[p. 387] noticing with what skill and judgment the wood was arranged and tied, asked the man to stop and rest awhile. When Protagoras did as he was asked, and Democritus again observed that the almost circular heap of blocks was bound with a short rope, and was balanced and held together with all but geometrical accuracy, lie asked who had put the wood together in that way. When Protagoras replied that he had done it himself, Democritus asked him to untie the bundle and arrange it again in the same way. But after he had done so, then Democritus, astonished at the keen intellect and cleverness of this uneducated man, said: “My dear young man, since you have a talent for doing things well, there are greater and better employments which you can follow with me” ; and he at once took him away, kept him at his own house, supplied him with money, taught him philosophy, and made him the great man that he afterwards became. Yet this Protagoras was not a true philosopher, but the cleverest of sophists; for in consideration of the payment of a huge annual fee, he used to promise his pupils that he would teach them by what verbal dexterity the weaker cause could be made the stronger, a process which he called in Greek: τὸν ἥττω λόγον κρείττω ποιεῖν, or “making the worse appear the better reason.”
IV
[4arg] On the word duovicesimus, which is unknown to the general public, but occurs frequently in the writings of the learned.I CHANCED to be sitting in a bookshop in the Sigillaria 1 with the poet Julius Paulus, the most
