Il nodo delle somiglianze e il destino dell’etnologia. Protagora, Erodoto, Platone

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This article is divided into three parts. The first opens with the debate between Protagoras and Socrates in Plato’s Protagoras. The discussion regards the concept of virtue (if there is only one or many), but is also about the concept of similarity. Forced by constant questions by Socrates, Protagoras ends up affirming that there is more than only one virtue, and that they are at the same time similar and different. This is so because «every thing, in one or other aspect, is similar to any other thing». Starting from this challenging thesis, the author tries to elaborate a theory in which similarities and differences are united in a «knot» and therefore the world appears as a morass of similarities and differences. Taking advantage from the friendly relationship between Protagoras and Herodotus, in the second section the author interprets the enterprise of the latter as a journey between similarities and differences. The cultural differences described by Herodotus are many and consistent; and he attests that these differences are usually accentuated by typically ethnocentric oppositions, which are expressed in the form of «us and the others». Similar to the Greeks, Egyptians and Persians put themselves in the center and the others as marginal barbarians. Notwithstanding some uncertainties and imprecisions, Herodotus elaborates an ethnological knowledge that is comparable to a great network of connections between the costums (nomoi) of the different societies: a network that no society is in position to ignore. In the third part, the author focuses on the Athenian thinkers who more than others felt the risk of destabilizing the eroded voyage. Without naming Herodotus, in The Laws Plato elaborates the project of a true State ethnology characterized by a frantic control of the possibilities and ways of seeking those who go out of the polis to observe other societies: the explicit goal is to prevent other people’s nomoi from corrupting the State. Compared to Herodotus’s research, what becomes undermined is freedom. In this sense, Plato has definitely contributed to obstructing the development of a proper ethnological knowledge in the classical world.