Sophists, Greek Religion: Limits of Atheistic Interpretation

This article examines the Sophistic movement as a decisive stage in the intellectual genealogy of atheistic possibility in Classical Greece. Unlike the earlier Pre-Socratics, the Sophists shifted inquiry toward knowledge, language, law, convention, and civic life. This reorientation made religious claims subject to epistemic and social scrutiny. The study focuses on three representative figures. Protagoras is treated not as a systematic atheist, but as a thinker of epistemic restraint: his statement concerning the gods reflects the limits of human knowledge rather than a direct denial of divine existence. His ‘man-measure’ doctrine is then analyzed as an influential form of relativism whose later misuse weakened claims to objective religious truth, though Plato’s critique shows that radical relativism ultimately refutes itself. Critias, through the Sisyphus fragment, represents a sharper political account of religion as an invented fear-mechanism designed to restrain hidden wrongdoing. Yet this critique is contextualized as a response to Greek anthropomorphic and mythological religion, not to the rational doctrine of a transcendent Creator. Finally, Diagoras of Melos is presented as the public symbol of Greek impiety, remembered through hostile testimonies as one who challenged civic cults and selective claims of divine intervention. The article argues that later atheistic traditions unfairly universalized critiques directed at flawed pagan religion and treated them as refutations of religion itself. Thus, Sophistic skepticism prepared the conditions for later atheistic thought, but it did not establish a philosophically adequate denial of God.

The Sophistic Age

The intellectual landscape of Classical Greece underwent a profound transformation in the 5th century B.C, a transformation which is not merely limited to developments in cosmology or metaphysics. Rather, the decisive shift occurred at the level of epistemology, and social organization. ¹ The emergence of the Sophists marks a transition from inquiries into the fundamental structure of the cosmos to a sustained investigation of human cognition, communication, and social practice. ² This reorientation is not merely thematic but methodological, as it introduces a critical interrogation of the conditions under which knowledge itself is possible.

Prior to the Sophists, the dominant trajectory of Greek philosophy had been concerned with identifying the underlying principles of nature. Thinkers such as Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus sought to replace mythological explanations with rational accounts grounded in impersonal forces or substances. ³ While this movement undoubtedly contributed to the demythologization of the cosmos, it did not directly challenge the existence of the divine. The gods, though increasingly marginalized in explanatory frameworks, remained conceptually intact.

The Sophists

The term ‘sophistes’ in ancient Greek derives from ‘sophia’, a word that encompassed not only ‘wisdom’ in a general sense but also specialized knowledge, practical skill, and forms of higher insight associated with poets, seers, and thinkers. In its earliest usage, sophistes referred broadly to a ‘wise man’ or ‘expert,’ without any fixed professional or philosophical connotation. However, during the 5th century B.C., the meaning of the term evolved significantly. While it continued to retain its earlier, more general sense, it increasingly came to denote a distinct group of intellectuals—individuals who operated as itinerant teachers across the Greek world. ⁴ These figures offered systematic instruction in a variety of disciplines, most notably rhetoric, argumentation, and the practical arts necessary for success in public and civic life.

In the 5th Century B.C., almost all the philosophers were called ‘sophists’ and almost all attempted to explain meteorological phenomena by other than prevalent Greek divine agencies. ⁵ In doing so, they initiated a form of philosophical inquiry that destabilized the epistemic foundations of traditional religious belief. By questioning the possibility of objective knowledge and emphasizing the variability of human perception and judgment, they introduced forms of skepticism and relativism that would have far-reaching consequences for the status of theological claims.

In the books of history, no canonical list of the ‘Sophists’ exist. ⁶ However, Protagoras and Critias are mentioned in the Sophists category. ⁷ If the pre-Socratic philosophers provided a framework against the prevalent Greek deities and by demonstrating that the cosmos can be explained through impersonal principles – which was later mis-used as a foundation of atheistic thoughts – the Sophistic movement constitutes the second. However, it needs to be noted that the sophistic contribution is not primarily cosmological but epistemic and social. The Sophists redirect philosophical attention from the structure of nature to the structure of knowledge, language, law, and civic life. In doing so, they initiate a transformation in how religious claims are evaluated.

Protagoras

Protagoras (c. 480–420 B.C.), one of the most prominent figures among the Sophists of Classical Greece, occupies a decisive position in the intellectual transformation of 5th century B.C. thought. ⁸ Unlike the earlier natural philosophers who sought the underlying principles (archai) of the cosmos, Protagoras redirects philosophical inquiry toward the human subject ⁹—knowledge, perception, language, and practical life. Like many Sophists, Protagoras’ works survive only in fragments, preserved through later authors such as Diogenes Laertius, ¹⁰ Plato and other later authors. Plato’s dialogues regarding Protagoras ¹¹ and sections of Theaetetus provide the most extensive philosophical engagement, though often in a critical or dialectical form. ¹²

Protagoras and the Limits of Knowledge

Protagoras’s philosophical contributions encapsulate the epistemological orientation of the Sophistic movement. His famous statement concerning the gods, preserved through later sources, is often cited as one of the earliest expressions of agnosticism in Western thought. However, a careful analysis of this fragment reveals that it is not a declaration of atheism but a reflection on the limits of human knowledge. Protagoras’s famous quote is stated as:

περὶ μὲν θεῶν οὐκ ἔχω εἰδέναι, οὔθ’ ὡς εἰσὶν οὔθ’ ὡς οὐκ εἰσὶν οὔθ’ ὁποῖοί τινες ἰδέαν• πολλὰ γὰρ τὰ κωλύοντα εἰδέναι ἥ τ’ ἀδηλότης καὶ βραχὺς ὢν ὁ βίος τοῦ ἀνθρώπου. ¹³

Translation: Concerning the gods, I am not able to know whether they exist or whether they do not exist, nor what they are like in form; for many are the obstacles to knowing—both the obscurity of the matter and the shortness of human life.

Protagoras’ claim that he is unable to determine whether the gods exist or do not exist should be understood primarily within his epistemological framework rather than as an ontological denial. His statement reflects a suspension of judgment grounded in the limitations of human knowledge—particularly the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life—rather than a positive assertion about the non-existence of the divine. The obstacles he identifies—the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life—point to a fundamental skepticism regarding the possibility of attaining certain knowledge about metaphysical matters.

Secondly, the later reception of this statement further indicates that it was treated less as a sustained philosophical doctrine and more as a striking remark that provoked an exaggerated reaction. Ancient sources recount that these words were repeated with a tone of pious alarm, allegedly leading to the expulsion of Protagoras from Athens and even to the public burning of his books. ¹⁴ In subsequent tradition, he was sometimes listed among the atheoi, though this classification reflects polemical overreach rather than philosophical precision. As figures such as Philostratus and Cicero correctly observed, the fragment expresses aporia (a suspension of judgment) rather than a denial of the gods. The contrary interpretation offered by Diogenes of Oenoanda, which equates ‘not knowing’ with ‘knowing that not’ rests on a clear conceptual confusion between ignorance and negation. More importantly, the structure of the fragment itself suggests that theology was not a central concern for Protagoras. The opening phrase ‘concerning the gods, on the one hand…’ strongly implies a corresponding ‘de’ clause—now lost—in which the focus shifts elsewhere. It is plausible that this contrast redirected attention from the unknowable realm of the divine to the more accessible domain of human life. This reading aligns with the broader orientation of his thought, which, as reflected in later sources and especially in Plato’s Protagoras, is predominantly anthropological in character. Questions of human origins, social development, and the formation of moral and political conventions occupy the core of his inquiry. In this light, the agnostic remark appears not as a central thesis but as a brief methodological aside—a dismissal of speculative theology in favor of a sustained engagement with human affairs. ¹⁵ Lastly, Protagoras does not engage in any sustained theological investigation at all, but instead deliberately brackets the subject after mentioning the incipit at the starting of his book. In this light, the remark functions as a methodological boundary, after which attention is redirected to what can, in fact, be known. This is reinforced by the absence of any preserved extended argument on theological matters and by the broader orientation of his thought toward human life, social conventions, and practical reasoning. ¹⁶ Protagoras, therefore, even though mentioned as an agnostic by Guthrie ¹⁷ should not be understood as an ‘agnostic’ in the systematic or programmatic sense, as can be seen in his own works which briefly acknowledges the limits of knowledge regarding the divine and proceeds to redirect philosophical attention to matters that are accessible, practical, and humanly significant.

Protagoras’ alleged agnostic declaration can be best understood within the intellectual and religious context of Classical Greece, where the plurality, anthropomorphism, and internal inconsistency of traditional religious beliefs had already come under philosophical scrutiny. ¹⁸ While no explicit statement survives linking his position directly to a critique of Greek religion, the broader Sophistic movement—along with earlier critiques by Xenophanes and the relativistic epistemology attributed to Protagoras—strongly supports the interpretation that his suspension of judgment reflects a response to the instability and contestability of prevailing theological conceptions and an epistemological acknowledgment of the limits of human knowledge in relation to the divine, rather than denying the existence of God. ¹⁹²⁰

Furthermore, as noted in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, very little is known about the life of Protagoras and even less about the intellectual formation that shaped his views. ²¹ The fragmentary nature of the evidence, ²² combined with the heavily mediated transmission of his thought through later ²³ —and often polemical—sources, makes any definitive classification precarious. In such circumstances, to label him straightforwardly as an atheist or even as a systematic agnostic risk imposing categories that exceed the available evidence. Rather, his surviving remark should be approached with caution, as a limited and contextually bound statement that reflects epistemic restraint rather than a fully developed doctrinal position.

Protagoras, Relativism and its Implications

Protagoras of Abdera occupies a significant place in the intellectual background of atheistic and anti-religious thought, not because he openly established a complete doctrine of atheism, but because his relativism attempted to weaken the very foundations upon which objective religious truth, moral certainty, and metaphysical knowledge stand. His famous dictum, preserved by Plato, states:

πάντων τῶν χρημάτων μέτρον ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος, τῶν μὲν ὄντων ὡς ἔστιν, τῶν δὲ οὐκ ὄντων ὡς οὐκ ἔστιν ²⁴

Translation: ‘Man is the measure of all things: of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not.’

This statement, commonly known as the homo mensura doctrine, became one of the earliest and most influential expressions of relativism in Greek philosophy. ²⁵ The danger of this doctrine lies in its displacement of objective truth. Instead of truth being grounded in reality, divine order, or a standard beyond man, Protagoras placed the human subject at the center of judgment. In other words, perception becomes the measure of reality. If every individual, city, or community becomes the measure of truth, then moral, religious, and metaphysical claims are reduced to personal perception, social convention, or practical usefulness.

This is precisely why Protagorean relativism later became useful for atheistic and anti-theistic systems. Later atheistic doctrines often followed the same destructive pattern: they shifted the center of meaning from God to man, from revelation to human consciousness, and from divine law to social or historical construction. Once man becomes the ‘measure,’ religious truth can easily be reinterpreted as human invention. Feuerbach, for example, argued that theology is in reality anthropology, and that God is merely the projection of human essence into an imagined divine object. ²⁶ Marx then transformed religion into a product of social and economic conditions, famously describing it as the ‘opium of the people.’ ²⁷

However, such deductions are faulty, as their foundations were based on weak and purely speculative evidence. Democritus, traditionally associated in some ancient reports with Protagoras as his teacher, ²⁸ rejects this conclusion. His response to the problem of conflicting appearances may be read as one of the earliest anti-relativistic answers to Protagoras’ man-measure doctrine. Protagoras had argued that appearances are true relative to the person who experiences them: if the same wind appears warm to one person and cold to another, then it is warm for the first and cold for the second. For him, the conflict between appearances does not prove that both judgments are true; rather, it shows that sensory appearances cannot be accepted as the final measure of truth. If the same thing appears differently to different perceivers, then the proper conclusion is not relativism, but caution: human perception is unstable, variable, and often misleading. Democritus therefore refuses to make the individual perceiver the standard of reality. Against Protagoras, he maintains that truth cannot be reduced to what appears to each person. ²⁹ The disagreement between appearances points beyond subjective judgment and demands a more objective standard of inquiry. In this sense, Democritus’ position functions as a direct challenge to Protagorean relativism: conflicting appearances do not make truth relative; they expose the weakness of appearance as a foundation for truth.

Furthermore, Plato’s critique of Protagoras in the Theaetetus provides one of the earliest and most penetrating refutations of epistemological relativism. Socrates, with Theodorus’ agreement, reduces the man-measure doctrine to its own consequences. If whatever appears true to each person is indeed true for that person, then the opinion of those who reject Protagoras must also be true. But most people do not accept that every individual is the final measure of truth; they believe that some people are wise and others ignorant, that some judgments are correct and others mistaken, and that in matters of danger, medicine, war, navigation, education, and governance, expert knowledge is superior to ordinary opinion. Therefore, Protagoras’ doctrine is forced to admit the truth of its own denial. If all opinions are true, then the opinion that Protagoras is wrong is also true; and if that opinion is true, then the doctrine that all opinions are true collapses. ³⁰

This is not a minor technical objection. It attacks the very foundation of radical relativism. Protagoras attempts to make the individual human subject the measure of truth, but Socrates shows that human life itself refuses such a doctrine. Men seek teachers because they know they are ignorant; they seek physicians because they know that illness is not cured by mere opinion; they seek commanders in war because they recognize superior knowledge. The existence of education, expertise, correction, and disagreement all presuppose that truth is not identical with appearance. Some appearances may be deceptive, some judgments may be false, and some people may know better than others.

This Socratic argument also has direct implications for atheistic doctrines when those doctrines are built upon relativistic or subjectivist assumptions. If man is the final measure of all things, then the atheist’s denial of God cannot claim universal truth; it becomes merely one appearance among others, true only for the one to whom it appears so. The theist’s belief would be equally true for the theist, and the atheist would lose the right to dismiss it as false. Thus, relativism does not strengthen atheism; it disarms it.

The deeper force of Socrates’ critique is therefore this: any worldview that wishes to refute religion must appeal to standards higher than private appearance. It must appeal to reason, coherence, evidence, reality, and the distinction between truth and falsehood. Yet these very standards contradict the radical claim that all truth is relative to the individual subject. Protagoras’ relativism therefore cannot serve as a stable foundation for atheism, skepticism, or anti-religious polemic. It either makes theism true for the believer and atheism true only for the atheist, or it must admit objective truth—and thereby give up its own first principle. In both cases, the doctrine turns against itself.

Critias and the Political Invention of Religion

If Protagoras represents epistemic restraint concerning the divine, Critias, or more precisely the authorial voice associated with the famous Sisyphus fragment, represents a much more radical development. The fragment, preserved by Sextus Empiricus and traditionally attributed to Critias, offers one of the most striking ancient explanations of religion as a human invention. Unlike Protagoras, who suspends judgment because the divine is obscure and human life is short, the speaker in the Sisyphus fragment proposes a genealogical account of religious belief: belief in the gods was invented by a clever lawgiver in order to restrain secret wrongdoing. His quotes are mentioned as:

ἦν χρόνος, ὅτ’ ἦν ἄτακτος ἀνθρώπων βίος

καὶ θηριώδης ἰσχύος θ’ ὑπηρέτης,

ὅτ’ οὐδὲν ἆθλον οὔτε τοῖς ἐσθλοῖσιν ἦν

οὔτ’ αὖ κόλασμα τοῖς κακοῖς ἐγίγνετο.

κἄπειτά μοι δοκοῦσιν ἄνθρωποι νόμους

θέσθαι κολαστάς, ἵνα δίκη τύραννος ᾖ

(ὁμῶς ἁπάντων> τήν θ’ ὕβριν δούλην ἔχῃ,

ἐζημιοῦτο δ’ εἴ τις ἐξαμαρτάνοι.

ἔπειτ’ ἐπειδὴ τἀμφανῆ μὲν οἱ νόμοι

ἀπεῖργον αὐτοὺς ἔργα μὴ πράσσειν βίᾳ,

λάθρᾳ δ’ ἔπρασσον, τηνικαῦτά μοι δοκεῖ

(πρῶτον> πυκνός τις καὶ σοφὸς γνώμην ἀνὴρ

(θεῶν) δέος θνητοῖσιν ἐξευρεῖν, ὅπως

εἴη τι δεῖμα τοῖς κακοῖσι, κἂν λάθρᾳ

πράσσωσιν ἢ λέγωσιν ἢ φρονῶσί (τι).

ἐντεῦθεν οὖν τὸ θεῖον εἰσηγήσατο,

ὡς ἔστι δαίμων ἀφθίτῳ θάλλων βίῳ,

νόῳ τ’ ἀκούων καὶ βλέπων, φρονῶν τ’ ἄγαν

προσέχων τε ταῦτα, καὶ φύσιν θείαν φορῶν,

ὃς πᾶν τὸ λεχθὲν ἐν βροτοῖς ἀκούσεται,

(τὸ) δρώμενον δὲ πᾶν ἰδεῖν δυνήσεται.

ἐὰν δὲ σιγῇ τι βουλεύῃς κακόν,

τοῦτ’ οὐχὶ λήσει τοὺς θεούς• τὸ γὰρ φρονοῦν

(ἄγαν) ἔνεστι. τούσδε τοὺς λόγους λέγων

διδαγμάτων ἥδιστον εἰσηγήσατο

ψεύδει καλύψας τὴν ἀλήθειαν λόγῳ.

ναίειν δ’ ἔφασκε τοὺς θεοὺς ἐνταῦθ’, ἵνα

μάλιστ’ ἂν ἐξέπληξεν ἀνθρώπους λέγων,

ὅθεν περ ἔγνω τοὺς φόβους ὄντας βροτοῖς ³¹

There was a time when the life of men was unordered

and bestial, a servant of strength,

when there was no prize for good men,

nor in turn was there chastisement for evil ones.

And then men seem to me to have established laws

as punishers, so that Justice might be a tyrant

(of everything altogether) and have violence as her slave,

and if anyone did wrong, he was punished.

Then, when the laws hindered them from openly

doing deeds through violence,

and they began to do (them) secretly, it seems to me that

at that time some shrewd man wise in judgment (first)

invented fear ((of the gods)) for mortals, so that

there might be some fear for evil men, even secretly

doing or saying or thinking (anything).

Henceforth, then, he introduced the divine, (saying)

that there is a divine power flourishing with immortal life,

hearing and seeing with his mind, thinking very much

being intent on these things, and possessing a divine nature,

(one) who hears everything spoken among mortals,

and will be able to see everything being done.

Even if you plan some evil undefined in secret,

this will not escape the notice of the gods; for thought

is (wholly) in (them). Telling these stories,

he introduced the sweetest of doctrines,

having covered the truth with a false story.

The argument unfolds in stages. First, human beings are imagined as having lived in a primitive condition of disorder, violence, and lawlessness. In this early condition, there was no reliable reward for the good and no punishment for the wicked. Human beings therefore established laws to restrain open acts of violence and injustice. Yet the laws could only punish crimes that were visible and publicly detected. Secret crimes remained beyond the reach of legal enforcement. At this point, according to the fragment, a shrewd and wise man invented fear of the gods. He taught that the gods see and hear everything, including hidden actions, secret words, and inward thoughts. In this way, divine surveillance was introduced as an invisible supplement to human law.

The Sisyphus fragment says, in effect, that belief in the gods was deliberately fabricated. The divine is not treated as an unknowable reality but as a political fiction, designed to discipline human beings when ordinary law is insufficient. Religion is thus explained not as revelation, metaphysical truth, or inherited sacred tradition, but as an instrument of social control.

However, it should be noted that Critias’s critique was not against the concept of God, rather it was against the concept of gods prevalent in that era, because at that time, religion was amended to serve personal gains, which involved attributing heinous things to the divine. The same was criticized by Xenophanes, ³² and endorsed by Plato who stated that true divinity could not be corrupted. ³³ Thus, Critias’s fragment appears to react not against the pure concept of a transcendent Creator, but against the popular Greek conception of gods as fear-producing, humanly constructed powers used to discipline society. In this sense, his argument arose from the weaknesses of anthropomorphic and mythological Greek religion. However, later atheistic writers unfairly extended this limited critique and applied it to religion as a whole, as though a criticism of Greek man-made gods were sufficient to disprove all belief in God. This was an unjust philosophical leap, because the fragment attacks a particular religious culture of mythical and fear-based deities, not the rational and revealed doctrine of one transcendent, all-perfect Creator.

In the wider history of atheistic thought, this distinction is essential. The rise of atheism in Greek thought did not occur in a single step. It emerged gradually through several intellectual movements: the naturalization of the cosmos by the Pre-Socratics, the critique of anthropomorphic religion by Xenophanes, the epistemological relativism and agnosticism of Protagoras, and finally the radical social explanation of religion in the Sisyphus fragment. These developments did not necessarily amount to systematic atheism in the modern sense. Rather, they created the conditions under which traditional religious belief could be questioned, bracketed, reinterpreted, or explained away.

Diagoras of Melos: The Public Symbol of Greek Impiety

Diagoras of Melos occupies an important but unusual place in the history of Greek unbelief. He was not a central sophist in the professional sense, like Protagoras or Critias, rather, he belonged to the broader 5th century intellectual atmosphere in which inherited myth, civic cult, traditional gods, and religious authority were increasingly exposed to rational criticism.

Ancient sources remember him under the title ‘the Atheist,’ yet the evidence must be handled cautiously, because his own writings have not survived and most reports about him come from hostile or later witnesses. ³⁴

The earliest strong evidence for his public notoriety comes from Aristophanes’ Birds, performed in 414 B.C. In the play, a proclamation offers a reward for the person who kills ‘Diagoras of Melos.’ ³⁵ Diodorus Siculus later reports that Diagoras, ‘called the Atheist,’ was accused of impiety and fled Attica out of fear of the Athenian people. ³⁶ Lysias also preserves the memory of his impiety, saying that Diagoras had committed impiety ‘in word’ against sacred things and festivals that were not his own. ³⁷ These sources show that, in Athenian memory, Diagoras was not merely a private doubter, rather, he was seen as someone who openly attacked or mocked established cultic institutions.

Cicero gives the most famous philosophical anecdotes about Diagoras. In De Natura Deorum, he lists Diagoras alongside Theodorus as one who openly denied divine existence. ³⁸ Elsewhere in the same work, Cicero narrates that when Diagoras was shown votive paintings of people saved from shipwreck after praying to the gods, he replied that there were no paintings of those who had drowned. The point of the argument is clear: Greek popular religion preserved stories of successful prayers while ignoring unanswered prayers and destroyed lives. In another anecdote, when sailors blamed a storm on Diagoras’s presence aboard the ship, he pointed to other ships suffering the same storm and asked whether Diagoras was also aboard them. ³⁹ These stories portray him as a critic of selective religious evidence and of the belief that fortune, storm, safety, and disaster were directly managed by the anthropomorphic gods.

For a careful historical judgment, Diagoras in Athenian and later Greek memory, is the clearest public symbol of impiety and denial of the gods. In this respect, Diagoras represents the radical and emotional edge of the Sophistic age: not merely questioning whether human beings can know the gods, as Protagoras did, but being remembered as one who openly challenged the gods of civic religion themselves.

From an anti-atheistic analytical perspective, however, his case must not be exaggerated. The ancient evidence suggests that his criticism arose in reaction to mythological, anthropomorphic, and cultic Greek religion, where gods were imagined in human forms, attached to local rites, and invoked for worldly benefit. Later atheistic writers unfairly extended this limited critique and treated it as though it were a universal refutation of all religion. This is methodologically weak. A critique of Greek cult-images, mythic deities, selective miracle-claims, or corrupt civic religion does not disprove the existence of the One transcendent Creator. At most, Diagoras exposes the weakness of pagan religious imagination; he does not answer the philosophical, moral, cosmological, or revelatory grounds for true monotheism.

Thus, the Sophistic age did not produce atheism in the modern systematic sense, but it created the intellectual conditions in which Greek religious belief could be questioned. Protagoras and Critias should therefore be understood with historical fairness. Protagoras’ hesitation concerning the gods arose from epistemic limits: the divine, as conceived in the Greek world, was obscure, disputed, and beyond certain human knowledge. Critias, or the authorial voice of the Sisyphus fragment, reacted against the fear-based and anthropomorphic gods of Greek civic religion, presenting them as political inventions used to restrain hidden wrongdoing. In both cases, the negation or skepticism was directed primarily against the unstable religious world of the Greeks, not against the rational doctrine of one transcendent Creator. However, Diagoras of Melos appears different. The surviving reports do not present him as a careful metaphysical thinker, but as a public symbol of impiety who challenged cultic practices, sacred mysteries, and selective claims of divine intervention. His atheism seems more reactive and polemical than systematic. Thus, the later atheistic use of these figures is methodologically unfair: criticism of Greek mythological gods cannot be converted into a universal disproof of God. At most, these thinkers exposed the weakness of pagan religious imagination and they did not refute true monotheism.

• ¹  Joshua Billings & Christopher Moore (Ed.) (2023), The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., Pg. 124.
• ²  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Online): https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sophists/: Retrieved: 18-07-2026
• ³  G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven & M. Schofield (2013), The Pre-Socratic Philosophers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., Pg. 178-179.
• ⁴  Joshua Billings & Christopher Moore (Ed.) (2023), The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., Pg. 33-35.
• ⁵  Alfred William Benn (1908), Early Greek Philosophy, Archibald Constable & Co., London, U.K., Pg. 89.
• ⁶  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Online): https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sophists/: Retrieved: 18-07-2026
• ⁷  G. B. Kerferd (1981), The Sophistic Movement, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., Pg. 42 & 52.
• ⁸  Alfred William Benn (1908), Early Greek Philosophy, Archibald Constable & Co., London, U.K., Pg. 89-90.
• ⁹  Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Online): https://iep.utm.edu/protagor/: Retrieved: 18-07-2026
• ¹⁰  Mario Untersteiner (1954), The Sophists (Translated by Kathleen Freeman), Philosophical Library Inc., New York, USA, Pg. 9-10.
• ¹¹  W. K. C. Guthrie (1975), A History of Greek Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., Vol. 3, Pg. 265-266.
• ¹²  Bertrand Russell (1945), History of Western Philosophy, N.P., (Oceanofpdf.com), Pg. 99.
• ¹³  Pablo Pinel Martinez (2020), Negative Theology and its Interpretation as an Atheistic Attitude in 5th Century Athens, Revue de l’histoire des religions, Open Edition Journals, Paris, France, Vol. 2, Pg. 284.
• ¹⁴  Diogenes Laertius (N.D.), Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Translated by R. D. Hicks), William Heinemann, London, U.K., Vol. 2, Pg. 465.
• ¹⁵  Jonathan Barnes (2005), The Pre-Socratic Philosophers, Routledge, London, U.K., Pg. 354-355.
• ¹⁶  John Henry (2022), The Agnosticism of Protagoras, Revue de Philosophie Ancienne, Éditions Ousia, Paris, France, Vol. 2, Pg. 218-219.
• ¹⁷  W. K. C. Guthrie (1985), A History of Greek Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., Vol. 1, Pg. 400.
• ¹⁸  Maria Michela Sassi (2013), Where Epistemology and Religion Meet What do(es) the god(s) look like?, Rhizomata, De Gruyter, Berlin, Germany, Vol. 1, Issue: 2, Pg. 284.
• ¹⁹  Adam Drozdek (2005), Protagoras and Instrumentality of Religion, L'antiquité Classique, Interuniversity Publication, Brussels, Belgium, Vol. 74, Pg. 41.
• ²⁰  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Online): https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/protagoras/: Retrieved: 18-07-2026
• ²¹  Michael Martin (2007), The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., Pg. 13.
• ²²  Adam Drozdek (2005), Protagoras and Instrumentality of Religion, L'antiquité Classique, Interuniversity Publication, Brussels, Belgium, Vol. 74, Pg. 41.
• ²³  John Henry (2022), The Agnosticism of Protagoras, Revue de Philosophie Ancienne, Éditions Ousia, Brussels, Belgium, Vol. 2, Pg. 213.
• ²⁴  Plato (1921), Theaetetus (Translated by H. N. Fowler), William Heinemann, London, U.K., Vol. 2, Pg. 40.
• ²⁵  Kamladevi Kunkolienker (2018), Ancient Greek Philosophy: Classical Greek Philosophy, Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy, Philosophy Documentation Center, Charlottesville, USA, Vol. 2, Issue: 2, Pg. 171.
• ²⁶  Ludwig Feurbach (2008), The Essence of Christianity (Translated by George Eliot), Cosimo Classics, New York, USA, Pg. Pg. XVII.
• ²⁷  Karl Marx (1970), Marx’s Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Translated by Joseph O'Malley), Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K., Pg. 3.
• ²⁸  Diogenes Laertius (1925), Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Translated by R. D. Hicks), William Heinemann, London, U.K., Vol. 2, Pg. 463.
• ²⁹  G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven & M. Schofield (2013), The Pre-Socratic Philosophers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., Pg. 437-438.
• ³⁰  Plato (1921), Theaetetus (Translated by H. N. Fowler), William Heinemann, London, U.K., Vol. 2, Pg. 107-113.
• ³¹  Sarah Adison Phillips (2018), Critias of Athens and the Sisyphus Fragment (Honors Thesis), No. 32, Mississipi State University, Missisipi, USA, Pg. 2-3.
• ³²  A. A. Long (Ed.) (1999), Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., Pg. 210.
• ³³  E. B. England (1921), The Laws of Plato, Manchester at the University Press, Manchester, U.K., Vol. 2, Pg. 29-30.
• ³⁴  Alexander Meert (2018), The Atheist Writings of Diagoras of Melos: New Approaches to the Authenticity of 'Phrygioi Logoi' and 'Apopyrgizontes Logoi', L'Antiquité Classique, Belgian Interuniversitary Society, Brussels, Belgium, Vol. 87, Pg. 1.
• ³⁵  W. C. Green (Trans.) (1874), The Birds of Aristophanes, J. Hall & Son, Cambridge, U.K., Pg. 38.
• ³⁶  C. H. Oldfather (Trans.) (N.D.), The Library of History of Diodorus of Sicily, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, USA, Vol. 5, Pg. 141.
• ³⁷  W. R. M Lamb (Trans.) (1930), Lysias, William Heinemann Ltd., London, U.K., Pg. 125.
• ³⁸  Marcus Tullius Cicero (1967), De Natura Deorum Academia (Translated by H. Rackham), Harvard University Press, London, U.K., Pg. 5.
• ³⁹  Ibid, Pg. 375-377.