Athens, the Unjust Student of Rhetoric: A Dramatic Historical Interpretation of Plato's Gorgias

Abstract

At a time when Athenians were still trying to explain the loss of their empire, Plato's Gorgias—through its dramatic structure and themes, through its allusions to critical moments in the Peloponnesian War, and through its literary engagements with Thucydides, Isocrates, and Polycrates—challenged both the actuality and legitimacy of that power as well as the rhetoric with which democratic Athenians rationalized their former tyranny. By portraying imperial Athens as an unjust student of sophistic rhetoric, as an immoderate practitioner of opportunistic reasoning, Plato offers an instructive explanation for its defeat. Interpreted in its historical contexts, his Gorgias has new relevance.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the RSQ reviewers for their constructive criticisms and for their painstaking attention to detail. Both for his guidance and his patience, an equal debt is owed to RSQ's editor, Gregory Clark. To Richard Leo Enos, John Poulakos, and James P. Zappen, thanks are offered for their helpful responses to earlier drafts. This article owes its origins, however, to the support and encouragement provided by my colleagues in the Athens-at-War reading group at Penn State: Stephen Belcher, David Dzikowski, Rosa Eberly, Tony Lentz, Ned O'Gorman, and Jon Torn.

Notes

In many texts of the fifth and fourth centuries, Athens, in whole (the city) or in part (the demos), is personified. In Thucydides's History, in the funeral oration, Pericles refers to Athens as a beloved, and in Pericles's final speech he calls Athens's empire a tyranny. In Knights, Aristophanes brings the demos, the Athenian people, on stage as a grotesque glutton. Thus presenting Athens as a person was a fairly well-worn trope by the time Plato wrote the Gorgias, and in the Republic, Plato himself reverses the synecdoche, analyzing the city in order to understand the individual psyche. The many parallels between the Gorgias and the first book of the Republic, in which the might-makes-right argument is played out at the level of the city, also provide further evidence for the imperial underpinnings of Callicles's persona.

The special attention paid here to the dramatic elements of the dialogue reflects a core principle of the dramatic and non-dogmatic interpretation of Plato outlined by Gerald Press and practiced, whether formally or informally, by most of the studies cited herein. But to this understanding of the dialogue as drama are added detailed analyses of the historical contexts, both for the dramatic date and the date of composition, in order to better understand how Plato's first readers would have interpreted these dramatic elements of the dialogue, including the incidental references to other figures or events. Studies by Arlene Saxonhouse and Harvey Yunis have provided the foundations for this effort; both works are discussed in detail in the second part of this article. The principal text interpreted here, the Gorgias, has been consulted in a variety of editions: the Greek texts of W. R. M. Lamb (1925) and E. R. Dodds (1959) and the English translations of W. R. M. Lamb (1925), W. D. Woodhead (1953), R. E. Allen (1984), and James H. Nichols (1998). With the exception of Libanius, all other primary texts were consulted in their Loeb editions and all translations are from those editions unless otherwise specified.

This modern expression seems closest to the range of meanings encompassed by Callicles's general claim, revised several times in his discussion with Socrates, that justice is defined by the interest(s) of the “superior.”

The difficulties one encounters in dating the dialogue, which have led most scholars to abandon the attempt (Dodds 18; Guthrie, Plato 284), are effectively summarized by Dodds (17–18) in a list of the conflicting historical dates to which different passages in the dialogue point: 429 BCE or soon after—Pericles is mentioned as “recently” dead (503c2); not before 427—the date of Gorgias's only attested visit to Athens; about 422—when Demos, mentioned at 481d, is named in a play by Aristophanes; before 415—when Alcibiades, for whom Socrates foresees trouble (519a), becomes embroiled in Athenian politics and complicates the equation of the war; 413 or soon after—when Archelaus, first mentioned at 470d, comes to power; 411 at the earliest—thought to be the beginning of a range of possible dates for the production of Euripides's Antiope, first mentioned at 485e; and 405—the year after the trial of the Arginusae generals in which Socrates had to put a motion to the vote, the presumed referent of 473e.

Taylor sets the dialogue in 427 BCE. Saxonhouse believes the Gorgias spans most of the war, from 427 to 405. And Yunis argues that “Plato telescopes this period into a single Athenian moment in which two factors predominate: Pericles is gone and disaster looms” (119).

For this slightly different understanding of the dramatic date, I would highlight or add to the arguments compiled by Taylor, Saxonhouse, and Yunis the following considerations: (1) different elements of the dialogue evoke passages from Thucydides's account of the early years of the Peloponnesian War, including the moral anomie in the aftermath of the plague (2.53), the inferiority of Pericles's immediate successors (2.65, see Taylor 104), and the revolt of Mytilene in 428-427 and the debate it inspired in Athens, to which Gorgias's second definition of rhetoric (452d) may subtly allude (for the revolt, 3.36–50, see Guthrie, Sophists 101–107; Kerferd 123–125; Saxonhouse 154; Yunis 136–46; and for the debate, 3.45.6, see Nichols 33, n.21), (2) the two end dates from Dodd's list both involve the “recent death” of a Pericles, the elder in the case of 427 and the younger in the case of 405, and (3) several Athenian authors manipulated time and/or history without abandoning all notions of chronology (see Aristophanes's Frogs, Euripides's Iphigenia in Tauris and Helen, and elsewhere in Plato, the Menexenus and the myths in Gorgias and Statesman).

Thucydides never mentions Gorgias; he only records that Leontini's ambassadors successfully presented their request to the Athenians. It is from Diodorus Siculus that we learn of Gorgias's role in this mission (12.53–54), but this literary/historical account has since been buttressed by epigraphic evidence (see Enos).

For a more general (not limited to the Gorgias) argument that Plato was familiar with Thucydides's work, see Yunis's introduction to his second chapter on the Gorgias (137–139).

See Dodds 27, 200 (see also note 10 here); Guthrie, Plato 308–311; Howland 151; and Schiappa 45–49. In particular, Dodds argues that some of Gorgias's lines in the Gorgias call to mind Isocrates's descriptions of his own logon techne while Callicles's criticism of philosophy reminds one of Isocrates's hostility to the theoretical sciences. But see the dissent by Poster (39) regarding claims that the Gorgias should be interpreted as a response to Isocrates.

See Dodds 200, 225, 227, 238, 365.

Only a few of Isocrates's extant speeches are dated early enough to fit with the date proposed here for the Gorgias (394-386 but preferably 394-390)—Against Lochites (404-400), Against Euthynus (403), Against Callimachus (402), The Team of Horses (397), Trapeziticus (393), Against the Sophists (390), Busiris (390-385) (from Isocrates I, II, III, Loeb)—and of these only the last two are directly relevant to this study.

See the tortured discussions by Taylor (103 n.1), Dodds (28), and Guthrie (Plato 284) regarding the misquotation of Pindar in both Polycrates's Accusation and Plato's Gorgias. Following Saxonhouse (156–160), I would argue that the misquotation, delivered by Callicles, is offered as a further indication that he is not merely an unjust but also an incompetent student: his Persian War analogy defeats his own point (483de), he cannot quote Pindar correctly (484ac), and he draws the wrong lesson from Euripides's Antiope (484e-485e).