Gorgias

W. K. C. Guthrie writes that "Like other Sophists, he was an itinerant that practiced in various cities and giving public exhibitions of his skill at the great pan-Hellenic centers of Olympia and Delphi, and charged fees for his instruction and performances.

[4][5][6][7] Prominent among his claims to recognition is that he transplanted rhetoric from his native Sicily to Attica, and contributed to the diffusion of the Attic dialect as the language of literary prose.

[11] It is not known what kind of role Gorgias may have played in the politics in his native Leontinoi,[11] but it is known that, in 427 BC, when he was around sixty years old, he was sent to Athens by his fellow-citizens as the head of an embassy to ask for Athenian protection against the aggression of the Syracusans.

[11] After 427 BC, Gorgias appears to have settled in mainland Greece, living at various points in a number of city-states, including Athens and Larisa.

[15] Additionally, although they are not described as his students, Gorgias is widely thought to have influenced the styles of the historian Thucydides, the tragic playwright Agathon, the doctor Hippocrates, the rhetorician Alcidamas, and the poet and commentator Lycophron.

[16] After his Pythian Oration, the Greeks installed a solid gold statue of him in the temple of Apollo at Delphi (Matsen, Rollinson and Sousa, 33).

The philosophies of the pre-Socratic Greek Sophists are much debated among scholars in general, due to their highly subtle and ambiguous writings and also to the fact that they are best known as characters in Plato's dialogues.

[17] While scholars debate the precise subtleties of the teachings of Protagoras, Hippias, and Prodicus, they generally agree on the basic frameworks of what these thinkers believed.

[19] The greatest hindrance to scholarly understanding of Gorgias's philosophy is that the vast majority of his writings have been lost[20] and those that have survived have suffered considerable alteration by later copyists.

[21] These difficulties are further compounded by the fact that Gorgias's rhetoric is frequently elusive and confusing;[22] he makes many of his most important points using elaborate, but highly ambiguous, metaphors, similes, and puns.

[19] As a result of all these factors, Scott Porter Consigny calls him "perhaps the most elusive of the polytropic quarry hunted in Plato's Sophist.

Although some scholars claim that each work presents opposing statements, the four texts can be read as interrelated contributions to the up-and-coming theory and art (technē) of rhetoric (McComiskey 32).

A number of these are referred to and quoted by Aristotle, including a speech on Hellenic unity, a funeral oration for Athenians fallen in war, and a brief quotation from an Encomium on the Eleans.

The performative nature of Gorgias' writings is exemplified by the way that he playfully approaches each argument with stylistic devices such as parody, artificial figuration and theatricality (Consigny 149).

In the Encomium, Gorgias likens the effect of speech on the soul to the effect of drugs on the body: "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" (Gorgias 32).

The dialogue tells the story of a debate about rhetoric, politics and justice that occurred at a dinner gathering between Socrates and a small group of Sophists.

Plato attempts to show that rhetoric does not meet the requirements to actually be considered a technê but rather is a somewhat dangerous "knack" to possess, both for the orator and for his audience, because it gives the ignorant the power to seem more knowledgeable than an expert to a group.

Regardless of how it "has largely been seen" it seems clear that Gorgias was focused instead on the notion that true objectivity is impossible since the human mind can never be separated from its possessor.

Gorgias explains that, by nature, the weak are ruled by the strong, and, since the gods are stronger than humans in all respects, Helen should be freed from her undesirable reputation.

The Encomium shows Gorgias' interest in argumentation, as he makes his point by "systematically refuting a series of possible alternatives," (Matsen, Rollinson and Sousa, 33).

According to Van Hook, The Encomium of Helen abounds in "amplification and brevity, a rhythm making prose akin to poetry, bold metaphors and poetic or unusual epithets" (122).

The Defense, an oration that deals with issues of morality and political commitment (Consigny 38), defends Palamedes who, in Greek mythology, is credited with the invention of the alphabet, written laws, numbers, armor, and measures and weights (McComiskey 47).

In Greek mythology, Odysseus – in order to avoid going to Troy with Agamemnon and Menelaus to bring Helen back to Sparta – pretended to have gone mad and began sowing the fields with salt.

In this epideictic speech, like the Encomium, Gorgias is concerned with experimenting with how plausible arguments can cause conventional truths to be doubted (Jarratt 59).

Throughout the text, Gorgias presents a method for composing logical (logos), ethical (ethos) and emotional (pathos) arguments from possibility, which are similar to those described by Aristotle in Rhetoric.

In the Defense these occurrences are as follows: communication between Palamedes and the enemy, exchange of a pledge in the form of hostages or money, and not being detected by guards or citizens.

Gorgias' text provides a clever critique of 5th century propagandist rhetoric in imperial Athens and is the basis for Plato's parody, Menexenus (Consigny 2).

[37] Plato answers Gorgias by reaffirming the Parmenidean ideal that being is the basic substance and reality of which all things are composed, insisting that philosophy is a dialectic distinct from and superior to rhetoric (Wardy 52).

[40] Gorgias's distinctive writing style, filled with antithesis and figurative language, has been seen as foreshadowing the later development of Menippean satire, as well as, in more recent times, the mannerist, grotesque, and carnivalesque genres.

[39] Several scholars have even argued that Gorgias's thoughts on the nature of knowledge, language, and truth foreshadow the views of modern philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A. J. Ayer, Amélie Rorty, and Stanley Fish.