Protagoras (480-410 B.C.E.) was born in Abdera, a coastal town in the northernmost hub of the Aegaean sea. Along with Anaxagoras and Zeno of Elea, he enjoyed the patronage of Pericles (495-429), the enlightened political leader and military general most responsible for the development of the Athenian democracy and the rise of the Greek Empire. Protagoras spent most of his adult life traveling throughout the Empire, teaching anyone for a fee. His exposure to many different societies, with lots of different customs, laws, and religions no doubt impressed upon him the vast latitude of ideas that the human mind could accept as true. Himself a teacher of Pericles, he showed the great leader the extent to which religious and moral codes were based not upon nature or some god-given truth but on socially constructed conventions. Rhetoric, the art of persuasive speech, could and should therefore according to him be used to influence people's opinions and change them in ways that great leaders like Pericles could see would be best, at least relative to the interests of the society. In that way he anticipated Plato's concept of the philosopher king.
As the oldest and generally regarded the wisest of the sophists who came to Athens, Protagoras wielded a huge influence. Like his most famous student Socrates, Protagoras raised doubts in the minds of the youth about the gods which they had come by tradition to accept, saying,
"About the gods, I am not able to know whether they exist or do not exist, nor what they are like in form; for the factors preventing knowledge are many: the obscurity of the subject, and the shortness of human life.
