l be no more flattery or disguise, and no further use for the
teaching of rhetoric.

The characters of the three interlocutors also correspond to the parts
which are assigned to them. Gorgias is the great rhetorician, now
advanced in years, who goes from city to city displaying his talents,
and is celebrated throughout Greece. Like all the Sophists in the
dialogues of Plato, he is vain and boastful, yet he has also a certain
dignity, and is treated by Socrates with considerable respect. But he is
no match for him in dialectics. Although he has been teaching rhetoric
all his life, he is still incapable of defining his own art. When his
ideas begin to clear up, he is unwilling to admit that rhetoric can
be wholly separated from justice and injustice, and this lingering
sentiment of morality, or regard for public opinion, enables Socrates to
detect him in a contradiction. Like Protagoras, he is described as of
a generous nature; he expresses his approbation of Socrates' manner of
approaching a question; he is quite 'one of Socrates' sort, ready to
be refuted as well as to refute,' and very eager that Callicles and
Socrates should have the game out. He knows by experience that rhetoric
exercises great influence over other men, but he is unable to explain
the puzzle how rhetoric can teach everything and know nothing.

Polus is an impetuous youth, a runaway 'colt,' as Socrates describes
him, who wanted originally to have taken the place of Gorgias under
the pretext that the old man was tired, and now avails himself of the
earliest opportunity to enter the lists. He is said to be the author
of a work on rhetoric, and is again mentioned in the Phaedrus, as the
inventor of balanced or double forms of speech (compare Gorg.; Symp.).
At first he is violent and ill-mannered, and is angry at seeing his
master overthrown. But in the judicious hands of Socrates he is soon
restored to good-humour, and compelled to assent to the required
conclusion. Like Gorgias, he is overthrown because he compromises; he is
unwilling to say that to do is fairer or more honourable than to suffer
injustice. Though he is fascinated by the power of rhetoric, and dazzled
by the splendour of success, he is not insensible to higher arguments.
Plato may have felt that there would be an incongruity in a youth
maintaining the cause of injustice against the world. He has never heard
the other side of the question, and he listens to the paradoxes, as
they appear