Gorgias

Summary

Gorgias is Plato's longest early dialogue and his most direct confrontation between philosophy and political ambition. Socrates and his friend Chaerephon arrive at the house of the Athenian Callicles just after the famous orator Gorgias of Leontini has finished a display. Socrates wants to know what rhetoric is and what it teaches, and the conversation passes through three opponents, each bolder than the last. Gorgias says rhetoric is the art of persuasion in courts and assemblies, the greatest of goods because it gives its owner power over others. He boasts that he can talk patients into surgery when their physician cannot. Socrates draws out that rhetoric produces belief without knowledge and that the orator persuades the ignorant about justice without teaching it. Gorgias concedes that he would teach justice to a pupil who lacked it, which sits awkwardly with his earlier claim that the teacher is not to blame if a pupil misuses his skill. Gorgias' young follower Polus takes over. Socrates now gives his own account: rhetoric is not an art but a knack, a part of flattery, which aims at pleasure rather than the good. As cookery imitates medicine and cosmetics imitate gymnastics, so sophistry imitates legislation and rhetoric imitates justice. Polus holds up the Macedonian usurper Archelaus as a happy criminal; Socrates replies that doing injustice is worse than suffering it, that the unpunished wrongdoer is the most miserable of men, and that a person who has done wrong should go to the judge as to a physician to be cured. Callicles, a rising politician, breaks in to say that Socrates has turned the world upside down. By nature, he argues, the stronger and better should have more; law and conventional morality are inventions of the weak majority to tame the strong. Philosophy suits boys, not grown men, and Socrates would be helpless in court. Against his praise of satisfied appetite Socrates sets images of leaky jars and a man forever scratching an itch, and argues that pleasure and good are different, that a good soul, like a good house or ship, has order, and that the great Athenian statesmen, Pericles among them, flattered the people rather than making them better. Callicles withdraws into sullen short answers, and Socrates finishes the argument largely alone. The dialogue ends with a myth of judgment. Souls are judged naked after death by Minos, Rhadamanthus and Aeacus, who see the scars that injustice has left; the curable are punished to be healed, and incurable tyrants serve as warnings. Written after Socrates' trial, the Gorgias reads with grim irony when Socrates says he would be tried like a physician prosecuted by a cook before a jury of children. Its central claim, that it is better to suffer wrong than to do it, stands close to the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, and early Christian readers saw the resemblance, though Plato reaches it by argument rather than revelation.

Top Lessons

• What is persuasion for?

  Gorgias treats rhetoric like boxing: a powerful skill whose misuse is the pupil's fault, not the teacher's. Socrates presses the point that persuasion about justice without knowledge of justice is dangerous, because the speaker can make the ignorant believe anything. The rhetoric student should leave this section asking not only how to persuade, but whether he knows the truth of what he urges and whether his hearers will be better for believing it.

• Cookery and medicine: the anatomy of flattery

  Socrates' proportion (465c) is one of the most memorable diagrams in Plato. Medicine knows what is good for the body and can give reasons; cookery knows only what pleases and works by routine. Before a jury of children the cook would win. The scheme lets students test any practice, including entertainment, advertising, preaching and teaching, by asking whether it aims at the good of the people it serves or only at their pleasure.

• Better to suffer wrong than to do it

  Polus thinks it obvious that being wronged is worse than wronging. Socrates argues the reverse, and adds that punishment, rightly given, is a kindness to the guilty, as surgery is to the sick. Students should follow the argument step by step and decide where, if anywhere, it fails. The conclusion resembles Christ's command to turn the other cheek and Paul's counsel to suffer wrong rather than defraud (1 Corinthians 6:7), but Socrates reaches it through an account of the soul's health.

• Callicles and the law of the stronger

  Callicles gives the most powerful statement in ancient literature of the view that justice is a convention of the weak and that nature authorises the strong to take more. He is not a straw man: he speaks with conviction, cites Pindar and the conquests of Xerxes, and gives Socrates friendly warnings about his safety. Students should take his argument seriously before judging it, and notice which of his premises Socrates attacks.

• The physician tried by the cook

  Near the end Socrates predicts his own trial: he will be like a doctor accused by a cook before a jury of children, unable to defend bitter medicine against sweets. The image gathers the dialogue's themes of flattery, true politics and the cost of telling people what is good for them rather than what pleases them. Written after Socrates' execution, it asks students what faithfulness to the truth may cost, and whether the cost is worth paying.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The Gorgias is one of the richest classical sources for how Greeks thought about medicine as a model of expertise. Socrates distinguishes a true art (techne), which knows the nature of its object and can give the reason for what it does, from a knack (empeiria) that works by routine and aims at pleasure; medicine is his paradigm of the first and cookery of the second. Gorgias' boast that he could persuade his brother Herodicus' patients to accept the knife and cautery when the physician could not is an early record of the problem of patient compliance and of the gap between medical knowledge and the power to persuade. Socrates extends the medical model to the soul: injustice is a disease, punishment a painful cure, and the wise wrongdoer seeks the judge as a sick man seeks the doctor, a foundational text for the idea of philosophy as therapy. The pilot passage (511e-512b), which says the pilot cannot know whether saving a passenger with an incurable bodily disease has benefited him, belongs to Greek debates about the value of prolonging a diseased life and should be presented as Socrates' argument, not as an ethical guide. The Herodicus here is Gorgias' brother, not the dietetic trainer Herodicus of Selymbria mentioned in the Republic.

• 456b

  Gorgias claims he has persuaded patients of his brother Herodicus to take medicine or submit to the knife and cautery when the physician could not, and that a speaker would defeat a physician in an election for public doctor.

• 464b-465d

  Socrates' scheme of arts and flatteries: medicine and gymnastics care for the body, cookery and cosmetics counterfeit them; the physician would starve if judged by children against a cook.

• 478a-480d

  Punishment compared to medical treatment: the wrongdoer who avoids justice is like a sick child who fears burning and cutting, and should go to the judge as to a physician.

• 504a-505b

  Health as order in the body, justice and self-control as order in the soul; the physician forbids the sick their appetites as the statesman should restrain the vicious.

• 511e-512b

  The pilot reflects that saving a passenger with great and incurable bodily disease may confer no benefit, and still less one with an incurable soul.

• 521e-522a

  The physician accused by the cook before a jury of children of cutting, burning, starving and giving bitter potions, able to say only that he did it for their health.