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If you love words, read on.

Gorgias mesmerising his audience.

The ancient Greek sophist Gorgias compared the power of words to the power of drugs. More than two thousand years later, his insight is as compelling as ever. Words can persuade and deceive, comfort and inspire, alter the course of a life—or even the march of history.

Gorgias (483—375 BCE) hailed from Leontini in Sicily. He studied the art of persuasion—or rhetoric—under Corax and Tisias in nearby Syracuse and was also acquainted with the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. In 427, he led an embassy to Athens to forge a defensive alliance against an overbearing Syracuse.

If Athens gave birth to philosophy, Sicily gave birth to rhetoric. Gorgias inherited the techniques of Corax and Tisias, the nominal founders of rhetoric, but transformed them into something that could dazzle audiences.

Indeed, Gorgias was something of a showman. He delighted in making unconventional, counterintuitive, or absurd arguments appear the stronger, and spoke in a florid, rhyming style that hypnotised all those who heard him. When in the theatre at Athens, he would say, “Come, propose me a theme!” He took great pride in his ability to defend any position, on any subject, and founded the art of extempore (‘off the cuff’) oratory.

In the Rhetoric, Aristotle characterises Gorgias’ style of oratory as ‘ironic’—and Gorgias’ opinions, if he had any at all, 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, Socrates, 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.”

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.

Words as Magic

In the Encomium of Helen, Gorgias sets himself the unlikely task of praising Helen and exculpating her for leaving Sparta with Paris and sparking the Trojan War. Gorgias 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 defending Helen, Gorgias 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.’

A doctor’s diagnosis, a judge’s verdict, a declaration of love, a political speech, a prayer, or a promise may consist of nothing more than words, yet each can change the course of a life—even the course of nations and the march of history.

Perhaps this is why so many ancient cultures regarded words as sacred. In the Vedas, speech is revered as a divine power, and even personified as the goddess Vac. A similar idea can be found in the Bible, at John 1:1: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ In Genesis, God does not create the world with his hands, but by speech: ‘And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.’

As a psychiatrist, I am often reminded of Gorgias’ insight. Faced with a suicidal patient, everything may depend upon finding the right words at the right moment. A single sentence, if it is the right one, can alter a person’s entire outlook. Equally, a single sentence can break—or make—a career or a relationship.

The linguist may insist that ‘casting spells’ and ‘spelling words’ have different etymologies; the psychologist suspects that they spring from the same ancient intuition. If they had told us at school that we were learning magic, we would have paid a lot more attention.

Nothing Exists

In On Non-Being, Gorgias pushes his fascination with language to its absolute limit. Responding to the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who held that reality is one and accessible to reason, he parodies his arguments by turning each of them on its head: (1) nothing exists; (2) even if something did exist, nothing could be known about it; (3) even if something could be known, this knowledge could not be communicated to others; and (4) even if it could be communicated, it could not be understood. But as ever with Gorgias, it is far from clear whether these stood among his genuine opinions.

Gorgias spent much of his long life in Thessaly where he enjoyed the patronage of Aristippus of Larissa and Jason of Pherae. 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…

Having no wife or children, Gorgias died at the grand old age of 108.

Plato’s attacks ensured that the Sophists would long be remembered as clever tricksters rather than serious thinkers. Yet Gorgias deserves a more generous hearing. More than two thousand years ago, he recognised something we are still apt to forget: words do not merely describe the world. They shape how we experience it.

Every day we persuade, comfort, deceive, negotiate, inspire, forgive, and fall in love with nothing more substantial than sounds carried through the air. That is the nearest thing to magic that human beings have ever possessed.

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If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, an engaging overview of the thinkers who shaped Western philosophy.

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The striking similarities between Greek and Indian thought. 

In antiquity, Pythagoras was better known as a philosopher than a mathematician. Although he may have introduced it to the West, the theorem that came to bear his name had been discovered centuries earlier by the Babylonians and Indians. His association with this theorem suggests some kind of Eastern connection.

Pythagoras

Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570-c.495 BCE) was a near contemporary of Anaximander and Anaximenes, as well as the Buddha. He might even have met Thales of Miletus—”the first scientist”—who, it is said, advised him to travel to Memphis to take instruction from Egyptian priests.

At the age of 40, Pythagoras left Samos for Croton in southern Italy, where he established a philosophically minded religious community. Unusually for the time, Pythagoras admitted men and women alike. Of the 235 famous Pythagoreans listed by Iamblichus, 17 are women.

The men and women who entered the community’s inner circle were governed by a strict set of ascetic and ethical rules, forsaking personal possessions, assuming a mainly vegetarian diet, and—since words are so often careless and misleading—observing the strictest silence.

In India, at around the same time, the Buddha’s followers were organizing into monasteries. The Buddha delivered many of his discourses in the monastery of Jetavana in Shravasti, which had been donated to him by the banker Anathapindada. Buddhist monks could eat meat if it was offered to them, but only after ensuring that the animal had not been slaughtered on their behalf. At her insistence, the Buddha’s aunt Mahapajapati became the first of many Buddhist nuns.

The first Buddhist monasteries served as a prototype for the world’s first residential university at Nalanda, just as Protagoras’ community served as a model for philosophical institutions such as Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, and, later, for the monastic life and associated early universities.

Music played an important role in Pythagoras’ community. Pythagoreans recited poetry, sang hymns to Apollo, and played on the lyre to cure illnesses of body and soul. One day, or so the story goes, Pythagoras passed by some blacksmiths at work, and found that their hammering produced especially pleasing sounds. He then noticed that their anvils were simple ratios of one another, one being half the size of the first, another twice the size, and so on. This insight led to his “harmony of the spheres,” according to which the movements of the heavenly bodies are in a mathematical relationship akin to that between musical notes, and, together, amount to a grand cosmic symphony.

Pythagoras (the name means “Oracle among the people”) never divorced religion from philosophy and science, which, even in his day, left him open to accusations of mysticism. No doubt under the influence of Orphism, a mystery religion rooted in pre-Hellenic beliefs and the Thracian cult of Zagreus, Pythagoras came to believe in metempsychosis, that is, in the transmigration of the soul at death into a new body of the same or a different species, until such a time as it became moral. He himself claimed to have lived four lives and to remember them all in detail: in his first life, he had had the good fortune of being Aethalides, son of Hermes, who had given him the faculty of remembering everything even through death.

Parmenides

After Pythagoras’ death in c. 495 BCE, the Pythagoreans deified him, and attributed him with a golden thigh and the gift of bilocation (being in two places at once).

In India, the first Upanishads, the Chandogya Upanishad and Great Forest Upanishad, had by then already been written. The central vision of the Upanishads is one of pantheism (all is God), with God hidden in nature “even as the silkworm is hidden in the web of silk he made.” God is Brahman and the part or aspect of Brahman that is in us is Atman. The aim then becomes to achieve the knowledge and unity of Atman and Brahman, which is wisdom, salvation, and liberation (moksha). When Socrates argued for self-knowledge over knowledge, he made the same turn as the Upanishads. 

The student of Western philosophy might be reminded of Parmenides (c. 515-c.440 BCE), who was still young when Pythagoras died. In his poem, On Nature, Parmenides contrasted the way of truth to the way of opinion. Through a chain of strict à priori deductive arguments from premises deemed incontrovertible, Parmenides argued that, despite appearances (the Way of Opinion), the universe must consist of a single undifferentiated and indivisible unity, which he called “the One”—comparable, of course, to Brahman.

Plato

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle says that Plato’s teachings owed much to those of the Pythagoreans; so much, in fact, that Bertrand Russell upheld not Plato but Pythagoras as the most influential of all Western philosophers. Pythagoras’ influence is perhaps most evident in Plato’s mystical approach to the soul and in his emphasis on mathematics, and, more generally, reason and abstract thought, as a secure basis for the practice of philosophy.

Just as Plato (c. 437-c. 348 BCE) leaned upon Heraclitus and his theory of flux (“No one ever steps twice into the same river”) for his conception of the sensible or phenomenal world, so he leaned upon Parmenides for his conception of the intelligible or noumenal world, which he rendered as the ideal, immutable realm of the forms.

Plato’s Phaedo, in which Socrates discusses the immortality of the soul with a pair of Pythagorean philosophers, is essentially an Upanishad in both form and content. Socrates argues that the forms cannot be apprehended by the senses, but only by pure thought, that is, by the mind or soul. Thus, the philosopher seeks in as far as possible to separate soul from body. As death is the complete separation of soul and body, the philosopher aims at death, and can be said to be almost dead.

Although the Phaedo is at the root of Western psychology, philosophy, and theology, it is also deeply Eastern in advocating supreme detachment and ego suppression or disintegration as the route to salvation. Also, death is an illusion … we will be reincarnated … according to our karma. These, however, are not the aspects that the West has retained.

Read more in Indian Mythology and Philosophy.