Gorgias hailed from Leontini in Sicily. He studied rhetoric under Corax and Tisias in nearby Syracuse, and was versed in the teachings of Empedocles. In 427, he led an embassy to Athens to forge a defensive alliance against an overbearing Syracuse.

Gorgias was something of a showman. He specialized in making unconventional, counterintuitive, or absurd arguments appear the stronger, and spoke in a florid, rhyming style that hypnotized his audiences. When in the theatre at Athens, he would say, ‘Come, propose me a theme!’ He took pride in his ability to take any position, on any subject, and founded the art of extempore oratory. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle characterizes his style of oratory as ‘ironic’, so that his own opinions, if he had any, are hard to decipher. Rather than any positive philosophy, he offered an agnostic art of persuasion which he held to be of the utmost value.

In Plato’s Philebus, the sophist Protarchus tells Socrates:

I have often heard Gorgias maintain that the art of persuasion far surpassed every other; this, as he says, is by far the best of them all, for to it all things submit, not by compulsion, but of their own free will.

Works

Of Gorgias’ works, two short display speeches survive, the Encomium of Helen and the Defence of Palamedes, along with a fragment of a funeral oration and two paraphrases of a lost treatise, On Non-Being. 

In the Encomium of Helen, which aims at praising Helen and exculpating her for leaving Sparta with Paris and sparking the Trojan War, he compares the effect of speech on the soul to the effect of drugs on the body:

Just as different drugs draw forth different humours from the body—some putting a stop to disease, others to life—so too with words: some cause pain, others joy, some strike fear, some stir the audience to boldness, some benumb and bewitch the soul with evil persuasion.

In sum, he argues that Helen could have been persuaded to leave in one of four ways: by the gods; by physical force; by the power of love; by the power of speech. But whichever way it was, she herself would have been blameless.

In On Not-Being, he parodies and refutes Parmenides by arguing that:

1. Nothing exists.
2. Even if something did exist, nothing could be known about it.
3. Even if something could be known about it, this knowledge could not be communicated to others.
4. Even if it could be communicated to others, it could not be understood.

But as ever with Gorgias, it is far from clear whether these stood among his own opinions.

Later Life

Gorgias spent much of his long life in Thessaly where he enjoyed the patronage of Aristippus of Larissa and Jason of Pheræ. He taught Aristippus’ one-time beloved, the Meno who lent his name to Plato’s Meno, as well as the orator Isocrates, who came to rank among the ten Attic Orators.

In his autobiographical Antidosis, Isocrates tells us that Gorgias:

…spent his time in Thessaly when the Thessalians were the most prosperous people in Hellas; he lived a long life and devoted himself to the making of money; he had no fixed domicile in any city and therefore paid out nothing for public weal nor was he subject to any tax; moreover, he did not marry and beget children, but was free from this, the most unremitting and expensive of burdens…

Gorgias died at the grand old age of 108.

Neel Burton is author of The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.