Socrates joked he could not afford Prodicus's fifty-drachma lecture on the right word
Most Sophists taught people to win arguments. Prodicus of Ceos was obsessed with using exactly the right word, separating courage from boldness and rashness. Plato treated him more kindly than any other Sophist, and Socrates quipped that the full fifty-drachma course would have made him an expert on names.
Born around 465 BC at Ioulis on the island of Ceos, the hometown of the poet Simonides, Prodicus first came to Athens as an envoy on his city's business and stayed in demand as a speaker and teacher. Plutarch described him as slender and frail, and his voice was deep and tended to drop away, yet audiences admired him. He charged anything from half a drachma to 50 drachmae, apparently depending on whether a listener wanted one lecture or the full course, and reportedly grew rich. The orators Theramenes and Isocrates studied with him, and he was still alive in 399 BC, the year Socrates died.
His fame showed up on stage: he appears in a play by Eupolis and in two comedies by Aristophanes, The Clouds and The Birds, where he is handled more gently than Socrates. In Plato's Meno, Socrates even calls Prodicus his teacher, and the dialogues suggest the two were genuinely friends. Thucydides is said to have learned his precision with words from him. Where Gorgias boasted of making small things seem great, Prodicus insisted a speech should be neither long nor short but the proper size.
His best-known piece, called Horai, survives only in Xenophon's summary. A young Heracles meets two women at a fork in life's road. One, alluring and showy, promises the quickest route to every pleasure with no effort. The other, dignified and modest, reminds him of his noble origins and admits that nothing truly good comes without toil. Heracles chooses virtue, and Xenophon's Socrates later borrowed the tale from the wise Prodicus to argue against a life of indulgence.
Prodicus also offered a naturalistic account of religion. Early humans, he suggested, were so struck by the sun, moon, rivers and springs that sustained them that they treated these gifts as gods or divine discoveries. The idea linked belief closely to farming, and it earned him accusations of atheism. He died around 395 BC.
Source: Prodicus
