Gorgias 483 BC – 375 BC

Gorgias of Leontini was a Greek Sophist and rhetorician who lived to a great age, traveling between Sicily and Athens as a celebrated public speaker. His treatise On Non-Being argued in turn that nothing exists, that if anything did exist it could not be known, and that even if it could be known, it could not be communicated. The Encomium of Helen and the Defense of Palamedes display the rhetorical brilliance for which he was famous, exhibiting argument as a power as much as a path to truth. Plato made him the foil of a major dialogue on rhetoric and justice.

Gorgias was born around 483 BC at Leontini, a Greek city in eastern Sicily. As a young man he is said to have studied with Empedocles. In 427 BC, when nearly sixty, he came to Athens at the head of an embassy to seek an alliance against Syracuse, and his speeches there made an extraordinary impression on the city; for the rest of a very long life — ancient sources put his death between his hundredth and hundred-eighth year — he traveled the Greek world as the most celebrated and richly paid teacher of rhetoric of his age.

His surviving works are the Encomium of Helen, the Defense of Palamedes, the Funeral Oration in fragments, and the philosophical treatise On Not-Being or On Nature, preserved by paraphrase in Sextus Empiricus and the pseudo-Aristotelian On Melissus, Xenophanes and Gorgias. On Not-Being is a deliberately Eleatic-sounding triple thesis: that nothing exists; that even if anything does exist, it cannot be known; and that even if it can be known, it cannot be communicated.

Gorgias is the founder of an art of Greek prose that drew deliberately on poetic devices — antithesis, isokolon, rhyme — and his treatment of the persuasive logos as a force capable of moving the soul like a drug shaped the Greek discussion of rhetoric, including Plato's hostile examination of him in the dialogue Gorgias. He is reported to have died at Larissa in Thessaly.