In this chapter, I argue, drawing primarily on passages from the Gorgias, the Republic and the Laws, that Plato understands tragedy to be, in essence, an imitation of the finest and noblest life. According to Plato, the only thing that is genuinely good and valuable is wisdom and virtue, and it is this life that tragedy imitates. This definition may seem deeply counterintuitive, lacking core tragic notions of loss, failure and suffering, but Plato would say these depend on prior conceptions of gain, success and flourishing. Ideal tragedy includes adversity, obstacles and limitations to living the best life – it is not an easy life of uninterrupted success – but it foregrounds the goodness and value of the life rather than dwelling on the obstacles. I formulate four constraints on ideal tragedy: the veridical constraint, which holds that only the life that is genuinely the best should be imitated as best; the educative constraint, which holds that tragic imitation must aim at educating the audience by encouraging them to pursue virtue and wisdom; the emotional constraint, which holds that the tragic imitation should cause appropriate and appropriately moderate emotional reactions; the political constraint, which holds that no living citizen should be portrayed as living the best life.

In this chapter, I argue that Plato borrows from Euripides’ Antiope, in order to frame the terms of the debate between Socrates and Callicles in the last part of the Gorgias about whether the philosophical or the political life is best. I argue that Plato’s engagement with this tragedy is an instance of paratragedy, that is, the non-parodic adaptation of a work of tragedy in order to enrich the dramatic situation. What redeems the Antiope in Plato’s eyes is its endorsement of the superiority of the intellectual over the political life. In adapting the Antiope for his own purposes, Plato defends an account of good life as spent in the cooperative pursuit of wisdom and virtue. This life runs up against two limits that are thematized in the Gorgias: human obstinacy, the refusal to cooperate and recognize the force of argument; and endemic uncertainty due to our finite capacity for argument. Since Socrates is portrayed as both defending the life of philosophy in argument, and actively living it, then the Gorgias itself counts as an ideal tragedy. This reading of the dialogue sheds important light on the arguments concerning the nature and value of rhetoric. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal tragedy articulated in Chapter 4.

Participatory Athenian democracy has inspired many political thinkers, despite its imperialist atrocities, slavery and the subordination of women. Pericles is an ambivalent figure, and it is dangerous to see him as the embodiment of a golden age. His speech over the war-dead can be seen as a noble democratic manifesto or the calculated work of a demagogue. In a debate about the punishment of Mytilene, as depicted by Thucydides, Cleon uses the language of reason to work on the emotions, and is a paradigm of the populist or ‘demagogue’. We can see the ‘demagogue’ as an aberration from true democracy, or see the word itself as a standard weapon that can be wielded in any democratic contest. The comic dramatist Aristophanes offers us insight into Cleon’s performance techniques that embrace face, arms and voice, and into the minds of those who supported him. In his Gorgias, Plato theorises the problem of rhetoric. Gorgias was a Sicilian who taught the Athenians that rhetoric was an art which they could pay to learn, and for Plato this was a fundamental flaw in his nation’s democratic enterprise.

The Gorgias ends with Socrates telling an eschatological myth that he insists is a rational account and no mere tale. Using this story, Socrates reasserts the central lessons of the previous discussion. However, it isn’t clear how this story can persuade any of the characters in the dialogue. Those (such as Socrates) who already believe the underlying philosophical lessons don’t appear to require the myth, and those (such as Callicles) who reject these teachings are unlikely to be moved by this far-fetched tale. This raises the question of who the myth is told for and what function it is meant to serve. This chapter argues that the myth is aimed not at Callicles, but at Socrates and those who aspire to follow him. There are uncertainties about the philosophical life deriving from the nature of embodiment, as well as reasons to doubt the connection between happiness and virtue. The myth assists with the former by presenting an image that draws a philosopher away from the goods of the body toward the goods of the soul. It assists with the latter by presenting an image of cosmic justice, thereby securing happiness in proportion to virtue.

This chapter considers the relationship between the historical Gorgias of Leontini and Plato’s portrayal of him and his ideas in the Gorgias. By drawing on fragments and testimonia of the historical figure, it shows that Plato’s understanding of Gorgias and his views informs both his characterization of the orator himself in the Gorgias, as well as that dialogue’s philosophical content and aims. In particular, three of the central themes of the Gorgias – ones that the character himself introduces – are prominent in Gorgias’ own works and in the doxographical reception of him: (1) the conception of speech as a form of power or dunamis; (2) the relation between power and wish or boulēsis and their joint role in human action; and (3) the contrast between – and contrasting relationships speech itself has with – belief on the one hand and knowledge on the other. Whether the historical Gorgias was ever personally committed to the relevant ideas in question or not, the chapter argues that he at least gave voice to them in his works, and that Plato, at least, evidently took them seriously as expressions of Gorgianic theory and practice.

Plato’s Gorgias presents philosophy as primarily the Socratic elenchos as practiced in large swathes of the Gorgias and other elenctic dialogues. So understood, unlike rhetoric, philosophy promotes the just life by encouraging the pursuit of knowledge necessary for the just life by eliminating the false conceit of believing that one already possesses it. This is not the only way the elenchos can promote the just life. Nor is philosophy only displayed in its elenctic form in the dialogue. Nevertheless, philosophy’s elenctic ability to encourage the pursuit of knowledge necessary for the just life by eliminating one’s false conceit of having it is a principal way in which Plato takes philosophy to promote the just life in the Gorgias. In this way, the victory of the just life over the unjust life grounds the victory of philosophy over rhetoric.

Within the group of classical Greek texts that we call funeral speeches, two have been passed down to us only in fragmentary form. We have just one single sentence from Archinus’ Epitaphios, and we know only a small number of relatively short quotations and paraphrases from Gorgias’ Epitaphios. Not surprisingly, these two texts are the least studied and the least well understood within the group of known funeral speeches. This chapter show shows that Gorgias’ Epitaphios played a vitally important role in the early formation of the literary genre. It begins with an overview of the text and the tradition of Gorgias’ literary version of a funeral oration before exploring its content, date, audience and purpose as well as its impact on the later funeral speeches. This chapter concludes that Gorgias’ Epitaphios was most likely composed and disseminated at some point in the last quarter of the fifth century, that the text was intended to be received primarily by an elite literary audience, and that Gorgias’ Epitaphios conveyed direct criticism of Athenian power politics at the time.

Sophists were active participants in ancient discussions about being or what-is at the most general level. This chapter discusses the contributions of Gorgias, Protagoras, Xeniades, and Lycophron in the context of the Eleatic philosophers Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus. All of these figures share a serious commitment to ontological inquiry as well as a concern with the problems that arise when discussing being or what-is. They also share an approach to these problems that is at times paradoxical and self-undermining. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Parmenides’ poem, a work that serves as an important backdrop for later ontology. It then covers Gorgias’ On Not-Being, a response to the Eleatics and a unique contribution in its own right. Gorgias’ work is then compared with that of Zeno and Melissus. Finally, the more limited evidence we have of Protagoras, Xeniades, and Lycophron’s ontological theorizing is discussed.

This volume offers perspectives on examples of key ingredients in Plato’s writing: particularly of argument, allegory, images, and myth, of intertextuality, and of paradox, but also his characterization of speakers he portrays in dialogue, now through narration, now direct dramatic presentation, and his assumed readerships. All the essays included were prompted by perception of something problematic: either in a passage within a dialogue itself, or in the way scholarship had tackled or failed to tackle a topic. First come three approaching the corpus as a whole, three different vantage points. The next group of three focus on arguments and disputants within the overall argumentative structure of three very different dialogues: Gorgias, Cratylus, and Parmenides. A third group contains two studies of celebrated imaginative fictions – the Noble Lie and the Cave – that perform key but unstraightforward roles in the philosophical strategy of the Republic. The final six chapters discuss the Laws. They explore further literary and philosophical dimensions of Plato’s writing in the last and longest of his dialogues, nowadays yielding up more philosophical rewards than was once the case.

Chapter 4 is primarily devoted to the influence of rhetoric on historiography. Here, too, the struggle for truth remains at the center, albeit in a dialectical relationship to the fictional, which Gorgias, the first great theoretician of rhetoric, was already aware of. Since the most important representatives of this new historiographical approach, Ephorus and Theopompus, have only survived in fragments, the first focus is on Isocrates, who was considered their teacher. His handling of history can be analyzed surprisingly clearly, and he shows a closeness to the rational-critical method, not least in his striving for truth and the awareness of the difficulties of searching for it. After a closer interpretation of the above-mentioned historians in this sense, the chapter treats another new tendency of historiography in the Hellenistic epoch. In the so-called tragic historiography, the representation of history again approaches the poetic. The striving for truth is now directed towards the most vivid representation of the real event, as if the recipient had been present at it.

Ancient Greece provided the setting for the first detailed, recorded hypotheses about the causes of human activity. In the search for first principles of life, tentative explanations included: The naturalistic orientation of the Ionian physicists Democritus, Heraclitus, and Parmenides looked to some basic physical element in nature as this first principle. A biological orientation, developed by Alcmaeon, Hippocrates, and Empedocles, held that bodily physiology is the key. Pythagoras held that life is transcendent of the material world and found in the essential coherence of mathematical relationships. The Sophists posited a pragmatic orientation that denied the value of trying to seek out first principles, relying instead on observations of life as it is lived. Finally, Anaxagoras and Socrates, rejecting the Sophists, proposed the existence of a soul that defines humanity. This humanistic orientation developed the notion of the spiritual soul that possesses the unique human capabilities of the intellect and the will. The soul was elaborated as the central element in the interpretation of life offered by Plato and Aristotle. By the end of the Greek era the critical themes and issues of psychology as well as the methodological approaches were well identified and structured.

This chapter examines friendship terms (e.g. phile, beltiste, daimonie) in Plato in the light of Brown and Levinson’s face-threat theory of politeness. It argues that every friendship term in Plato is polite redress for a specific face-threatening act, and aims to explain not only their general significance but also why they occur exactly when they do. The chapter examines Phaedrus in detail in order to show how friendship terms are associated with particular face-threatening acts, and supports the argument with a selection of passages from other dialogues. About 240 out of the 457 friendship terms in the corpus are either discussed in detail or explicitly linked to a specific face-threatening act, and the remaining examples should be readily intelligible in the light of this. Friendship terms are formally polite, in keeping with Socrates’ persona as represented in the dialogues, but also serve to emphasize face-threatening acts such as criticism and refutation. It is notable that there are no friendship terms in dialogues, or sections of dialogues, where overt face threat is avoided (e.g. the conversation with Gorgias in Gorgias).

This chapter investigates Plato’s thoughts on poetic creativity by tracing a path from a traditional divine inspiration view to a new kind of inspiration, which transforms the poet into a philosopher. The path begins with divine inspiration in the Ion, then turns to the power of public poetry in the Gorgias. Next is the beginning of a new conception of poetic creativity in the Symposium. By considering poetry as a kind of communication between a lover and the beloved, Plato views poetry as a basis for a philosophical ascent to the Form of Beauty. In the Republic, Plato emphasizes further the power of poetry by classifying traditional poetry as a degraded kind of imitation. He highlights its power to corrupt the listener by strengthening irrational emotions. In the Phaedrus, Plato extends his notion of poetic creativity to linguistic communication in general, thereby developing further his notion of philosophical communication as a creative force generated by love. In the end, Plato pulls together both his denunciation of traditional poetry and his new conception of poetic creativity by offering a new type of public poetry in the Laws, consisting ultimately of his own body of laws.

The exploration of the ancient aesthetics of deception takes its cue from Gorgias fr. B 23 DK. After contemplating the fragment in its original contexts – Plutarch cites it in two different treatises – I will argue that Gorgias’ assertion derives its poignancy from the transformation of several topoi. What reads like a mere witticism is the result of a crossing of an epistemological tradition with an ethical paradox and a poetological premise, all under the auspices of aesthetics.

This section substantiates the claim that Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles played an instrumental role in the emergence of what may be termed the Classical conception of literature – that is, the view that a work of literature is a mortally crafted artefact that reflects a true state of affairs only symbolically or mimetically – by drawing attention to evidence for their influence on certain important developments in fifth- and fourth-century BCE poetics. These include (a) fifth-century practices of allegorical interpretation; (b) Gorgias’ statements that poetry is deceptive and is a kind of charm or drug; (c) Democritus’ physical explanations for poetic inspiration and composition; (d) Democritus and the sophists’ analytical approaches to language; and (e) the conceptions of mimesis presented by Plato.

This chapter traces key moments in the rhetorical tradition in the context of which the problematic relationship of difference and similarity between rhetorical and poetic discourse is evoked and discussed. The competing claims of affinity and difference between poetic and rhetorical discourse in Gorgias’ Helen, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Kant and others are analyzed as aspects of rhetoric’s self-definition.

This chapter traces key moments in the rhetorical tradition in the context of which the problematic relationship of difference and similarity between rhetorical and poetic discourse is evoked and discussed. The competing claims of affinity and difference between poetic and rhetorical discourse in Gorgias’ Helen, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Kant and others are analyzed as aspects of rhetoric’s self-definition.

This chapter argues that Plato effectively pre-empts the Stoics in defining virtuous action as conformity with cosmic order. Scholarship has been beguiled by Alcibiades’ striking analysis of Socrates in the Symposium as someone ugly to look at but beautiful within, and misled into thinking that Plato defines virtue as ‘inner beauty’, something private which only accidentally manifests itself in public benefit. In fact, as a closer examination of Diotima’s account of the lover’s ascent towards beauty in the same dialogue shows that the distinction that actually interests Plato is that between the body and its activity – not the body and the soul as such. And by referencing this activity to cosmic order (as he does most clearly in Gorgias 507e-508), Plato guarantees essentially that virtue is not only publicly manifest but of essential benefit to others as well as self.