Gorgias

Gorgias of Leontini was a Sicilian Greek rhetorician and one of the most famous sophists, who came to Athens on an embassy in 427 BCE and taught rhetoric across the Greek world; ancient sources report that he lived past a hundred. His Encomium of Helen presents speech as a powerful force acting on the soul, comparable to a drug acting on the body. Plato's dialogue Gorgias, named after him, sets philosophy against rhetoric, and his treatise On Not-Being survives only in later paraphrases.

Key ideas

• Speech (logos) is a powerful master that can change beliefs and emotions as drugs change the body.
• Helen may be defended because, if persuaded by speech, she was compelled rather than culpable.
• In On Not-Being he argues that nothing exists, that if it did it could not be known, and that if known it could not be communicated.
• Rhetoric is a teachable art of persuasion.

Major works

• Encomium of Helen
• Defence of Palamedes
• On Not-Being (On Nature), known through paraphrases in Sextus Empiricus and the pseudo-Aristotelian On Melissus, Xenophanes and Gorgias
• Plato's Gorgias, a dialogue in which he appears as a character

In the conversation

• Question What did Gorgias actually say about the power of speech in the Encomium of Helen? Gemma Pritchard · 4 replies
• Reading group Reading group: Plato’s Gorgias in five weeks, one interlocutor at a time Nikos Theodoridis · 5 replies