Plato’s Gorgias

Week 1: Overview of Plato and the Gorgias

Greece in the fifth century B. C.

The fifth century B.C. — running from 500 to 401 B.C. — was arguably the period of greatest political, social, and artistic development for ancient Greece, and certainly the period in which Athens was most prominent. Led by Athens, a coalition of Greek city-states defeated several attacks from Persia, which was at the time the greatest power around the Mediterranean, between the battle of Marathon (490 B.C.) and the land and sea victories at Thermopylae and Salamis (480 B.C.). Freedom from the Persian threat allowed a fragile balance of power to develop covering most of the Greek mainland, the islands of the Aegean, and some of the coastal cities of Asia Minor. Athens became the leading power among them for a period, with the power of the so-called Delian League, which included at its peak more than three hundred separate Greek city-states, but not Sparta or many of the other cities to the south and west. The Delian League continued to prosecute occasional war against the Persians until the middle of the century, when it was concluded officially in 449 B.C. in the Peace of Callias.

The fifth century saw the development of much that we now consider characteristic of ancient Greece, though a good deal of it was in reality confined to Athens itself. The democracy that had taken root at around the turn of the century now came into full flower there, though many other cities had very different forms of government. The growth of what we often call Greek tragedy — in fact Athenian tragedy — took place at the same time. While it had its origins in the late sixth century, it came into prominence with the three great playwrights Aeschylus (ca. 525 – 455 B.C.), Sophocles (ca. 497 – 405 B.C.), and Euripides (ca. 480 – 406 B.C.). Comedy — what we now call Old Comedy — became popular as well. It tended to be edgy and highly political, and the only surviving examples we have are a number of plays of Aristophanes (ca. 446 – 386 B.C.). His satires on Socrates are, Socrates claims, a source of prejudice against him.

Athens: democracy and other problems

While its image has been highly idealized in 2400 years of hindsight, the Athenian democracy was hardly a paragon of what would be considered modern democratic virtues. It had a tumultuous birth, life, and death. There were few restrictions on what it could do, and in the absence of anything like a governing constitution, the will of the majority could be turned to almost any end without formal restriction. It produced wild swings in policy and programs, and an arbitrary structure of justice. A number of people at the time and since have viewed it with considerable skepticism — among the contemporaries Thucydides, Aristophanes, and Plato and Aristotle themselves.

The Peloponnesian War and its aftermath

In 431 B.C., tensions between the Delian League and the Peloponnesian League (led by Sparta) broke out into open war. It was waged intermittently over the ensuing thirty years. Despite early advantages and something like a clear victory, Athens continued to wage war until it lost in 404 B.C. It left the Athenian democracy in disarray, and the state was taken over for a period by a group of oligarchic rulers (the Thirty Tyrants), though the democracy was restored in 403 B.C. While Athens would eventually reacquire some measure of prominence in the Corinthian War (395-387 B.C.), it never again became the dominant power in mainland Greece. By the end of the fourth century B.C. Athens, and most of the rest of mainland Greece had fallen to the power of the Macedonians to the north.

Socrates in the political scene

It was in this defeated and socially chaotic culture that Socrates was brought to trial and convicted. The people of Athens were somewhat dazed by their defeat and were looking to find someone to blame. Socrates was one option. In his Apology, he recounts his part in the wars and his more or less cavalier disobedience to the Thirty Tyrants afterward. For the most part, however, Socrates did not involve himself in political matters, and this is one of the points of contention that arise in the course of his prosecution and defense.

The charges against Socrates

Socrates was brought to trial in 399 B.C., on charges of corrupting the youth, making the weaker argument appear the stronger, and a range of religious infractions that included (at the same time) believing in no gods at all, and believing in gods different from those officially sanctioned by the state. It’s worth noting that these charges were not framed up with respect to any laws that had been written or promulgated before: the charges were for the most part made up for the occasion. As long as the jury was willing to try him for so doing, they could do so and find him innocent or guilty, and, if they found him guilty, could impose whatever sentence upon him they deemed relevant.

The charge of corrupting the youth was a complicated one, and it is in an odd way an image of the kind of culture war rhetoric we saw here in the 1960s and intermittently since. Among those who had once been in Socrates’ circle of young admirers was one Alcibiades, who had gone on to commit treason against Athens in the Peloponnesian conflict and finally defected to Persia. Other citizens similarly seem to have found Socrates to be an unpleasant irritant, and, having no more subtle way of ridding themselves of his influence, brought him to trial on these made-for-the-occasion charges.

From our point of view, and in the context of our juridical culture, that would have been illegal, but it’s worth noting that there were no constraints in particular on what one could or could not be tried for. The trial was indeed irregular, but it was not illegal on those terms. It was arguably illegal, however, inasmuch as it in bringing these charges, Anytus violated the terms of an amnesty that had been granted in 403 or 402 B.C. for any religious actions undertaken during or prior to the rule of the Thirty Tyrants.

The structure of the Gorgias

The occasion for the dialogue is the aftermath of a public demonstration by Gorgias of his rhetorical prowess, in an attempt to get people to sign up with him as students. Unlike most of the dialogues we have discussed in this context previously, Gorgias offers three distinct interlocutors who are present for the whole time. Each of them takes up an encounter with Socrates in turn, and the dialogue is loosely divisible into the three sections — the first with the sophist Gorgias himself, the second with Polus, and the third with Callicles. Each of these speakers has a different line of defense for rhetoric, and (perhaps more subtly) each approaches the problem of defending it differently. It is worth the time to examine not only the arguments but the approach to argumentation that each of the three represents. Gorgias himself defends rhetoric with some fairly jingoistic vocabulary suitable to the advertising of late-night television infomercials — presenting rhetoric as the greatest thing ever, conferring untold power over others, but without any real evidence for his argument or any serious consideration of why it might (or might not) be right to exercise such power. Polus takes a somewhat different turn, and is perhaps tougher to defeat than Gorgias; in many ways his defense of rhetoric is the most robust. Callicles as the last is not perhaps more difficult to defeat in philosophical terms, but he takes a dismissive attitude toward Socrates’s arguments, representing them as juvenile games, unworthy of the attention of mature and civically engaged adults. Each of these approaches involves different suppositions about what the nature of philosophical discourse is. Because all this discussion can itself be seen as instances of different kinds of persuasion, there is a reflexive quality to it all that makes untangling the threads a problem that is far from simple.

The persons of the dialogue

All the characters represented here are historically attested, but surely the most interesting of them was Gorgias himself. Unlike the interlocutors in many of the other dialogues, Gorgias has not only left a reputation behind him but also a small body of written work, the most prominent of which is the Encomium to Helen — a kind of advertising show-piece for his course of study. This is a reasoned defense of Helen, who had long been regarded as a woman of (at best) questionable morals who was responsible for starting the Trojan War by leaving her husband Menelaus for the Trojan prince Paris. Gorgias defends her and indeed eventually praises her on the grounds that she could not have done other than as she did, because she was subject to the irresistable force of persuasion — (Gk. peithō, πειθώ). It is unsurprising that this defense did not itself persuade everyone, but it was consistent with Gorgias’ marketing of his instruction, and it offered the seduction of an esteemed woman, the daughter of a god, as an example of just how powerful persuasion could be. The whole text of the Encomium is to be found here: it's not terribly long, but it will provide some real insight into Gorgias’s highly artificial style and presentation.