 According to some ancient sources, this statement had a disproportionate effect: his books were burned in public, while he was convicted in Athens on a charge of atheism and sentenced to death; he then escaped and lost his life in a shipwreck. As already remarked, all these anecdotes are probably fictitious, but it is true that the sophist was made the object of unanimous and enduring condemnation, to the point of bringing together traditionally antithetical schools of thought, such as the Christians and the Epicureans, both concord in condemning his thesis as atheistic (see Diogenes of Oenoanda, 80A23 DK, and Epiphanius, Against Heresies III 16). As a matter of fact, there is no reason to assume a profession of atheism on his part, because these hostile sources conflate a confession of ignorance (“I do not know that P”) with a profession of knowledge (“I know that not-P”). “To the believer, agnostics may be as bad as atheists; but to the atheists agnostics are not much better than believers” (Barnes 1979: 449–450). Protagoras is the first thinker to take an agnostic stance, which can hardly be understood as an expression of atheism; at stake, in the fragment, is not so much an ontological thesis (on the existence of the gods) but an epistemological one (on our knowledge of them; Drozdek 2005: 41). Like in the case of MM, also in this fragment the emphasis seems to fall on the absence of a universal and incontrovertible truth.