Gorgias

A dialogue in three rounds about rhetoric and the best way to live. Socrates first questions the famous orator Gorgias, who claims rhetoric is the power to persuade crowds about justice. Socrates argues that it produces belief without knowledge, and calls it a knack of flattery rather than an art: it stands to justice as cookery stands to medicine. The young Polus defends the tyrant who can do whatever he likes, and Socrates replies that doing wrong is worse than suffering it, and that a wrongdoer is better off punished than unpunished. The hardest challenge comes from Callicles, who says that conventional justice is a device of the weak, that by nature the stronger should have more, and that the best life feeds every desire. Socrates answers with the image of leaking jars, separates the good from the pleasant, and ends with a myth of judgement after death.

Callicles is one of the strongest cases for power over morality in ancient literature, and the dialogue's questions about persuasion, spin and political leadership read as current.