Polus c. 440 BC – c. 380 BC

Polus of Acragas was a Greek sophist and rhetorician of the late fifth century BC, a pupil of the great rhetorician Gorgias and the author of a now-lost handbook of rhetoric. He is best known to us through Plato's Gorgias, in which he appears as one of Socrates's principal interlocutors, defending the position that the able orator is happy because he can do as he pleases in his city, and being driven by Socrates to admit, against his own intentions, that to do injustice is worse than to suffer it. Whatever his historical writings may have been, the Polus of Plato has shaped two millennia of philosophical reflection on rhetoric, justice, and political ambition.

Polus of Acragas in Sicily flourished in the second half of the fifth century BC; he was a younger contemporary and pupil of the great rhetorician Gorgias of Leontini. Aristotle reports that he wrote a Technē, a handbook of rhetoric, and Plato's Phaedrus refers to a work in which Polus catalogued figures of speech. Apart from these notices nothing of his teaching survives, and the few details of his life come from anecdotal mentions in later writers.

He is principally known to philosophy through his role in the Gorgias, where Plato makes him the second of three interlocutors of Socrates after his master Gorgias and before the harder-edged Callicles. Polus there argues that the orator who can persuade the people to kill or banish his enemies is among the most fortunate of human beings, that doing wrong is preferable to suffering wrong, and that the tyrant Archelaus of Macedon is happy because he can do whatever he likes. Socrates leads him by short questions to the conclusion that doing wrong is the greatest of evils and that the unjust man who escapes punishment is more wretched than the one who pays for his crimes.

Polus's character in the dialogue is the type of the showy young rhetorician who has not yet hardened into principled immoralism but is shocked into apparent agreement; through that role he became, with Callicles, the canonical opponent against whom Plato's argument for the priority of justice was framed.