Peri Theon: The Renaissance Confronts the Gods

Abstract

This essay traces the legacy of the ancient Greek sophists in the European Renaissance with particular attention to the study of religion as a human institution. Vernacular writers such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Michel de Montaigne follow the lead of the sophists in their effort to bring religion into the field of social thought. Montaigne himself offers a particularly interesting variation on the sole remaining fragment of Protagoras of Abdera’s Peri theon. In this way, these thinkers inscribe themselves in a genealogy of sophistic that continues from Classical Greece to the Enlightenment.