 This is not a fragment, but it is a reasonable and widely shared assumption that it conveys some Protagorean ideas. The problem is how to interpret it. There are at least two possibilities: (1) According to several scholars, this myth reflects Protagoras’ views on the development of human civilisation, a highly debated topic in fifth-century Athens (Kahn 1981: 98). Such a reading, however, has several limitations, both if you read it literally or metaphorically. Taken literally, the myth is full of inconsistencies. Just to give some examples: there does seem to be a pre-existing human kind, which is virtually defined by the possession of qualities which will be introduced later; since first humans were living scattered, it is not clear how they developed and used the different specialised arts; if language is distributed like the other technai, the absurd conclusion is that it does not belong to all human beings; the only possible solution to account for the passage from the second to the third phase seems to depend on Zeus’ direct intervention, a belief which is hard to reconcile with Protagoras’ agnosticism (see  §4).  Taken metaphorically, as a mythical (Platonic?) reshaping of an historical account, it results in a rather banal summary of some popular and widespread views on human progress (Cole 1967: 51) and does not explain the overall structure of Protagoras’ speech in its entirety. As a matter of fact, in the logos which follows the myth there is no interest at all for any sort of chronological reconstruction. To be sure, many parallels with the dossier of texts on the origins of human civilisation can be underlined; there is no need to deny a common ground between Protagoras’ myth and these texts. But there is no need either to read into the myth an historical narrative that either Protagoras or Plato would have reshaped into a myth. (2) An alternative, and more promising, option is to take the myth for what it is, that is, a myth—as a story and not history (Farrar 1988; Sihvola 1989; Bonazzi 2011; Beresdorf 2013). It is not a matter of denying that the story is clearly articulated in three phases, but of remarking that the myth need not be interpreted in a chronological sense as if it were offering a naturalistic reconstruction of how our civilisation developed. It is rather meant to account for how our society is organised and identify some essential features of humankind itself. When read in this way, analytically and not genetically, the myth gains in clarity and originality (interestingly, Plato often uses aetiological mythical narratives about the origins of certain phenomena, see for instance Betegh 2009 on the Aesopean myth on pleasure and pain in Phaedo 60b–c; these parallels could be tentatively used in favour of the attribution to Plato of the mythological format also in the case of the Protagoras). If the goal is to explain who we are, the myth does not need to be divided in three or five steps (as it is possible, of course), but rather in two parts, between the pre-political state of nature and the political world of the city, the first envisaging an impossible world, a counterfactual example which shows e contrario, what is really distinctive of the human world—what really allows men to live the way they live: not technical skills (or the belief in the gods), but the political attitude, which consists in the possess of aidos and dike—aidos corresponding to the component that enables each to govern himself in his conduct towards other human beings and dike to the norms which regulate the social intercourse among human beings (Segvic 2004 [2009: 9–11]). In this myth we find a first defence of the idea, which Aristotle will make famous, that we are political animals. Human beings are political animals: and political society is not so much the final accomplishment of mankind’s long journey but the condition of possibility for human life, which is always associated life.