



Produced by Sue Asscher





GORGIAS

by Plato

Translated by Benjamin Jowett




INTRODUCTION.

In several of the dialogues of Plato, doubts have arisen among his
interpreters as to which of the various subjects discussed in them
is the main thesis. The speakers have the freedom of conversation; no
severe rules of art restrict them, and sometimes we are inclined to
think, with one of the dramatis personae in the Theaetetus, that the
digressions have the greater interest. Yet in the most irregular of the
dialogues there is also a certain natural growth or unity; the beginning
is not forgotten at the end, and numerous allusions and references are
interspersed, which form the loose connecting links of the whole. We
must not neglect this unity, but neither must we attempt to confine
the Platonic dialogue on the Procrustean bed of a single idea. (Compare
Introduction to the Phaedrus.)

Two tendencies seem to have beset the interpreters of Plato in this
matter. First, they have endeavoured to hang the dialogues upon one
another by the slightest threads; and have thus been led to opposite and
contradictory assertions respecting their order and sequence. The mantle
of Schleiermacher has descended upon his successors, who have applied
his method with the most various results. The value and use of the
method has been hardly, if at all, examined either by him or them.
Secondly, they have extended almost indefinitely the scope of each
separate dialogue; in this way they think that they have escaped all
difficulties, not seeing that what they have gained in generality they
have lost in truth and distinctness. Metaphysical conceptions easily
pass into one another; and the simpler notions of antiquity, which
we can only realize by an effort, imperceptibly blend with the more
familiar theories of modern philosophers. An eye for proportion is
needed (his own art of measuring) in the study of Plato, as well as of
other great artists. We may hardly admit that the moral antithesis
of good and pleasure, or the intellectual antithesis of knowledge
and opinion, being and appearance, are never far off in a Platonic
discussion. But because they are in the background, we should not bring
them into the foreground, or expect to discern them equally in all the
dialogues.

There may be some advantage in drawing out a little the main outlines
of the building; but the use of this is limited, and may be easily
exaggerated. We may give Plato too much system, and alter the natural
form and connection of his thoughts. Under the idea that his dialogues
are finished works of art, we may find a reason for everything, and lose
the highest characteristic of art, which is simplicity. Most great works
receive a new light from a new and original mind. But whether these new
lights are true or only suggestive, will depend on their agreement with
the spirit of Plato, and the amount of direct evidence which can
be urged in support of them. When a theory is running away with
us, criticism does a friendly office in counselling moderation, and
recalling us to the indications of the text.

Like the Phaedrus, the Gorgias has puzzled students of Plato by the
appearance of two or more subjects. Under the cover of rhetoric higher
themes are introduced; the argument expands into a general view of the
good and evil of man. After making an ineffectual attempt to obtain a
sound definition of his art from Gorgias, Socrates assumes the
existence of a universal art of flattery or simulation having several
branches:--this is the genus of which rhetoric is only one, and not the
highest species. To flattery is opposed the true and noble art of life
which he who possesses seeks always to impart to others, and which at
last triumphs, if not here, at any rate in another world. These two
aspects of life and knowledge appear to be the two leading ideas of
the dialogue. The true and the false in individuals and states, in the
treatment of the soul as well as of the body, are conceived under the
forms of true and false art. In the development of this opposition
there arise various other questions, such as the two famous paradoxes of
Socrates (paradoxes as they are to the world in general, ideals as they
may be more worthily called): (1) that to do is worse than to suffer
evil; and (2) that when a man has done evil he had better be punished
than unpunished; to which may be added (3) a third Socratic paradox or
ideal, that bad men do what they think best, but not what they desire,
for the desire of all is towards the good. That pleasure is to be
distinguished from good is proved by the simultaneousness of pleasure
and pain, and by the possibility of the bad having in certain cases
pleasures as great as those of the good, or even greater. Not merely
rhetoricians, but poets, musicians, and other artists, the whole tribe
of statesmen, past as well as present, are included in the class of
flatterers. The true and false finally appear before the judgment-seat
of the gods below.

The dialogue naturally falls into three divisions, to which the three
characters of Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles respectively correspond; and
the form and manner change with the stages of the argument. Socrates is
deferential towards Gorgias, playful and yet cutting in dealing with the
youthful Polus, ironical and sarcastic in his encounter with Callicles.
In the first division the question is asked--What is rhetoric? To this
there is no answer given, for Gorgias is soon made to contradict
himself by Socrates, and the argument is transferred to the hands of his
disciple Polus, who rushes to the defence of his master. The answer has
at last to be given by Socrates himself, but before he can even explain
his meaning to Polus, he must enlighten him upon the great subject of
shams or flatteries. When Polus finds his favourite art reduced to
the level of cookery, he replies that at any rate rhetoricians, like
despots, have great power. Socrates denies that they have any real
power, and hence arise the three paradoxes already mentioned. Although
they are strange to him, Polus is at last convinced of their truth; at
least, they seem to him to follow legitimately from the premises. Thus
the second act of the dialogue closes. Then Callicles appears on the
scene, at first maintaining that pleasure is good, and that might is
right, and that law is nothing but the combination of the many weak
against the few strong. When he is confuted he withdraws from the
argument, and leaves Socrates to arrive at the conclusion by himself.
The conclusion is that there are two kinds of statesmanship, a higher
and a lower--that which makes the people better, and that which only
flatters them, and he exhorts Callicles to choose the higher. The
dialogue terminates with a mythus of a final judgment, in which there
will be no more flattery or disguise, and no further use for the
teaching of rhetoric.

The characters of the three interlocutors also correspond to the parts
which are assigned to them. Gorgias is the great rhetorician, now
advanced in years, who goes from city to city displaying his talents,
and is celebrated throughout Greece. Like all the Sophists in the
dialogues of Plato, he is vain and boastful, yet he has also a certain
dignity, and is treated by Socrates with considerable respect. But he is
no match for him in dialectics. Although he has been teaching rhetoric
all his life, he is still incapable of defining his own art. When his
ideas begin to clear up, he is unwilling to admit that rhetoric can
be wholly separated from justice and injustice, and this lingering
sentiment of morality, or regard for public opinion, enables Socrates to
detect him in a contradiction. Like Protagoras, he is described as of
a generous nature; he expresses his approbation of Socrates' manner of
approaching a question; he is quite 'one of Socrates' sort, ready to
be refuted as well as to refute,' and very eager that Callicles and
Socrates should have the game out. He knows by experience that rhetoric
exercises great influence over other men, but he is unable to explain
the puzzle how rhetoric can teach everything and know nothing.

Polus is an impetuous youth, a runaway 'colt,' as Socrates describes
him, who wanted originally to have taken the place of Gorgias under
the pretext that the old man was tired, and now avails himself of the
earliest opportunity to enter the lists. He is said to be the author
of a work on rhetoric, and is again mentioned in the Phaedrus, as the
inventor of balanced or double forms of speech (compare Gorg.; Symp.).
At first he is violent and ill-mannered, and is angry at seeing his
master overthrown. But in the judicious hands of Socrates he is soon
restored to good-humour, and compelled to assent to the required
conclusion. Like Gorgias, he is overthrown because he compromises; he is
unwilling to say that to do is fairer or more honourable than to suffer
injustice. Though he is fascinated by the power of rhetoric, and dazzled
by the splendour of success, he is not insensible to higher arguments.
Plato may have felt that there would be an incongruity in a youth
maintaining the cause of injustice against the world. He has never heard
the other side of the question, and he listens to the paradoxes, as
they appear to him, of Socrates with evident astonishment. He can hardly
understand the meaning of Archelaus being miserable, or of rhetoric
being only useful in self-accusation. When the argument with him has
fairly run out.

Callicles, in whose house they are assembled, is introduced on the
stage: he is with difficulty convinced that Socrates is in earnest;
for if these things are true, then, as he says with real emotion, the
foundations of society are upside down. In him another type of character
is represented; he is neither sophist nor philosopher, but man of the
world, and an accomplished Athenian gentleman. He might be described in
modern language as a cynic or materialist, a lover of power and also of
pleasure, and unscrupulous in his means of attaining both. There is no
desire on his part to offer any compromise in the interests of morality;
nor is any concession made by him. Like Thrasymachus in the Republic,
though he is not of the same weak and vulgar class, he consistently
maintains that might is right. His great motive of action is political
ambition; in this he is characteristically Greek. Like Anytus in the
Meno, he is the enemy of the Sophists; but favours the new art of
rhetoric, which he regards as an excellent weapon of attack and defence.
He is a despiser of mankind as he is of philosophy, and sees in the laws
of the state only a violation of the order of nature, which intended
that the stronger should govern the weaker (compare Republic). Like
other men of the world who are of a speculative turn of mind, he
generalizes the bad side of human nature, and has easily brought down
his principles to his practice. Philosophy and poetry alike supply him
with distinctions suited to his view of human life. He has a good will
to Socrates, whose talents he evidently admires, while he censures the
puerile use which he makes of them. He expresses a keen intellectual
interest in the argument. Like Anytus, again, he has a sympathy with
other men of the world; the Athenian statesmen of a former generation,
who showed no weakness and made no mistakes, such as Miltiades,
Themistocles, Pericles, are his favourites. His ideal of human character
is a man of great passions and great powers, which he has developed to
the utmost, and which he uses in his own enjoyment and in the government
of others. Had Critias been the name instead of Callicles, about whom
we know nothing from other sources, the opinions of the man would have
seemed to reflect the history of his life.

And now the combat deepens. In Callicles, far more than in any sophist
or rhetorician, is concentrated the spirit of evil against which
Socrates is contending, the spirit of the world, the spirit of the
many contending against the one wise man, of which the Sophists, as
he describes them in the Republic, are the imitators rather than the
authors, being themselves carried away by the great tide of public
opinion. Socrates approaches his antagonist warily from a distance, with
a sort of irony which touches with a light hand both his personal vices
(probably in allusion to some scandal of the day) and his servility
to the populace. At the same time, he is in most profound earnest, as
Chaerephon remarks. Callicles soon loses his temper, but the more he is
irritated, the more provoking and matter of fact does Socrates become.
A repartee of his which appears to have been really made to the
'omniscient' Hippias, according to the testimony of Xenophon (Mem.), is
introduced. He is called by Callicles a popular declaimer, and certainly
shows that he has the power, in the words of Gorgias, of being 'as long
as he pleases,' or 'as short as he pleases' (compare Protag.). Callicles
exhibits great ability in defending himself and attacking Socrates, whom
he accuses of trifling and word-splitting; he is scandalized that the
legitimate consequences of his own argument should be stated in plain
terms; after the manner of men of the world, he wishes to preserve the
decencies of life. But he cannot consistently maintain the bad sense
of words; and getting confused between the abstract notions of better,
superior, stronger, he is easily turned round by Socrates, and only
induced to continue the argument by the authority of Gorgias. Once, when
Socrates is describing the manner in which the ambitious citizen has to
identify himself with the people, he partially recognizes the truth of
his words.

The Socrates of the Gorgias may be compared with the Socrates of the
Protagoras and Meno. As in other dialogues, he is the enemy of the
Sophists and rhetoricians; and also of the statesmen, whom he regards as
another variety of the same species. His behaviour is governed by that
of his opponents; the least forwardness or egotism on their part is met
by a corresponding irony on the part of Socrates. He must speak, for
philosophy will not allow him to be silent. He is indeed more ironical
and provoking than in any other of Plato's writings: for he is 'fooled
to the top of his bent' by the worldliness of Callicles. But he is also
more deeply in earnest. He rises higher than even in the Phaedo and
Crito: at first enveloping his moral convictions in a cloud of dust and
dialectics, he ends by losing his method, his life, himself, in them.
As in the Protagoras and Phaedrus, throwing aside the veil of irony, he
makes a speech, but, true to his character, not until his adversary has
refused to answer any more questions. The presentiment of his own fate
is hanging over him. He is aware that Socrates, the single real teacher
of politics, as he ventures to call himself, cannot safely go to
war with the whole world, and that in the courts of earth he will
be condemned. But he will be justified in the world below. Then the
position of Socrates and Callicles will be reversed; all those things
'unfit for ears polite' which Callicles has prophesied as likely to
happen to him in this life, the insulting language, the box on the
ears, will recoil upon his assailant. (Compare Republic, and the similar
reversal of the position of the lawyer and the philosopher in the
Theaetetus).

There is an interesting allusion to his own behaviour at the trial
of the generals after the battle of Arginusae, which he ironically
attributes to his ignorance of the manner in which a vote of the
assembly should be taken. This is said to have happened 'last year'
(B.C. 406), and therefore the assumed date of the dialogue has been
fixed at 405 B.C., when Socrates would already have been an old man.
The date is clearly marked, but is scarcely reconcilable with another
indication of time, viz. the'recent' usurpation of Archelaus, which
occurred in the year 413; and still less with the'recent' death of
Pericles, who really died twenty-four years previously (429 B.C.) and
is afterwards reckoned among the statesmen of a past age; or with the
mention of Nicias, who died in 413, and is nevertheless spoken of as
a living witness. But we shall hereafter have reason to observe, that
although there is a general consistency of times and persons in the
Dialogues of Plato, a precise dramatic date is an invention of his
commentators (Preface to Republic).

The conclusion of the Dialogue is remarkable, (1) for the truly
characteristic declaration of Socrates that he is ignorant of the true
nature and bearing of these things, while he affirms at the same time
that no one can maintain any other view without being ridiculous. The
profession of ignorance reminds us of the earlier and more exclusively
Socratic Dialogues. But neither in them, nor in the Apology, nor in
the Memorabilia of Xenophon, does Socrates express any doubt of the
fundamental truths of morality. He evidently regards this 'among the
multitude of questions' which agitate human life 'as the principle which
alone remains unshaken.' He does not insist here, any more than in the
Phaedo, on the literal truth of the myth, but only on the soundness of
the doctrine which is contained in it, that doing wrong is worse than
suffering, and that a man should be rather than seem; for the next best
thing to a man's being just is that he should be corrected and become
just; also that he should avoid all flattery, whether of himself or of
others; and that rhetoric should be employed for the maintenance of the
right only. The revelation of another life is a recapitulation of the
argument in a figure.

(2) Socrates makes the singular