Gorgias (c. 485-c. 380) visited Athens as part of an embassy from Leontini in Sicily, in 427 (Socrates will have been about 42 years old at the time, Isocrates about 9, and Plato about 2!). His power of speaking made an immediate and forceful impression. In general, and in broad terms, the sophists were itinerant professors of higher education, though what they professed to teach varied. We learn from Plato’s Meno that many, including Protagoras, claimed to teach ‘virtue’ (arete:, Meno 91b), but that Gorgias laughed at such claims, and himself claimed only to make people clever speakers (Meno 95c). The Meno records also his bold offer to speak on any topic he was asked about (70b), and how his pupils learned to follow suit.
Some of Gorgias’ own words will set the stage for discussion of the ethical problems posed by rhetoric. The following comes from his showpiece, the Encomium on Helen, a tour de force of glowing whitewash. Given any of the possible explanations of Helen’s elopement to Troy, he boldly claims that it was not her fault. She was not responsible if fate was the cause, nor if she was taken by brute force, nor if she fell uncontrollably in love with Paris, and the excerpt I now quote aims to persuade the hearer that she was equally not responsible if someone had used the powers of persuasion to talk her into it. To get something of the flavour of Gorgias’ extraordinary prose style I quote the translation by L. van Hook, who tried to reproduce some of its effect in English. Apparently, to his contemporaries, Gorgias’ prose style added to his rhetorical effectiveness, thus providing extra support to the claims that he is making for the irresistible power of persuasive eloquence:4
If [her travel to Troy] was through persuasion’s reception and the soul’s deception, it is not difficult to defend the situation and forfend the accusation, thus. Persuasion is a powerful potentate... it can put an end to fear and make vexation vanish; it can inspire exultation and increase compassion.... AH poetry I ordain and proclaim to be composition in metre, the listeners of which are affected by passionate trepidation and compassionate perturbation and likewise tearful lamentation, since through discourse the soul suffers, as if its own, the felicity and infelicity of property and person of others.
Gorgias goes on to call the power of rhetoric ‘witchery and sorcery’. How many men have persuaded how many others about how many things, and still persuade them, he exclaims, by forging false speech! Speech gains this power to deceive through the near-universal lack of firm knowledge in human affairs, leaving only opinion, with its unsteadiness and unreliability, to look to for advice. And he quotes three fields where knowledge is particularly lacking: meteorology, legal cases, and philosophical debate. All of these, he claims, illustrate particularly well how easily persuasion is able to form and sway opinion without reference to truth, and he concludes this section by likening the power of speech on the soul, both for good and for ill, to that of drugs on the body. So Helen was not responsible if she went to Troy as the result of persuasion.
Furthermore, Gorgias himself implicitly claims similar power over the audiences who hear his own speeches (including this one); that is the corollary of what he says. The implication is shocking, since his picture of persuasion leaves no place for a distinction between valid and invalid means towards it. To quote one more sentence in full: ‘A single speech charms and convinces a vast crowd when skilfully composed, rather than when truthfully spoken’ (Helen 13). One should add that it is difficult to be sure how seriously he himself takes the view he puts forward - he ends the Encomium by referring to the piece as ‘praise for Helen and a pastime for me’ (21) which does not suggest complete seriousness - but this would not greatly reassure anyone troubled by the power of rhetoric untrammelled by constraints of truth.5
World History
