 We do not know much about Protagoras’ life, and even less about his death: as the most famous sophist, he became the object of many, often unreliable, anecdotes. He was born in Abdera in Thrace, in the north cost of the Aegean Sea. In Plato’s Protagoras (317c) he says that he is old enough to be the father of anyone present, including Hippias and Prodicus. This confirms that he was one of the earliest sophists and suggests the 490s BCE as his birth year. According to an anecdote in Diogenes Laertius (IX.53) he was a porter until Democritus taught him. Democritus was also from Abdera, but was younger by about thirty years and criticised Protagoras’ thesis of the “Man measure” (see below) on the charge of being self-refuting. It is therefore highly improbable that Protagoras was one of his pupils. The anecdote, probably derived from some comic poets (such as Eupolis or Hermippus) due to possible connections between their epistemological theories, also served to point to Protagoras’ humble origins; an alternative testimony from Philostratus (Lives of the Sophist I.10.1–2) about his family hosting Xerxes at the time of the Persian wars goes in the opposite direction. This testimony also reports that Xerxes granted Protagoras’ family the rare privilege of having their son Protagoras educated by the Magi (this anecdote was also used to explain his agnosticism, as if it was impossible for a Greek to endorse similar ideas, see below). Even if we regard this story as spurious, it still seems to confirm the contacts between Protagoras and the culture of the Ionian colonies and of the Near East. As Plato repeatedly reports, he later travelled around Greece as a teacher and a “sophist” (most importantly, again according to Plato, he was the first to explicitly present himself as such, Protagoras 316c–317b), earning great fame and amassing considerable riches. It is equally certain that Protagoras sojourned at least twice in Athens in Pericles’ time, establishing with him personal ties. It is more difficult to tell whether these contacts also led to a direct involvement in the democratic politics of the great statesman. Evidence in this direction is apparently provided not just by some of the sophist’s surviving fragments, but also by the fact that in 444 BCE, Pericles entrusted him with drafting the constitution of the new pan-Hellenic colony of Thurii in South Italy (clearly, an appointment of this sort implies that the two men shared the same political outlook). This connection with Pericles can also be confirmed by the upheavals that marked the last years of Protagoras’ life: the crisis of Periclean politics seems to find a counterpart in the downfall of Protagoras, who—like other personalities close to the statesman—was put on trial. By the same account, the sophist died in a shipwreck during his flight. However, this is very questionable. First, that he had a trial seems to be confirmed also by other sources; but these sources (in particular Aristotle, see Diogenes Laertius IX.54) do not seem to relate the trial to political issues (Diogenes actually relates the trial to the charge of impiety, which would justify the story about the shipwreck as divine punishment); at stake was rather a controversy with a pupil. Moreover, it cannot be excluded that the trial with the student was also a fiction. Second, the story of the trial and flight from Athens differs from what Plato writes in his dialogues, where he speaks of Protagoras as though he had died as a universally esteemed figure in old age. From Plato we know that Protagoras lived approximately 70 years (Meno 91e; other sources state 90 years), which would place his death at around 420 BCE. Protagoras' pupils include Antimoerus of Mende, Carmidas and Euathlus of Athens, and Theodore of Cyrene. Protagoras’ influence has also been posited in relation to Prodicus and the Dissoi Logoi, although it is difficult to measure its extent.