Gorgias & the Sophists

A History of Mankind (114)

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Democritus wasn't the longest-living Sophist, a title that surely must go to Gorgias (485-380 BC).

Even more so than any of his predecessors, Gorgias is key to the lawyer/philosopher distinction that Socrates and Plato tried to make. Being Socrates' ultimate straw man, Gorgias' writings showcase his ability of making ridiculous and unpopular positions appear stronger.

Gorgias was a pupil of Empedocles, although he would only have been a few years younger, and authored a lost work known as “On the Non-Existent,” which centers on the argument that nothing exists. In it, he attempts to persuade his readers that thought and existence are different. His chief claim to recognition is that he transplanted rhetoric from his native Sicily to Attica, and contributed to the diffusion of the Attic dialect as the language of literary prose.

Unlike other Sophists, such as Protagoras, Gorgias did not profess to teach virtue (“arete”). He believed that there's no absolute form of arete, but that arete is relative to each situation.