A javelin veers off course at an Athenian athletic contest and kills a bystander. Is the thrower to blame, the organizers, or the javelin itself? That real legal puzzle occupied Pericles and Protagoras for an entire day, and it opens this episode on the thinker who arguably invented the high-priced consultant and challenged whether objective truth exists at all. The conversation traces Protagoras from his reported beginnings as a porter in Abdera, through the possibly apocryphal story of Democritus spotting his geometric genius in a bundle of wood, to his rejection of abstract mathematics in favor of the messy human world of politics, language, and law.

The hosts explain how Protagoras became the first professional sophist in Athens, teaching practical virtue and creating a taxonomy of speech acts that gave litigants an edge in a direct dem ...