Gorgias

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Gorgias bigraphy, stories - Philosophers

Gorgias : biography

487 BC –

Gorgias ( , ; c. 485 – c. 380 BC),Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd. ed. s.v. "Gorgias" (Oxford, 1996) called "the Nihilist," was a Greek sophist, Italiote, pre-Socratic philosopher and rhetorician who was a native of Leontini in Sicily. Along with Protagoras, he forms the first generation of Sophists. Several doxographers report that he was a pupil of Empedocles, although he would only have been a few years younger. "Like other Sophists he was an itinerant, practicing in various cities and giving public exhibitions of his skill at the great pan-Hellenic centers of Olympia and Delphi, and charged fees for his instruction and performances. A special feature of his displays was to invite miscellaneous questions from the audience and give impromptu replies."W.K.C. Guthrie, The Sophists (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 270.

His chief claim to recognition resides in the fact 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.

Life

Gorgias originated from Leontini, a Greek colony in Sicily, and what is often called the home of Spartan rhetoric. It is known that Gorgias had a father named Charmander and two siblings – a brother named Herodicus and a sister who dedicated a statue to Gorgias in Delphi (McComiskey 6-7).

He was already about sixty when in 427 BC he was sent to Athens by his fellow-citizens at the head of an embassy to ask for Athenian protection against the aggression of the Syracusans. He subsequently settled in Athens, probably due to the enormous popularity of his style of oratory and the profits made from his performances and rhetoric classes. According to Aristotle, his students included Isocrates.Aristotle, fr. 130 Rose = Quintilian 3.1.13. (Other students are named in later traditions; the Suda adds Pericles, Polus, and Alcidamas,Suda, Gorgias Diogenes Laërtius mentions Antisthenes,Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 2 and according to Philostratus, "I understand that he attracted the attention of the most admired men, Critias and Alcibiades who were young, and Thucydides and Pericles who were already old. Agathon too, the tragic poet, whom Comedy regards as wise and eloquent, often Gorgianizes in his iambic verse").Lives of the Sophists 1.9, trans. George Kennedy in The Older Sophists, ed. R.K. Sprague (Columbia, S.C., 1972), p. 31.

Gorgias is reputed to have lived to be one hundred and eight years old (Matsen, Rollinson and Sousa, 33). He won admiration for his ability to speak on any subject (Matsen, Rollinson and Sousa, 33). He accumulated considerable wealth; enough to commission a gold statue of himself for a public temple.Sprague, Rosamond Kent, The Older Sophists, Hackett Publishing Company (ISBN 0-87220-556-8)., p. 31 After his Pythian Oration, the Greeks installed a solid gold statue of him in the temple of Apollo at Delphi (Matsen, Rollinson and Sousa, 33). He died at Larissa in Thessaly.

Rhetorical works

Encomium of Helen

The Encomium of Helen is considered to be a good example of epideictic oratory and was supposed to have been Gorgias’ "show piece or demonstration piece," which was used to attract students (Matsen, Rollinson and Sousa, 33). In their writings, Gorgias and other sophists speculated "about the structure and function of language” as a framework for expressing the implications of action and the ways decisions about such actions were made” (Jarratt 103). And this is exactly the purpose of Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen. Of the three divisions of rhetoric discussed by Aristotle in his Rhetoric (forensic, deliberative, and epideictic), the Encomium can be classified as an epideictic speech, expressing praise for Helen of Troy and ridding her of the blame she faced for leaving Sparta with Paris (Wardy 26).

Helen – the proverbial “Helen of Troy” – exemplified both sexual passion and tremendous beauty for the Greeks. She was the daughter of Zeus and Leda, the Queen of Sparta, and her beauty was the direct cause of the decade long Trojan War between Greece and Troy. The war began after the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite asked Paris (a Trojan prince) to select who was the most beautiful of the three. Each goddess tried to influence Paris’ decision, but he ultimately chose Aphrodite who then promised Paris the most beautiful woman. Paris then traveled to Greece where he was greeted by Helen and her husband Menelaus. Under the influence of Aphrodite, Helen allowed Paris to persuade her to elope with him. Together they traveled to Troy, not only sparking the war, but also a popular and literary tradition of blaming Helen for her wrongdoing. It is this tradition which Gorgias confronts in the Encomium.