With this lecture, we continue our inquiry into Socrates as a teacher. One of the devices Plato uses to inform us about Socrates is to contrast him with his closest competitors, the sophists and rhetoricians, the famous itinerant teachers of subjects both practical and theoretical. By far the most famous sophist in antiquity was Protagoras, and the whole of this lecture is devoted to an examination of the Platonic dialogue named after him. After some introductory remarks about the Protagoras and its curious opening sections, we will consider Socrates’s introductory, but very revealing, conversation with Protagoras, in which Socrates questions whether Protagoras can really teach, as he claims to, the art of good citizenship or the skills specific to politics. We will also consider in some detail Protagoras’s subtle and subversive response, which takes the form of a creation myth and for which the dialogue is rightly famous. In it Protagoras not only makes the case for studying with soph