 This quotation is not a display of erudition, but aims to indicate the real subtext of the myth, with Protagoras adopting a subtle strategy of appropriation of the poet. Hesiod’s basic idea is that nomos (law, justice, politics) is what distinguishes humans from animals, insofar as it allows them to transcend the world of brute force and violence by creating an order based on shared values. As a matter of fact, as we have seen, this is also Protagoras’ thesis: what is typical of human beings is the common possession of justice, which is to say their political and social capacity. Protagoras’ myth, by alluding to Hesiod’s story, emphasises such a convergence. But also in this case the divergences are as interesting than the affinities. Borrowings are never neutral, and the appropriation is also a transformation. In Hesiod, Justice is divine, a deity, the daughter of Zeus, who intervened when he saw that men fail to respect her (Works and Days 257, 265; Theogony 901–903). All mythological imagery aside, this means the belief in the existence of absolute justice; human justice is not independent of this order of divine values, but must rather conform to it. The situation radically changes with Protagoras whose innovation consists in his emphasis on the human rather than divine. There is no place for divinity; justice is something human; it is determined by laws, which can vary—it is not what brings us close to the gods but what makes it possible to fulfil our natural potential. This emphasis on law as the result of collective human decisions was particularly well-suited to one of the key motives of the Athenian democratic propaganda, which insists on the idea of democracy as everyone’s government, as the government of the people as a whole and not just of a part of it (see Thucydides History VI 39: “democracy (demos) is the name for all, oligarchy for only a part”). Secondly, also in the Athenian political discourse the emphasis on the community is used to justify another cornerstone of the democratic ideology, arguably the most important one, namely the very close bond that must hold together the city’s interest and the individual’s, where the former is the precondition for the latter (for some interesting parallels, see Pericles in Thucydides History, II 40, 2 and 60, 2–4 and Herodotus Histories V 78). Thirdly, the parallel between the vindication of opinions implied by MM and another key motive of Athenian democracy, isegoria (everyone’s right to express their idea in the assembly), need to be taken into account: the right for everyone to express their ideas seems to rely on the assumption that all opinions are legitimate, as indeed Protagoras argued. All in all, without having to posit that Protagoras’ doctrines were developed precisely for this purpose, it is possible to note that they were far from irrelevant or foreign to the new political phase that Athens was experiencing. Protagoras’ views provide a theoretical basis for participatory democracy (Kerferd 1981a: 144; particularly important is Farrar 1988). Protagoras emerges as a democratic political thinker: he is a political thinker because he has shown that the social (or political—from polis) dimension is fundamental; he is democratic insofar as he suggests that political action is a collective and shared kind of action. It is hardly a coincidence that the main ancient reflections on democracy have often been set in relation to his ideas (see, e.g., Herodotus Histories III 80–82 or Dissoi logoi 7; Anonymous of Iamblichus, 90, 7 DK).