The luxurious texture of Gorgias’ speech was not its only attraction. The Helen is also a tour-de-force of argumentation. At the beginnings of theorizing about persuasive speech, he presents a thesis, that Helen is innocent. He considers four causes for her behavior (I-IV) and argues that each cause provides a grounds for exculpation. Helen is not the perpetrator of a great crime. She is the victim, a poor, defenseless girl, caught up in events she was powerless to control. Gorgias moves from the obvious cases of compulsion, (I) divine predestination and (II) violence, to more subtle forms, (III) verbal persuasion and (IV) passion. He implies that humans are no more in command of their own decisions when swayed by their own impressions or feelings than when swayed by fate or force majeure.
Gorgias shrewdly makes verbal persuasion a power to be reckoned with. “Speech is a great potentate, who by means of the tiniest and most invisible body achieves the most godlike results,” he says. Language can overpower the individual who hears it. Poetry can produce powerful emotional effects in an audience, while religious songs move people to action. He compares the effect of artful speech to witchcraft in its power to cast a spell upon the hearer. Speech is like a drug in its power to change the internal states of the hearer. So how is Helen less a victim if she is carried away by false words than if she is carried away by physical force? The subtext of Gorgias’ argument here is that a master of the art of persuasion can manipulate people as surely as a poet, a magician, a doctor, even a god. The hearers of a great orator are putty in the hands of the trained speaker.
In his final section Gorgias argues that mortals are helpless to resist powerful sense impressions and the emotions they stir up. We are all victims of circumstance. Furthermore, “If Love is a god with the godlike power of gods, how can a lesser being refuse and resist him?” Thus it turns out that the power of the gods, especially Eros, the god of love, is lurking in human passions, so that his fourth cause turns out to be a version of the first.
Gorgias wraps up his defense speech with a brief summation, and a playful note that the speech is just an amusement for the speaker. But of course it is much more. It is, among other things, a powerful advertisement for the sophist. If I can, he implies, take one of the greatest miscreants of mythology and portray her as a poor, helpless victim of circumstances beyond her control, think what I could do for a respectable person like you in a court case where you are the defendant! In a litigious state like Athens, the ability to defend oneself in a forensic speech provided a powerful motivation to learn the art of speaking.
In the background, moreover, we see hints of a psychological theory according to which human actions are not the products of rational deliberation—or at least solely of rational deliberation—but of sense impressions and psychological responses that stir up passions which can overwhelm human reason. The message is that people’s “memory of the past, awareness of the present, and foresight of the future”[10] are all defective, their opinions are based on little more than guesswork. A speaker with a specious argument and vivid illustrations can alter people’s mental states and change their perceptions. If the human mind is a compound of unfounded opinions and burning passions, it is ripe for manipulation. A skillful orator can push all the right buttons to bamboozle people into accepting any conclusion he wants.
[10]. This is from section 11 of the speech, not quoted above.