First Chapter

that a person could either impart to another or receive from another (Men. 93 B, just like Prot. 319 B). The challenger this time, however, is the other accuser of Socrates, Anytus. He, too, is of the opinion that any decent Athenian makes one better; why ask for the one person who understands it, since everyone understands it! In view of this clear agreement regarding what Socrates—and on the other hand, what his opponents—assert in the three related writings that refer precisely to one another—the Apology, Protagoras, and Meno—it is a sheer impossibility to explain the thesis of Socrates in the Protagoras, that virtue is not teachable, as his usual "irony," or to assume that Socrates really only wants to say: the Sophists are not teachers of virtue, the Athenian statesmen and brave patriots are not, but in general, virtue is teachable, and there is at least one teacher of it: Socrates.

But no less firmly does the other main tenet of the Socratic method remain: virtue is knowledge. This, in fact, forms the core of the other thesis that Socrates contests against Protagoras: the unity of virtue. Knowledge eventually proves to be the point of unity in which all so-called virtues finally converge. In the end, there is no virtue other than knowledge. It is, however, very important to note how the two themes—the teachability and the unity of virtue—are set in relation to one another throughout the entire dialogue. They appear at first to be seemingly unconnected. The question of teachability, to which everything already pointed in the broadly laid-out introduction, is then suddenly set aside entirely, as if it had been resolved by the lecture of the Sophist, which was convincing to all those present and—save for a small detail—even to Socrates; and the discussion now turns exclusively to the other question, regarding the unity of the virtues, which, as stated, aims at the identity of virtue with knowledge. Only at the very end does the first question, and the logical connection between the two that was previously only to be guessed, emerge openly, in that the ridiculous result of the entire proceeding is established: Socrates intended to claim that virtue is not teachable, and yet he seeks in every way to force against Protagoras the idea that it is knowledge, in which case it must necessarily be teachable; Protagoras, who presupposed its teachability, seemed on the contrary to exert every effort to make it appear as anything but knowledge, in which case it would certainly