Gorgias

Gorgias, dialogue by Plato named after the famous sophist (see above). Socrates opens the dialogue by asking Gorgias to define rhetoric. The latter replies that it is the most important of human concerns because successful statesmanship depends not upon knowing what should be done and advising accordingly, but upon having the knack of persuasive speech. A successful orator can therefore act as he pleases, justly or unjustly. When Gorgias retires his pupil Polus takes up the argument; Socrates makes him agree, against his will, that it is better to suffer injustice than to do it, and that when one has done evil it is better to be punished than to go unpunished. When Polus retires his place is taken by a certain Callicles (otherwise unknown to us), who in a manner foreshadowing Nietzsche argues that virtue and happiness are to be found in the exercise of lawless self-will, for those who are capable of it. The issue of the dialogue is suddenly seen to be the choice a man has to make between a life of action of the kind Callicles stands for and a life of philosophy represented by Socrates. Socrates reinforces his own choice of philosophy with a passionate denunciation of the ‘great’ Athenian statesmen of the past, Pericles, Cimon, and Miltiades, and emerges himself as the only true statesman because he alone improves his fellow citizens. At the climax of the dialogue there is a myth, the earliest in Plato, of the judgement of the soul after death, perhaps as an additional incentive to avoid injustice.