Gorgias (c.483–c.376 B.C.), Greek Sophist. A teacher of rhetoric from Leontini in Syracuse, Gorgias came to Athens in 427 B.C. as an ambassador from his city and caused a sensation with his artful oratory. He is known through references and short quotations in later writers, and through a few surviving texts – two speeches and a philosophical treatise. He taught a rhetorical style much imitated in antiquity, by delivering model speeches to paying audiences. Unlike other Sophists he did not give formal instruction in other topics, nor prepare a formal rhetorical manual.
He was known to have had views on language, on the nature of reality, and on virtue. Gorgias’s style was remarkable for its use of poetic devices such as rhyme, meter, and elegant words, as well as for its dependence on artificial parallelism and balanced antithesis. His surviving speeches, defenses of Helen and Palamedes, display a range of arguments that rely heavily on what the ancients called eikos (‘likelihood’ or ‘probability’). Gorgias maintained in his ‘Helen’ that a speech can compel its audience to action; elsewhere he remarked that in the theater it is wiser to be deceived than not. Gorgias’s short book On Nature (or On What Is Not) survives in two paraphrases, one by Sextus Empiricus and the other (now considered more reliable) in an Aristotelian work, On Melissus, Xenophanes, and Gorgias. Gorgias argued for three theses: that nothing exists; that even if it did, it could not be known; and that even if it could be known, it could not be communicated. Although this may be in part a parody, most scholars now take it to be a serious philosophical argument in its own right. In ethics, Plato reports that Gorgias thought there were different virtues for men and for women, a thesis Aristotle defends in the Politics. See also SOPHIST. P.Wo.