In the summer of 427 BC, when Socrates was 42 years old, a group of emissaries came from Leontini in Sicily to ask the Athenian state for help.[1] Athens had made an alliance with Leontini in 433, or rather renewed an alliance made in the 450s. Now Leontini was at war with their larger and powerful neighbor, Syracuse. Since the Leontines belonged to the Ionian tribe, like the Athenians, while the Syracusans belonged to the Dorian, like the Spartans, the emissaries appealed to the Athenian sense of racial solidarity. In fact, the Syracusans were joined by most of the Dorian cities in a coalition against Leontini and the Ionian cities. The issues the embassy brought to Athens were important. Should the Athenians extend themselves into a new theater of war in Sicily? Should they honor their obligations to a distant ally?
What made the embassy of more than political interest was the presence in it of Leontini’s most illustrious citizen, Gorgias.[2] Gorgias was a sophist of great reputation who was distinguished for his ornate speaking style. The Athenians who listened to his speeches on behalf of his city were captivated, not so much by the arguments he made as by the sparkle of his rhetoric. Athenians loved a good speech, and they couldn’t get enough of this foreign orator.
The Athenian Assembly debated the Leontine proposal. In the end they approved it for pragmatic reasons; they saw that if they could make headway in Sicily, they could block grain shipments from the rich breadbasket to the west from arriving in the Peloponnesus to feed Spartan and Corinthian armies, while gaining more power for themselves.[3] The generals Laches (whom we shall meet again) and Charoeades were sent with twenty galleys to support the Ionian cities of Sicily. They made a base at Rhegium, an ally of Leontini, located at a strategic point on the toe of Italy.[4]
Meanwhile Gorgias, his official work done or progressing nicely, offered private displays of his oratorical skills. Athenians flocked to hear him. When he offered lessons to paying students, he was thronged by eager young men.[5] As they listened to him, they heard a dazzling display of linguistic virtuosity. Gorgias lined up his words in parallel phrases or striking antitheses. He sometimes rhymed the endings of his clauses or sentences, and he used repetitions to create musical patterns. Overall, he wove a rich tapestry of sound and sense that held his audience spellbound. Protagoras and other sophists in mainland Greece had presented clever arguments in polished diction, but no one had ever made speeches sing like Gorgias.
We have a complete speech of his which displays his verbal pyrotechnics. In the Encomium of Helen, Gorgias defends the mythological figure Helen of Troy against the charge of adultery in leaving her husband Menelaus for Paris of Troy, hence providing the occasion for the Trojan War. Gorgias says:
“Being born from [illustrious] progenitors, she [Helen] possessed a godlike beauty, which she received without deceiving. She inspired the greatest desires of love in the greatest number of men, attracting to one body many bodies of men greatly aspiring to great things, of whom some had great stores of wealth, some the glory of ancient lineage, some the distinction of individual strength, others the power of acquired wisdom.” But she is accused of abandoning her husband and thus bringing about the Trojan War. Gorgias will defend her from the charges.
“She did what she did either (I) by the caprices of Chance, the counsels of the gods, and the decrees of Fate, or (II) ravished by force, or (III) persuaded by words, or (IV) <captivated by love>.”[6]
Here Gorgias outlines the argument he will give, just as a modern speaker or persuasive essayist might do.
“(I) Now if she was impelled by the first cause, the accuser deserves to be accused. For it is impossible to thwart divine predestination by human precautions. It is natural for the stronger not to be thwarted by the weaker, but for the weaker to be ruled and led by the stronger, and the stronger leads, the weaker follows. God is stronger than man, in power, in wisdom, and in everything else. If then the cause is attributed to Chance and God, Helen must be absolved of dishonor.
“(II) But if she was violently ravished and lawlessly violated and unjustly assaulted, it is clear that her ravisher wronged her by assaulting, while the ravished suffered wrong by being assaulted. Thus the barbarian who undertook an undertaking that was barbarous in word and law and deed deserves to suffer the charge of guilt in word, condemnation in law, and penalty in deed. And she who was violated, deprived of her country, bereft of friends and family, how is she not worthy of pity rather than abuse? He committed outrage, she suffered it; it is right then to pity her and to abhor him.
“(III) But if words persuaded her and deceived her soul, it is not difficult to defend her in this case either, and to absolve her from guilt. Speech is a great potentate, who by means of the tiniest and most invisible body achieves the most godlike results. For it is able to dispel fear, to assuage grief, to inculcate joy, and to evoke pity. … All poetry I judge and define to be speech in verse; when the audience hears it, terrifying horror, tearful pity, and sorrowful longing enter them, and the soul experiences its own emotion at the actions and feeling of others in their fortunes and misfortunes, produced through words.”
Here Gorgias reveals his belief in the power of words to overwhelm the soul of the listener. The sophist is a wordsmith who can dazzle, bewitch, and seduce his audience. If Helen’s lover was a gifted speaker, he could enslave her with his speech.
“Two arts of witchcraft and magic can be identified: those producing errors of soul and those producing deceptions of judgment. How many have persuaded and do persuade of how many things by fashioning false speech! … What reason prevents us from <thinking> that Helen came led by the power of speech as unwillingly as if she was ravished by force? It is possible <to see how> the power of persuasion <rules>, which does not indeed have the form of necessity, but does have its power. For speech which convinces the soul which it convinces, compels it both to accept its message and to agree to its deeds. … That persuasion proceeding via speech impresses the soul as it will, can be seen by studying: first, the accounts of the cosmologists who produce one opinion after another, taking away this one, imposing that, making incredible and inscrutable things appear to the eyes of the mind; second, the compelling contests of words in which one speech captures the fancy of the crowd and having been composed artfully persuades everyone, though it is spoken falsely; third, the verbal competitions of philosophers, in which quick thinking is displayed, showing how changeable is the belief in an opinion.”
Here Gorgias uses the theories and argument of philosophers to prove how words can make people believe things they have never thought of. He continues:
“The power of speech has the same relationship to the order of soul as does the order[7] of drugs to the nature of bodies. For just as different drugs draw different humors from body … so some speeches induce grief, some joy, some fear, some instill courage in the audience, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of pernicious persuasion. That, if she was persuaded by words, she did not commit a wrong, but suffered a misfortune, has been said.”
So the words are like a drug that can change the listener’s mood, inflame passions, and instill virtue, or control the listener’s will.
“(IV) I shall now consider the fourth reason for her action in my fourth argument. If love was what caused all this, it will not be difficult to defend against this accusation of an alleged misconduct. For the things we see have a nature that does not depend on our will, but on how each happens to be; and through sight the soul is impressed in its disposition. … The sight inscribes in the mind images of objects seen. … If, then, Helen’s eye, taking pleasure in the body of Alexander, imparted to her soul an eagerness and striving for love, what is surprising about that? If Love is a god with the godlike power of gods, how can a lesser being refuse and resist him? But if love is a human sickness and error of soul, it should not be blamed as a wrong but recognized as a misfortune. For she came, when she came, impelled by the entanglements of chance, not the premeditations of planning; by the compulsions of love, not the preparations of art.
“How, then, can we think it right to blame Helen, who, having done what she did either (IV) because she was in love, or (III) persuaded by words, or (II) ravished by force, or (I) compelled by divine compulsion, is completely innocent of the accusation?”
Gorgias has completed his proof, showing how, whatever the cause, Helen was helpless in the face of powers beyond her control. He concludes:
“I have by this speech rescued a woman from dishonor while adhering to the conditions I set at the beginning of the speech. I have attempted to dispel unjust blame and unthinking prejudice. I have undertaken to write this speech as an encomium of Helen—and an amusement for myself.”[8]
In the face of this kind of verbal virtuosity the Athenians were stunned. Gorgias made his speech into a prose poem full of sonorities and dissonances, rhymes and assonances, parallelisms and antitheses, wordplays and echoes. He lifted rhetoric from the pragmatic and logical to the level of an art-form.
Gorgias found a goldmine in his ability to shape language; he made a great deal of money in Athens, as in other places he visited. From this time forth, the cadences of Gorgias began to resound in the compositions of Athenian writers and speakers. Alcibiades, Critias, Agathon, and Thucydides are mentioned by the later rhetorician and historian Philostratus as imitators of Gorgias’s techniques.[9] Those who spoke like the sophist were said to “gorgize.” Philostratus attributes to Gorgias the rhetorical tropes, tricks, and the elevated diction of subsequent oratory.[10] In time the euphuistic style he introduced came to be viewed as cloying, affected and artificial, but in its first bloom it awed hearers. The techniques he introduced have become part of the toolkit of every writer and speaker since, in a suitably restrained form.
[1].Thucydides 3.86.2-3.
[2].Diodorus Siculus 12.53.1-2.
[3].Thucydides 2.86.3-4; Diodorus Siculus 12.54.1.
[4].Thucydides 3.86.1, 5; Diodorus Siculus 12.54.4.
[5].Plato Hippias Major 282b-c; Diodorus Siculus 12.53.1-3 = DK 82A4.
[6].Angle brackets (</>) used in classical texts indicate words supplied by editors to fill in words missing from ancient manuscripts.
[7].There is an untranslatable word-play here: taxis also means “prescription” and applies to the heating power of a drug (LSJ, s.v., II b, VI).
[8].Gorgias B11 = TEGP 49[F10], with corrections.
[9].Philostratus Lives of the Sophists 1.9.3 = A1; he mentions also Pericles, but Pericles died before Gorgias arrived, and it is not clear that Gorgias’ speeches where published early enough for Pericles to have read them.
[10].Philostratus Lives 1.9.2; Diodorus Siculus 12.53.4.