ic uses relate to
the best and greatest of human things.' But tell me, Gorgias, what are
the best? 'Health first, beauty next, wealth third,' in the words of
the old song, or how would you rank them? The arts will come to you in a
body, each claiming precedence and saying that her own good is superior
to that of the rest--How will you choose between them? 'I should say,
Socrates, that the art of persuasion, which gives freedom to all men,
and to individuals power in the state, is the greatest good.' But what
is the exact nature of this persuasion?--is the persevering retort: You
could not describe Zeuxis as a painter, or even as a painter of figures,
if there were other painters of figures; neither can you define rhetoric
simply as an art of persuasion, because there are other arts which
persuade, such as arithmetic, which is an art of persuasion about odd
and even numbers. Gorgias is made to see the necessity of a further
limitation, and he now defines rhetoric as the art of persuading in the
law courts, and in the assembly, about the just and unjust. But still
there are two sorts of persuasion: one which gives knowledge, and
another which gives belief without knowledge; and knowledge is always
true, but belief may be either true or false,--there is therefore a
further question: which of the two sorts of persuasion does rhetoric
effect in courts of law and assemblies? Plainly that which gives
belief and not that which gives knowledge; for no one can impart a real
knowledge of such matters to a crowd of persons in a few minutes. And
there is another point to be considered:--when the assembly meets to
advise about walls or docks or military expeditions, the rhetorician
is not taken into counsel, but the architect, or the general. How would
Gorgias explain this phenomenon? All who intend to become disciples,
of whom there are several in the company, and not Socrates only, are
eagerly asking:--About what then will rhetoric teach us to persuade or
advise the state?

Gorgias illustrates the nature of rhetoric by adducing the example
of Themistocles, who persuaded the Athenians to build their docks and
walls, and of Pericles, whom Socrates himself has heard speaking about
the middle wall of the Piraeus. He adds that he has exercised a similar
power over the patients of his brother Herodicus. He could be chosen a
physician by the assembly if he pleased, for no physician could compete
with a rhetorician in popularity and influe