What About Hermes?: A Reconsideration of the Myth of Prometheus in Plato’s Protagoras

This essay reevaluates scholarship regarding the myth of Prometheus in Plato’s Protagoras and offers a new interpretation that focuses on the potential of Hermes as representative par excellence of the Protagorean, or, more generally, sophistic tradition. I thus consider the messenger god’s traditional portrayal in works such as the Homeric Hymn to Hermes and various Aesopic fragments, which underscore his role as teacher of learnable skills and master of deception. I then suggest that Plato alludes to this playful tradition in his own portrayal of Hermes, who, like Protagoras, is concerned with the distribution and promotion of “political skill.”