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Protagoras of Abdera was the most renowned of the Sophists; he was also the one who, by being the first to charge tuition fees for his courses, established Sophistry as a profession. He, more than anyone else, was responsible for the two key themes of Sophistry: the relativity of judgment and the teaching of the rhetorical arts. His intellectual reputation was therefore immediate and enduring. In Plato's Protagoras (circa 399 B.C.-387 B.C.) he was treated with great deference, and by the Hellenistic period he was regarded as sufficiently significant to have a statue of himself included among those of such respected figures as Plato and Aristotle in the Serapeum at Memphis, Egypt. Little of Protagoras's work has survived; what has survived exists only in fragments, few of which can be reliably assigned to Protagoras. Nevertheless, and despite the extensive controversy over the correct interpretation of his views, Protagoras's contributions to philosophy, rhetorical and grammatical theory, and skeptical theology are now generally recognized to have had multiple and profound effects upon the history of ideas in the West.
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