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Part 1 of 14 (Part 2 here)
An ancient commentator on Aristotle tells a story about a farmer who got ahold of Plato’s Gorgias and was so stunned that he gave up the life of farming, trudged to Athens, looked up Plato, and put his soul in Plato’s care.[1]
Like the Alcibiades I, the Gorgias offers a wonderful argument for pursuing the philosophical life. But there are differences. The Gorgias is twice as long as the Alcibiades I. Instead of speaking to a naïve young man, Socrates faces three formidable opponents, including one of the greatest of all sophists, Gorgias of Leontini, for whom the dialogue is named. But in the end, philosophy wins. Sorry for giving away the ending, but did you imagine it would turn out any other way given that Plato is our author?
The Dramatic Date
Like the Alcibiades I, the Gorgias is a play. So let’s analyze it first in terms of the dramatic date, characters, and setting.
The Gorgias is a very strange text for a number of reasons.
First of all, it’s impossible to assign a single dramatic date to it. The death of Pericles in November of 429 BCE is mentioned as a recent event, which would place the discussion about three years after the setting of the Alcibiades I. But Gorgias first set foot in Athens in 427 BCE. So, there’s a two-year discrepancy there. Archelaus is mentioned as having recently become the king of Macedonia, but that happened in 413 BCE. Callicles quotes a play by Euripides, Antiope, which premiered in either 411 or 408 BCE. And Socrates refers to his opposition to the condemnation of the Athenian generals in 406 BCE as “last year,” so that gives us the year 405 BCE. Now, the Gorgias is one of Plato’s longer dialogues, but the conversation does not last 25 years.

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Plato, of course, couldn’t have done this through accident or lack of historical sense. It’s got to mean something.
The first word of the Gorgias is polemos, or “war.” The dramatic dates span the years 429 to 405 BCE. It is noteworthy that 431 to 404 BCE were the years of the Peloponnesian War, the greatest event in the lives of Socrates and all his contemporaries. The whole discussion is bounded by the Peloponnesian War, minus the very beginning and the very end. This is significant, for if he wanted to, Plato could have found a way to broaden the dates to include the whole of the war. So there is something significant about this. Dramatically speaking, the dialogue is comprehended by the war. It does not comprehend it. Beyond that, the central themes of the dialogue touch on war and power politics. The participants talk about city walls, arsenals, and battleships.
Another possible reason Plato set the Gorgias over a period of 25 years is to oppose one of the main features of the sophists’ teaching, which is the primacy of the ever-changing, ever-passing moment. Gorgias was the first theorist of rhetoric who emphasized timeliness, kairos, the moment. Disraeli once claimed that timeliness can overcome even great learning, even very rigorous arguments. If you give the right argument in an untimely manner, it will fall deadborn from your lips, whereas a specious argument or a mere arbitrary exhortation, if delivered at the right time, hits home and changes people’s minds.
One philosophical assumption of the sophists is the centrality of time and change, especially the variability of conventions and opinions, which are the media of persuasion. You can’t have a dialogue outside of time, of course. The closest you can get is untimeliness. Thus, perhaps the strange untimeliness of the Gorgias is at least a gesture toward a metaphysics that’s deeply anti-sophistical.
The Characters
There are five characters in the Gorgias.
Socrates (469–399 BCE) is, of course, the main character. He’s a citizen of Athens, where he is known as a good-for-nothing philosopher.
Chaerephon (c. 469–c. 399 BCE) is the first person who speaks in the dialogue. He also speaks in Plato’s Charmides and the Halcyon, a Socratic dialogue by an unknown author. He is mentioned in Plato’s Apology of Socrates. It was Chaerephon who asked the oracle of the god Apollo at Delphi, “Is there anybody wiser than Socrates?” To which the oracle said, “No.” Socrates said that this got him started as a philosopher. Of course, that can’t be true, because no one would have asked “Is anyone wiser than Socrates?” if Socrates didn’t already have a reputation for wisdom. Chaerephon is also mentioned in Aristophanes’ Clouds, Wasps, and Birds, and in Xenophon’s Apology and Memorabilia. He was a citizen of Athens and one of Socrates’ old friends. He was known for his manic energy and his high, squeaky voice, for which he was known as “the bat.” He is described as cadaverous and unhealthy-looking in the Clouds.
Gorgias (c. 485–380 BCE), a visitor from Leontini, lends his name to the dialogue. Leontini was a Greek city-state in Sicily, and Gorgias was one of its most prominent citizens. Gorgias was sent to Athens in 427 BCE as an ambassador to seek a crucial alliance against Syracuse. He lived either 105, 108, or 109 years. (Reports vary.) He was reputedly a student of Empedocles the Pythagorean, but there is nothing particularly Pythagorean about his philosophy, which was deeply anti-metaphysical and skeptical. Gorgias was one of the most impressive and influential sophists. Gorgias is very much a gentleman, which in part means being unwilling to do or say shameful things. During his time in Athens, Gorgias made a powerful impression on the locals with his rhetorical skills. He apparently returned many times and may have even settled there.
Polus (dates unknown) was a visitor from the city of Acragas in Sicily. He was an actual historical figure who authored a book on rhetoric. But little is known about him outside the Gorgias.[2] Based on the dialogue, we can say that he was a student of Gorgias who traveled with his teacher. Like Gorgias, Polus was a sophist. The name “Polus” means “colt,” and there is something coltish about his depiction in the Gorgias. He’s young and enthusiastic. He was less of a gentleman than Gorgias, and thus more willing to say shameful things. He actually upbraids Gorgias for allowing Socrates to use his sense of shame to defeat him in argument.
Callicles (dates unknown), the final character, was a citizen of Athens and the host of Gorgias and Polus. He is depicted as a man of some wealth and ambition. He is known only from the Gorgias, but there’s no reason to think that he was not a historical figure. He is a student of sophistry and an advocate of cynical power politics. But he also has a philosophical temperament.
Callicles is even more shameless than Polus. So, there’s a kind of downward trajectory to the Gorgias that illustrates the negative influence of the sophists. The sophists believed that morality was conventional, and conventions are mutable. Increasingly, they were seen as hindrances to one’s own freedom and as tools to manipulate others. Thus with the passage of time and the weakening of conventions, the sophists become increasingly shameless and immoral.
Gorgias is the most gentlemanly but the least effectual against Socrates. Polus is less gentlemanly and more challenging to Socrates. Callicles is the least gentlemanly and the most difficult for Socrates to defeat. This is why fully three-fifths of the dialogue is devoted to the conversation with Callicles.
Socrates defeats Gorgias and Polus by appealing to their sense of right and wrong. Callicles has no sense of right and wrong. At least he thinks he doesn’t. Thus he’s a tougher opponent. But if there’s even the tiniest bud or shoot of moral sensibility in Callicles’ soul, Socrates will try to find and nurture it, because that’s how he’s going to defeat him. But to truly overcome Callias, Socrates must place morality on natural rather than conventional foundations.
The Setting
The setting of the Gorgias is Athens, but where precisely is unclear. Socrates and Chaerephon arrive at a building in which Gorgias has given a speech and held a question-and-answer session before a crowd. Outside the building, they meet Callicles, who is the host of Gorgias and Polus. They emerge from the building, at which time the discussion takes place. It is not even clear if the building is public or private, or if the space outside it is public (for instance, a street or square) or private (for instance, an enclosed courtyard or garden).
What Gorgias Taught
Gorgias wrote two books, but it is hard to say what he taught, because only two complete speeches and a few fragments and testimonia survived the collapse of the ancient world.
The first book was a collection of his show speeches. Gorgias was famous as a speechwriter for all occasions. But he was most famous for writing and performing some speeches simply as show pieces. Only two survive: his Encomium of Helen, which is a defense of Helen of Troy from her accusers, and the Apology or Defense of Palamedes, a character in Homer who was unjustly accused and put to death by Odysseus. (The Defense of Palamedes is interesting for readers of Plato, because some of the rhetoric is echoed by Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Crito.)
The second book is called On Non-Being, which argues for three theses:
- [Anything you might mention] is nothing.
- If it were something, it would be unknowable.
- If it were something and knowable, it could not be made evident to others.[3]
So, there is nothing, and if there were something we couldn’t know it, and if we could know it, we couldn’t communicate it to anybody else.
Is Gorgias trying communicate that we can’t communicate? Is he trying to communicate that he doesn’t exist, that we don’t exist, that these facts can’t be known, and that he has a really good argument why none of us exist, which we can’t know, and he can’t communicate? That hardly seems likely. So what is a more plausible interpretation?

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I think Gorgias is attacking the notion of objective reality as some philosophers conceived it, and if that fails he’s attacking the notion that you can know objective reality, and if that fails he falls back and attacks the notion you could ever communicate objective truth.
What does Gorgias put in place of objective reality? Probably the changing things that we see around us. What does he put in place of objective truth? Probably opinions (doxa) about the changing things around us. Opinions are beliefs that change as well. Gorgias wants to argue that “Opinion is king,” just as Herodotus argued that “Custom is king,” which amounts to the same thing. Opinion is always shifting and changing. Opinion is relative to time and place. Opinions vary from person to person. A single person’s opinions change from day to day and from hour to hour and from place to place.
What art is most suited to govern a world of shifting opinions? The art of rhetoric, because rhetoric is an art of manipulating opinions and appearances in order to get one’s way. So, the rhetorician, the persuasive man, is king in the land of opinion. Beyond that, the best kind of rhetoric pays attention to timeliness. In a world of change, rhetoric must develop a sense for the right moment. Thus Gorgias’ philosophy serves as a foundation for his rhetorical teachings.
Gorgias was primarily a teacher of rhetoric, which he defined as a value-neutral technique of persuasion. But there was more to it than that. Gorgias was fundamentally a good man and thus believed that he made his students better men. Gorgias, who was quite rich, dedicated a golden statue of himself in Olympia. The statue, alas, is lost, but the inscription on the base remains, probably the words of Gorgias himself: “No mortal has yet found a finer art [techne] than Gorgias to train the soul for the contests of virtue [arete, also translated as “excellence”]. This statue stands in the vale of Apollo, a tribute not to wealth but to the piety of his character.”[4]
As we shall see, however, Socrates finds a contradiction between the idea that rhetoric is a value-free technique and the idea that studying rhetoric makes us better men.
What are Gorgias’ innovations in rhetoric?
He was the first to thematize the whole issue of timeliness: the right word at the right time makes all the difference.
In one fragment, Gorgias claims, “One must defeat the seriousness of one’s opponents with laughter and their laughter with seriousness.”[5] This is a nice illustration of what an artful wordsmith Gorgias is. Beyond that, it illustrates how a supple pragmatism copes with ever-changing situations. Precisely opposed actions — seriousness or humorousness — can produce victory in different situations.
Gorgias was also the first to make thematic the necessity of always accommodating one’s speeches to one’s audience, which is a basic principle of rhetoric that Plato would certainly agree with.
Gorgias was one of the first rhetoricians to pay attention to ornamenting speeches. He used metaphors, poetic turns of phrase, dramatic antitheses, and measured repetitions. He carefully crafted clauses of the same length. He was also attentive to the rhythm of speech. Gorgias’ speeches dazzled his plain-spoken contemporaries, like a peacock spreading his tail for the first time amid a muster of dowdy peahens. He was eagerly imitated. But to later generations, his style came to seem contrived: jangling, ornate, and sing-songy.
I am no classicist, so I can’t evaluate Gorgias’ style in Greek. Thus I will turn to the great Irish classicist E. R. Dodds:
His art was in fact the art of verbal magic . . . And the extant samples of his writing . . . fully support that view. They make the impression of a dazzling insincerity, an insincerity so innocently open as to be (except in the funeral oration) entirely void of offence. They are the work of an indefatigable stylist, a man who polished painfully every sentence that he wrote, carrying passionately about its form, but . . . very much less about its relationship to the truth. For him fidelity to fact is a subsidiary matter . . . . The style seems to us, as it did to later antiquity, affected and boring: the well-drilled words execute ad nauseam the same repetitive maneuvers with the mechanical precision of a platoon on a barrack square. But Gorgias’ contemporaries were bewitched by it, perhaps just because it was so easily imitable, a style that could be taught and learned. We can still see for ourselves that men as diverse in their gifts and interests as Thucydides, Antiphon, and Isocrates succumbed in varying degrees to the fascination.
Plato did not.[6]

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Gorgias was also a master of extemporaneous speaking. He would speak on any topic nominated by his audience. He also invented the question-and-answer session.
Finally, just as Socrates was a master of persuading people that philosophy was the most important thing in the world, Gorgias was a great salesman for rhetoric, lauding it for its almost supernatural power.
Let’s look at a few passages from the Encomium of Helen, in which Gorgias seeks to absolve Helen of Troy of all blame for going to Troy: “Either she did what she did because of the will of fortune and the plan of the gods and the decree of necessity, or she was seized by force, or persuaded by words, [or captured by love].”[7] No matter why Helen went to Troy, Gorgias argues that you can’t blame her for it. She’s a victim.
Let’s look at his discussion of persuasion by words:
If speech [logos] persuaded and deluded her mind, even against this it is not hard to defend her or free her from blame, as follows. Speech is a powerful master and achieves the most divine feats with the smallest and least evident body. [By the “smallest and least evident body,” Gorgias is referring to the invisible material vibrations of speech.] [Speech] can stop fear, relieve pain, create joy, and increase pity. . . .
Poetry [poiesis] as a whole I deem and name speech [logos] with meter. To its listeners, poetry brings a fearful shuddering, a tearful pity, and a grieving desire, while through its words the soul feels its own feelings for good and bad fortune in the affairs and lives of others. [It produces sympathy, “suffering with.”] . . .
Sacred incantations with words inject pleasure and reject pain, for in associating with the opinion of the mind, the power of incantation and chants persuades and alters it through bewitchment. The twin arts of witchcraft and magic have been discovered, and these are illusions of mind and delusions of judgment.
How many men on how many subjects have been persuaded, and do persuade how many others, by shaping the false speech! For if all men and all subjects had memory of the past, understanding of the present, and foresight into the future, speech would not be the same in the same way. But as it is, to remember the past, to examine the present, or to prophesy the future is not easy, and so most men on most subjects make opinion an advisor to their minds. But opinion is perilous and uncertain and brings those who use it to perilous and uncertain good fortune.[8]
This is an argument for the sovereignty of opinion in human life. If we knew better — if we had good memories, if we understood what was happening in front of us, if we had genuine insight into the future — we would have knowledge and not opinion. But because we don’t know better — because we have faulty memories, because we have deranged or slow wits, because we usually understand things in hindsight, if we understand them at all, and because the future is all just a matter of conjecture — we live in a world ruled by opinion. That means we live in a world ruled by opinion-makers and opinion-shapers. And that means a world ruled by sophists, rhetoricians, and orators.
Why, then, did Helen not just go as unwillingly under the influence of speech as if she were seized by the violence of violators? For persuasion expelled her thought — persuasion which has the same power but not the same form as compulsion [ananke]. A speech persuaded a soul that was persuaded and forced it to be persuaded by what was said and to consent to what was done.
The persuader, then, is the wrongdoer, because he compelled her, while she who was persuaded is wrongly blamed because she was compelled by the speech.
To see that persuasion when added to speech indeed molds the mind as it wishes, one must first study the arguments of astronomers who replace opinion with opinion displacing one but implanting another and make incredible, invisible matters apparent to the eyes of opinion.[9]
Here Gorgias rejects the basic idea of natural philosophy and natural science, namely that they replace opinion with knowledge. Induction on the basis of past experience shows that science has a long history of plausible yet failed theories, and if the past is a good guide to the future — which all scientists presume — then present-day theories, which we regard to be as well-founded and as true as anything, will be replaced as well. So science is just the replacement of one opinion — however well-founded — with other opinions, albeit still better-founded ones.
Gorgias, therefore, is an exception to Aristophanes’ thesis in his comedy the Clouds that the sophists are nourished by natural philosophy.[10] For Gorgias, natural philosophy is just another species of mutable opinion.
Gorgias continues with examples of how persuasion molds the mind:
Second, compulsory debates with words where a single speech to a large crowd pleases and persuades because composed with art [techne] not spoken with truth.
Third, contests of philosophical arguments where it is shown that speed of thought also makes it easy to change a conviction based on opinion.
Gorgias then illustrates the power of speech over the soul by comparing it to the power of drugs over the body, to say nothing of their power over the mind:
The power of speech has the same effect on the disposition of the soul as the disposition of drugs on the nature of bodies. Just as different drugs draw forth different humors from the body — some putting a stop to disease, others to life — so too with words: some cause pain, others joy, some strike fear, some stir the audience to boldness, some benumb and bewitch the soul with evil persuasion.
Then Gorgias draws his conclusion:
The case has been made: if [Helen] was persuaded by speech her fortune was evil not her action.[11]
To close, I want to look at a fragment from Gorgias that argues that deceptive speech can also produce wisdom, not just folly:
Tragedy produces a deception in which the one who deceives is more just than the one who does not, and the one who is deceived is wiser than the one who is not.[12]
The tragedian is a liar, but he improves us through his stories. He edifies our spirits and purges negative emotions. Thus he is more just than the person who doesn’t write tragedies, who does not deign to deceive or benefit us. The tragedian is a better man for lying to us.
How is it that we are wiser for being deceived? Imagine watching Hamlet. You suspend disbelief and are swept up in in the story. You truly are beguiled and deceived. Thus you can have a powerful experience and become wiser for it. Whereas the one who just can’t get into it, who sits there thinking, “God, this is so long, so flowery, so implausible,” is not deceived. Therefore, he does not really experience the story. Thus he remains in a state of folly. This is as powerful a defense of the “noble lie” as anything in Plato.
In sum, for Gorgias the power of speech over the human mind is truly awe-inspiring. Moreover, Gorgias’ art of rhetoric gives us power over speech, both freeing our minds and giving us power over the minds of others. Thus you can forgive Gorgias for thinking that rhetoric is the king of all the arts, that it has the right to rule over everything, because in many societies it does.
Socrates doesn’t deny that rhetoric rules. He just denies that it is the rightful ruler. Rhetoric is a mere pretender. Instead, Socrates argues that philosophy is the rightful ruler of all human affairs.
Notes
[1] Themistius (317–c. 388), Orations, 295 c–d.
[2] Plato also mentions Polus in the Theages and Phaedrus, and Aristotle mentions him in Metaphysics, Book I.
[3] Gorgias, On Non-Being, in Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists, ed. and trans. Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 206.
[4] Gorgias, fragment 14, Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists, p. 205.
[5] Gorgias, fragment 9, in Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists, p. 204.
[6] Plato, Gorgias: A Revised Text with Introduction and Commentary, ed. E. R. Dodds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 8–9.
[7] Gorgias, Encomium of Helen, in Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists, p. 191.
[8] Encomium of Helen, 192–93.
[9] Encomium of Helen, 193.
[10] See my chapter on Aristophanes’ Clouds in The Trial of Socrates (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2023).
[11] Encomium of Helen, 193.
[12] Gorgias, fragment 10, in Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists, p. 204.
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1 comment
I’ve read it, and my take is that Gorgias was an early postmodernist – the same sort of “nothing is real” subjectivist fluff, the “communication is impossible” stuff from the French pomos, the fast talk that doesn’t really mean anything, etc. This doesn’t give me a favorable opinion of Gorgias.
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