Reading group: Plato’s Gorgias in five weeks, one interlocutor at a time
Its coordinates: 4.2.3 Rhetoric
I teach theology at a secondary school in Thessaloniki, and every year a student asks whether politicians are "just good at talking". I always want to hand them the Gorgias, and I have never read it closely with adults. Let's do that.
Translation. Donald Zeyl's (Hackett, and in the Cooper Complete Works) or Robin Waterfield's (Oxford World's Classics). Stephanus numbers below so everyone can follow.
Plan.
– Week 1: 447a–461b. Socrates and Gorgias: what is rhetoric about, and what kind of persuasion does it produce?
– Week 2: 461b–466a. Polus takes over; the famous passage where rhetoric is called a form of flattery.
– Week 3: 466a–481b. Power, and the claim that doing injustice is worse than suffering it.
– Week 4: 481b–506c. Callicles, nature and convention, and the life of unlimited appetite.
– Week 5: 506c–527e. Socrates argues alone, and the closing myth of judgement.
What to watch for. The dialogue is itself a piece of persuasion about persuasion. Socrates complains about long speeches and then gives some. He mocks rhetoric and ends with a myth. Is Plato contradicting himself, or showing us what a rhetoric answerable to truth would look like? The Phaedrus, later, gives a friendlier answer; keep it in mind but leave it on the shelf for now.