PLATO: The Dialogues of Plato: Gorgias

The Dialogues of Plato: Gorgias

Quotes for Discussion

Polus:… there are many arts among mankind which are experimental, and have their origin in experience, for experience makes the days of men to proceed according to art, and inexperience, according to change, and different persons in different ways are proficient in different arts, and the best person in the best arts. And our friend Gorgias is one of the best, and the art in which he is a proficient is the noblest.

The Dialogues of Plato, Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 253

Socrates: ... you know any other effect of rhetoric over and above that of producing persuasion?

The Dialogues of Plato, Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 255

Socrates: … Does he who teaches anything persuade men of that which he teaches or not?
The Dialogues of Plato, Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 255

Socrates: For at every election he ought to be chosen who is most skilled; and , again, when wall shave to be built or harbours or docks to be constructed, not the rhetorician, but the master workman will advise; or when generals have to be chose and an order of battle arranged, or a proposition taken, then the military will advise and not the rhetoricians; what do you say, Gorgias. Since you profess to be a rhetorician and a maker of rhetoricians, I cannot do better than learn the nature of your art from you. And here let me assure you that I have your interest in view as well as my own.
The Dialogues of Plato, Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 256

Gorgias: You must have heard, I think, that the docks and the walls of the Athenians and the plan of the harbour were devised in accordance with the counsels, partly of Themistocles, and partly of Pericles, and not at the suggestion of the builders.

Socrates: Such is the tradition, Gorgias, about Themistocles; and I myself heard the speech of Pericles when he advised us about the middle wall.

Gorgias: And I say that if a rhetorician and a physician were to go to any city, and had there to argue in the Ecclesia or any other assembly as to which of them should be elected state physician, the physician would have no chance; but he who could speak would be chosen if he wished; and in a contest which a man of any other profession the rhetorician more than any one would have the power of getting himself chosen, for he can speak more persuasively to the multitude than any of them and on any subject. Such is the nature and power of the art of rhetoric! And yet, Socrates, rhetoric should be used like any other competitive art, not against everybody – the rhetorician ought not to abuse his strength any more than a pugilist or pancratiast or other master of fence; because he has powers which are more than a match either for friend or enemy, he ought not therefore to strike or stab, or slay his friends.

The Dialogues of Plato, Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 257

Socrates: … the rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know?

Gorgias: Yes, Socrates, and is not this a great comfort? – not to have learned the other arts but the art of rhetoric only, and yet to be in no way inferior to the professors of them?

The Dialogues of Plato, Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 258

Socrates: In my opinion then, Gorgias, the whole of which rhetoric is a part is not an art at all, but the habit of a bold and ready wit, which knows how to manage mankind; this habit I sum up under the word “flattery”; and it appears to me to have many other parts, …
The Dialogues of Plato, Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 260

Socrates:Rhetoric, according to my view is the ghost or counterfeit of a part of politics.
The Dialogues of Plato, Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 260

Socrates:The soul and body being two, have two arts corresponding to them; there is the art of politics attending on the soul; and another art attending on the body of which I know no single name, but which many be describe as having two divisions, one of them gymnastic, and the other medicine. And in politics there is a legislative part, which answers to gymnastic, as justice does to medicine; and the two parts run into one another, justice having to do with the same subject as legislation, and medicine with the same subject as gymnastic, but with a difference.
The Dialogues of Plato,  Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 261

Socrates: cookery simulates the disguise of medicine, and pretends to know what food is the best for the body; and if the physician and the cook had to enter into a competition in which the children were the judges, or men who had no more sense than children, as to which of them best understands the goodness or badness of food, the physician would be starved to death. A flattery I deem this to be an of an ignoble sort, Polus, for to you I am now addressing myself, because it aims at pleasure without any thought of the best. An art I do not call it, but only an experience, because it is unable to explain or to give a reason of the nature of its own applications.
The Dialogues of Plato,  Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 261

Socrates: …if at your age, Polus, you cannot remember, what will you do by-and-by, when you get older?
The Dialogues of Plato,  Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 262

Socrates: Yes, indeed, Polus, that is my doctrine; the men and women who are gentle and good are also happy, as I maintain, and the unjust and evil are miserable.
The Dialogues of Plato,  Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 264

Socrates: The I say that neither of them will be happier than the other – neither he who unjustly acquires a tyranny, nor he who suffers in the attempt, for of two miserables one cannot be the happier, but that he who escapes and becomes a tyrant is the more miserable of the tow. Do you laugh, Polus? Well, this is a new kind of refutation – when anyone sys anything instead of refuting him to laugh at him.
The Dialogues of Plato,  Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 266

Socrates: Then the art of money-making frees a man from poverty; medicine from disease; and justice from intemperance and injustice?

… Which, then, is the best of these three? …

Polus: Justice, Socrates, far excels the two others.
The Dialogues of Plato,  Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 269

Socrates: And would he be the happier man in his bodily condition, who is healed, or who never was out of health?

Polus: Clearly he who was never out of health.

Socrates: Yes; for happiness surely does not consist in being delivered from evils, but in never having had them.
The Dialogues of Plato,  Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7,  pg 269

Callicles:And people of this sort, when they betake themselves to politics or business, are as ridiculous as I imagine the politicians to be, when they make their appearance in the arena of philosophy. For as Euripides says,

Every man shines in that and pursues that, and devotes the greatest portion of the day to that in which he most excels.

But anything in which he is inferior, he avoids and depreciates, and praises the opposite from partiality to himself and because he thinks that he will thus praise himself.
The Dialogues of Plato, Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 272

Callicles: This man will never cease talking nonsense. At your age, Socrates, are you not ashamed to be catching at words and chuckling over some verbal slip? Do you not see – have I not told you already, that by superior I mean better; do you imagine me to say, that if a rabble of slaves and nondescripts, who are of no use except perhaps for their physical strength, get together, their ipsissima verba are laws?
The Dialogues of Plato,  Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 274

Socrates: Well, but do you admit that the wiser is the better? Answer “Yes” or “No.”
The Dialogues of Plato,  Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 275

Socrates: Well, but people say that “a tale should have a head and not break off in the middle,” and I should not like to have the argument going about without a head; please then to go on a little longer, and put the head on.

Callicles: How tyrannical you are, Socrates! I wish that you and your argument would rest, or that you would get someone else to argue with you.

Socrates: But who else is willing? I want to finish the argument.

Callicles: Cannot you finish without my help, either talking straight on, or questioning and answering yourself?
The Dialogues of Plato,  Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 283

Socrates: This appears to be the aim which a man out to have, and towards which he out to direct all the energies both of himself and of the state, acting so that he may have temperance and justice present with him and be happy, not suffering his lusts to be unrestrained and in the never-ending desire to satisfy them leading a robber’s life. Such a one is the friend neither of God nor man, for he is incapable of communion, and he who is incapable of communion is also incapable of friendship.
Dialogues of Plato,  Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 284

Socrates: And if you despise the swimmers, I will tell you of another and greater art, the art of the pilot, who not only saves the souls of men, but also their bodies and properties from the extremity of danger, just like rhetoric. Yet his art is modest and unpresuming; it has no airs or pretences of doing anything extraordinary, and in return for the same salvation which is given by the pleader, demands only two obols, if he brings us from Aegina to Athens, or from the longer voyage from Pontus or Egypt, and the utmost two drachmae, when he has saved, as I was just now saying, the passenger and his wife and children and goods, and safely disembarked them at the Piraeus – this the payment which he asked in return for so great a boon; and he who is the master of the art, and has done all this , gets out and walked about on the sea-shore by his ships in an unassuming way. For he is able to reflect and is aware that he cannot tell which of his fellow-passengers he has benefited, and which of them he has injured in not allowing them to be drowned. He knows that they are just the same when he as disembarked them as when they embarked, and not a whit better either in their bodies or in their souls; and he considers that if a man who is afflicted by great and incurable bodily diseases is only to be pitied for having escaped, and is in no way benefited by him in having been saved from curable diseases, not of the body, but of the soul, which is the more valuable part of him; neither is life worth having nor of any profit to the bad man, whether he be delivered from the sea, or the law-courts, or any other devourer – and so he reflects that such a one had better not live, for he cannot live well.

And this is the reason why the pilot, although he is our savior, is not usually conceited, any more than the engineer, who is not at all behind either the general, or the pilot, or any one else, in his saving power, for he sometimes saves the whole cities. Is there any comparison between him and the pleader? And if he were to talk, Callicles, in your grandiose style, he would bury your under a mountain of words, declaring and insisting that we ought all of us to be engine-makers, and that no other profession is worth thinking about; he would have plenty to say. Nevertheless you despise him and his art, and sneeringly call him an engine-maker, and the others whom I was just not mentioning? I know that you will say, “I am better, and better born.” But if the better is not what I saw, and virtue consists only in a man saving himself and his, whatever may be his character, then your censure of the engine-maker, and of the physician, and of the other arts of salvation, is ridiculous. O my friend! I wasn’t you to see that the noble and the good may possibly be something different from saying and being saved – May not he who is truly a man cease to care about living a certain time? He knows, as women say, that no man can escape fate, and therefore he is not fond of life.; he leaves all that with God, and considers in what way he can best sped his appointed term – whether by assimilating himself to the constitution under which he lives, as you at this moment have to consider how you may become as like as possible to the Athenian people, if you mean to be in their good graces, and to have power in the state; whereas I want you to think and see whether this is the for the interest of either of us – I would not have us risk that which is dearest on the acquisition of this power, like the Thessalian enchantresses, who as they say, bring down the moon from heaven at the risk of their own perdition.
Dialogues of Plato,  Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 286

Socrates: Can anything be more irrational, my friends, than this? You, Callicles, compel me to be a mob-orator, because you will not answer.

Callicles: An you are the man who cannot speak unless there is someone to answer?

Socrates: I suppose that I can; just now, at any rate, the speeches which I am making are long enough because you refuse to answer me. But I adjure you by the god of friendship, my good sir, do tell me whether there does not appear to you to be a great inconsistency in saying that you have made a man good, and then blaming him for being bad?

Callicles: Yes, it appears so to me.

Socrates: Do you never hear our professors of education speaking in this inconsistent manner?
Dialogues of Plato,  Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 290

Socrates: Can anything be more irrational, my friends, than this? You, Callicles, compel me to be a mob-orator, because you will not answer.

Callicles: An you are the man who cannot speak unless there is someone to answer?
Socrates: I suppose that I can; just now, at any rate, the speeches which I am making are long enough because you refuse to answer me. But I adjure you by the god of friendship, my good sir, do tell me whether there does not appear to you to be a great inconsistency in saying that you have made a man good, and then blaming him for being bad?

Callicles: Yes, it appears so to me.

Socrates: Do you never hear our professors of education speaking in this inconsistent manner?
Dialogues of Plato,  Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 290

Socrates: Then Pluto and the authorities from the Islands of the Blessed came to Zeus, and said that the souls found their way to the wrong places. Zeus said: “I shall put a stop to this; the judgments are not well given, because the persons who are judged have their clothes on; for they are alive; and there are many who, having evil souls, are appareled in fair bodies, or encased in wealth or rank, and when the day of judgment arrives, numerous witnesses come forward and testify on their behalf that they have lived righteously. The judges are awed by them, and they themselves too have their clothes on when judging; their eyes and ears and their whole bodies are interposed as a veil before their own souls. All of this is a hindrance to them; there are the clothes of the judges and the clothes of the judged – What is to be done? I will tell you; - In the first place, I will deprive men of the foreknowledge of death, which they possess at present; this power which they have Prometheus has already received my orders to take from them; in the second place; they shall be entirely stripped before they are judged, for they shall be judged when they are dead; and the judge too shall be naked, that is to say, dead- he with his naked soul shall pierce into the other naked souls; and they shall die suddenly and be deprived of all their kindred, and leave their brave attire strewn upon the earth – conducted in this manner the judgment will be just.
Dialogues of Plato,  Gorgias, Great Books Volume 7, pg 292

Vocabulary – Dialogues of Plato: Gorgias
Great Books Volume 7

Ipsissima verba, pg 274
Latin for "the very words," is a legal term referring to material, usually established authority, that a writer or speaker is quoting

The very words, as of a quote.

Pilot, pg 286
Archaic helmsman; a person licensed to direct ships into or out of a harbor or through difficult waters. a person qualified to operate the controls of ...