worship and
sanctuaries of the State (violation of the Mysteries and mutilation of the
Hermae). The work on the gods had presumably been in existence and known
long before this without causing scandal to anybody. But, nevertheless,
the trial, like those of Anaxagoras and Socrates, plainly bears witness to
the animosity with which the modern free-thought was regarded in Athens.
This animosity did not easily manifest itself publicly without special
reasons; but it was always there and might always be used in case of
provocation.

As to Protagoras's personal attitude to the question of the existence of
the gods, much may be guessed and much has been guessed; but nothing can
be stated for certain. However, judging from the man's profession and his
general habit of life as it appears in tradition, we may take for granted
that he did not give offence in his outward behaviour by taking a hostile
attitude to public worship or attacking its foundations; had that been so,
he would not for forty years have been the most distinguished teacher of
Hellas, but would simply not have been tolerated. An eminent modern
scholar has therefore advanced the conjecture that Protagoras
distinguished between belief and knowledge, and that his work on the gods
only aimed at showing that the existence of the gods could not be
scientifically demonstrated. Now such a distinction probably, if
conceived as a conscious principle, is alien to ancient thought, at any
rate at the time of Protagoras; and yet it may contain a grain of truth.
When it is borne in mind that the incriminated passage represents the very
exordium of the work of Protagoras, the impression cannot be avoided that
he himself did not intend his work to disturb the established religion,
but that he quite naively took up the existence of the gods as a subject,
as good as any other, for dialectic discussion. All that he was concerned
with was theory and theorising; religion was practice and ritual; and he
had no more intention of interfering with that than the other earlier
sophists of assailing the legal system of the community in their
speculation as to relativity of right and wrong.

All this, however, does not alter the fact that the work of Protagoras
posed the very question of the existence of the gods as a problem which
might possibly be solved in the negative. He seems to have been the first
to do this. That it could be done is significant of the age to which
Protagoras belong