Ellen Meiksins Wood writes in _Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy_ (London: Verso, 1988)
***** The conventional evaluation of labour in democratic Athens is suggested by the debate reported in Plato's dialogue, _Protagoras_, in which Socrates and Protagoras discuss the Athenian practice of allowing ordinary craftsmen into the public councils. What is at stake here is nothing less than the moral worth and political capacities of labourers. It makes little difference whether this dialogue records any conversation that actually took place between the philosophers named, or between any other historical individuals. What is important is that it reflects an opposition between two essentially different views of labour which undoubtedly confronted each other in Athens.
In a discussion of whether virtue can be taught..., Socrates makes the following observation on the Athenian conception of political virtue:
Now when we meet in the Assembly, then if the State is faced with some building project, I observe that the architects are sent for and consulted about the proposed structures, and when it is a matter of shipbuilding, the naval designers, and so on with everything the Assembly regards as a subject for learning and teaching. If anyone else tries to give advice, whom they do not consider an expert, however handsome or wealthy or nobly-born he may be, it makes no difference: the members reject him noisily and with contempt, until either he is shouted down and desists, or else he is dragged off or ejected by the police on the orders of the presiding magistrates. That is how they behave over subjects they consider technical. But when it is something to do with the government of the country that is to be debated, the man who gets up to advise them may be a builder or equally well a blacksmith or a shoemaker, a merchant or shipowner, rich or poor, of good family or none (319B-D, trans. W.K.C. Guthrie)
The immediate object of these remarks is to demonstrate that the Athenians apparently do not regard the political art -- or political virtue -- as a technical skill that can be taught, or else they would surely not treat it as a universal quality belonging to all citizens, even those who have never been apprenticed to a master of virtue. The full implications of Socrates' views -- or at least Plato's -- on this score do not become fully apparent until Plato's later works, especially the _Statesman_ and the _Republic_; but the groundwork is being laid here for the view that politics, like other arts, is a specialized skill which should be practiced only by those who engage in it exclusively. Ruling, indeed the life of citizenship, cannot be the province of people who engage in other arts; the shoemaker should stick to his last. The 'argument from the arts,' which is at the centre of Plato's attack on democracy, joins with his view that a life free from the compulsions of labour and material necessity is a condition for virtue, as vulgar arts and crafts 'mutilate the soul' (_Rep_, 495E).
Protagoras in his reply to Socrates provides the only systematic defence of democracy to survive from classical times, by demonstrating that virtue, while capable of being taught, is also universal, in much the same way that a mother tongue is both learned and universal. This is not the place to discuss all the philosophical implications of this argument. What is important here is Protagoras' conviction that political virtue is necessarily a universal quality, belonging not just to a select few but to 'shoemakers and smiths', that is, to 'banaustics' as well as to gentlemen or philosophers. To introduce his argument, he makes use of the Prometheus myth; and here Prometheus is clearly a benefactor, not the instrument of man's fall. Where Hesiod's Prometheus brought an end to the golden age in which the fruits of the earth offered themselves freely to mankind without their labour, Protagoras' hero gave them a gift of practical arts which allowed them to turn the earth's riches to their benefit; and once Zeus had distributed political skills to them universally -- on the principle that if the political art were reserved for experts like other specialized arts, no polis could survive -- human beings were able to make use of their arts to enjoy civilized life. Where for Hesiod the arts of Prometheus are a token of the fall, for Protagoras they are the symbols of civilization. Where for Hesiod the cycle of human life has regressed from a golden age of leisure to a fallen condition of pain and labour, for Protagoras it has progressed from a state of nature where men lived like beasts to a civilized life marked by the practice of human arts and the universal distribution of political virtue.
It is not surprising that when Plato in the _Statesman_ adapts the ancient myth to his own political purposes, he reverts to the version in which the need for labour and the practical arts is the mark of an age bereft of divine guidance, at the bottom of the cosmic cycle. What better way of putting working farmers, craftsmen, and labourers in their place? What better way of invoking divinity in support of his anti-democratic argument, spelled out in this dialogue in painstaking detail, that practitioners of the 'contributory' arts, the arts which supply the daily needs of human life, should have no share in the art of ruling? (142-144) *****
Yoshie