The Parts of Gold and the Parts of Face

Abstract

Whereas Chapter 7 focuses on a recurring trend in how Protagoras prevaricates, this chapter micro-analyzes one specific rhetorical avoidance: if Protagoras believes that good is divided into different parts, Socrates forces him to choose between which kind of division it most resembles, division between parts of the face or parts of a substance (gold). The chapter deals with Protagoras’s choice: its logical issues, ideas of saving face, and the performance of wearing a mask. The choice of gold, not taken, implicitly offers some insight into the substantial uniformity of the many agents at work in the dialogue, that Plato’s Socrates, Socrates’s Simonides, Protagoras’s Simonides, Socrates’s Protagoras, etc., begin to lose boundaries.