A javelin veers off course at an Athenian athletic contest and kills a bystander. Is the thrower to blame, the organizers, or the javelin itself? That real legal puzzle occupied Pericles and Protagoras for an entire day, and it opens this episode on the thinker who arguably invented the high-priced consultant and challenged whether objective truth exists at all. The conversation traces Protagoras from his reported beginnings as a porter in Abdera, through the possibly apocryphal story of Democritus spotting his geometric genius in a bundle of wood, to his rejection of abstract mathematics in favor of the messy human world of politics, language, and law.

The hosts explain how Protagoras became the first professional sophist in Athens, teaching practical virtue and creating a taxonomy of speech acts that gave litigants an edge in a direct democracy where citizens argued their own cases. They unpack his claim that every issue has two opposing arguments, the relativism of his lost book Truth and the maxim that man is the measure of all things, his defense against Plato’s critique by separating truth from utility, his argument that acknowledging subjective realities is the bedrock of democracy, and the agnostic stance of On the Gods that later writers claimed got his books burned in the marketplace.

• How mastering grammatical gender and sentence types translated into courtroom power in litigious Athens
• The chess-grandmaster method of arguing both sides and why Aristotle accused him of making the weaker argument stronger
• The wind, the sick person’s bitter apple, and the viral dress as illustrations of Protagorean relativism
• Why he argued that believing in a single absolute truth turns a person into a tyrant
• John Burnett’s case that the impiety trial and book burning may be ancient fake news