  Specifically, in the Protagoras he claims to teach ‘the proper management of one’s own affairs, how best to run one’s household, and the management of public affairs, how to make the most effective contribution to the affairs of the city by word and action’, and he accepts Socrates’ account of that subject as ‘the art of running a city’, which he promises will ‘make men into good citizens’ (319a). Can we form any conception of the means by which this ambitious project of education in self-improvement and good citizenship was to be put into effect? In his ‘Great Speech’ in the dialogue (320c–328d) Protagoras presents an account of the development of human civilization, with the aim of showing that the essence of good citizenship consists in justice and self-restraint, which are natural to humans in that the preservation of the social order, and ultimately the survival of the species, depend on their being universally inculcated. It is at least plausible that this complex of themes, including the development of civilization from primitive beginnings, the nature of social virtue and its foundation in human nature, represents some of the content of Protagoras’ actual teaching; the list of titles of his works preserved by Diogenes Laertius (IX.55) includes ‘On the Virtues’, ‘On (the) Constitution’ (Peri Politeias) and ‘On the State of Things in the Beginning’. Later in the dialogue he provides a critical reading of a poem of Simonides, saying that the ability to specify the good and bad parts of a poem and to justify one’s criticisms is a very important part of education (338e–339a). Relevantly to this, he is reported as a pioneer of some aspects of linguistic theory, and of its application to literary criticism. He wrote on correctness in language (orthoepeia, Plato, Phaedrus 267c): he is said to have devised a taxonomy of speech acts into assertion, question, answer, command etc. (Diogenes Laertius IX.53–4), and to have criticised the opening of the Iliad ‘Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles’ on the ground that instead of a prayer, as it ought to be, the phrase is a command (Aristotle Poetics 1456b15–16). He is also said both to have classified grammatical genders (Aristotle Rhetoric 1407b6–7) and to have suggested that gender should be modified to fit the sense, so that ‘wrath’ (mēnis) in the same line of Homer, which is a grammatical feminine, should be masculine, since wrath is characteristic of males rather than females (Aristotle Sophistici Elenchi 173b19–20). It is unclear whether these topics and their application to literary criticism are seen primarily as part of an individual’s cultural refinement, something valuable for its own sake, or whether the aim is to be able to incorporate exegesis and criticism of poets in forensic or political speeches, as one tactic in argument and persuasion.