The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Plato · a dialogue · Stephanus 447a to 527e · Athens; the date of composition uncertain, the dramatic date inconsistent · scored on Plato’s Greek, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Greek quoted only where its words are certain, with Zeyl’s translation for sense
Mode
Dialogue as contest: question and answer against the long speech, in three conversations that climb, closed by a speech and a myth
Mythos
The four flatteries; the lion’s whelp that shakes off its charms; the leaky jar and the sieve; the doctor tried by the cook before children; souls judged naked, and the scars
Phase
One conversation, set at a dramatic date the dialogue never fixes: the prologue, then Gorgias, Polus and Callicles in turn, Socrates alone, the myth
Presentation
Prose dialogue among five speakers, Socrates, Gorgias, Polus, Callicles and Chaerephon; Stephanus pages 447a to 527e, eighty-one pages, the longest of the dialogues after the Republic and the Laws
Register
Gorgianic jingle, courteous exposition, quick question and answer, Callicles’ oratory with its Pindar and Euripides, Socrates’ plain speech, and at the close a myth told as a logos
Scale
A few Athenian rooms and one conversation, with the city’s courts, its Assembly, its statesmen and the judgment of the dead in its argument
Governing Proposition
Socrates arrives too late, Callicles says, for the feast, and asks Gorgias what his art is. Three men answer in turn, each taking up the position the last was ashamed to hold: Gorgias, who will not say that the orator may be ignorant of justice; his follower Polus, who will say it; and Callicles, who says that law is the device of the weak and that nature’s justice is the rule of the stronger. Against them Socrates holds that rhetoric before a crowd is flattery, that doing wrong is worse than suffering it, and that a soul, like a city, is good by its order. When the last of them will not answer, Socrates questions himself, and ends with a story of souls judged naked. The wager of the dialogue is that the quarrel of persuasion and knowledge can be shown only in a form that stages it, and that the form can show the method failing with the man who most needs it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The dialogue begins at the door, with a proverb. Callicles meets Socrates with the saying that one should take part in war and battle like this (447a), and the sneer is that Socrates has come too late for the feast. Gorgias is there, with his follower Polus, and Chaerephon. The prologue is short, about a thirtieth of the whole (447a to 449c), but it sets the five speakers in place and the man who will speak last speaks first.
Polus’ first speech is a small display of Gorgianic antithesis and assonance (448c), a jingle that tells the reader what kind of speaking the dialogue has come to examine. Socrates asks for something else. The question of the long speech and the short, makrologia and brachylogia, is raised at once (449b to c): Gorgias, the master of the long speech, is made to answer briefly.
The conversation with Gorgias takes about a seventh of the dialogue (449c to 461b). He answers with courtesy and some vanity. Pressed on what the orator knows, and whether the orator must know what is just, Gorgias will not say that the orator may be ignorant of justice. The concession is the first rung of the dialogue’s ladder. The man who teaches persuasion has been made to speak in the form that tests it, and the form has found the place where he would rather not be seen to stand.
Movement II
Polus breaks in: Gorgias said what he said because he was ashamed not to (461b). The second conversation is about twice the first, a quarter of the dialogue (461b to 481b), and its partner cannot hold the short form. Socrates now gives his own account. Rhetoric before a crowd is not a craft but a knack, empeiria, of producing gratification, without knowledge of the good. He lays it out as four flatteries, each the counterfeit of a craft: cookery of medicine, cosmetics of gymnastics, sophistry of legislation, rhetoric of justice (464b to 465c).
The talk turns to power and to the tyrant, Archelaus of Macedon, whose seizure of power is recent news. Socrates answers that power without knowledge of one’s good is no power: the tyrant does what seems best to him and not what he wants (466d to 468e). Then the claim the whole dialogue defends: that doing wrong is worse for the doer than suffering it (469b, 474b). Socrates recalls, in passing, his own term on the Council (473e).
The argument that follows is the dialogue’s most charged. The argument from the fine and the shameful is made with an ease closer to sleight (474c to 475e). The proof that the punished wrongdoer is benefited then runs through the analogy of medicine and the body two and three times (476a to 479e). Polus is beaten, and the reader has seen how; the second rung holds, and its length shows.
Movement III
Callicles says that Polus was shamed in his turn, as Gorgias was (482c to e), and states the doctrine naked. Law is the device of the weak; nature’s justice is the rule of the stronger over the weaker (483b to 484c). The stronger man is a lion’s whelp tamed by incantations, who shakes them off and tramples the writings and spells that held him (484a). Pindar is called in, with nomos the king of all (484b). The third conversation, with Socrates’ monologue, is more than half the dialogue (481b to 522e), twice the second.
The speech turns from doctrine to the man in front of it. Callicles turns Euripides’ Antiope, its Zethus and Amphion, against Socrates (485e to 486c). And he prophesies: if some worthless man dragged Socrates into court, he would stand helpless and be put to death (486a to b). The case for the stronger is put here more forcefully than any defender of it has put it since, and the dialogue gives it to the enemy at full strength.
The questioning resumes, and the images come from Socrates: the body as a tomb, the leaky jar of the uninitiated and the sieve (493a to c), the stone curlew, the bird that eats and excretes at once (494b), and itching and scratching (494c). The question beneath all of it is named: what way of life one must live (500c). Callicles answers, but only to oblige Gorgias.
Movement IV
Socrates sets out the positive account. A good thing of any kind has its order: the good ship, the good house, the good body, and the good soul is the ordered soul (503e to 504d). Callicles stops answering. Socrates asks and answers alone, conducting both sides of the dialogue (505d to 506c): the method of question and answer is reduced to its limit, a man questioning himself before a partner who will no longer play.
From there Socrates speaks at length, the long speech the dialogue began by refusing. The wise say that heaven and earth, gods and men are held together by community, friendship, orderliness and justice, and that is why they call the whole a kosmos (507e to 508a). Callicles has neglected “hē isotēs hē geōmetrikē”
“geometrical equality” (508a). The monologue’s second half rehearses what has been shown (506c to 509c), and here the dialogue is longer than its argument needs.
Then the city’s heroes are brought to judgment. Pericles, Cimon, Miltiades and Themistocles are named as flatterers who left the city worse (515c to 519a): they filled it with harbours and dockyards and walls without temperance and justice (518e to 519a). The democracy they served turned on them, ostracising Cimon and nearly executing Miltiades (516d to e). Pericles is spoken of as recently dead (503c), though Archelaus’ seizure of power in 413 is recent news and Socrates’ term on the Council points to 406: the dramatic date does not hold together, and the dialogue never resolves it.
Movement V
Socrates answers the prophecy that was put in Callicles’ mouth. He is, he says, one of few Athenians, not to say the only one, who attempts the true political craft (521d). If he is brought to court he will be tried like a doctor prosecuted by a cook before a jury of children (521e): the four flatteries of the second conversation return as the scene of the trial. The reader knows that the city did kill him, and the dialogue has let both the enemy and the friend say so.
Then the story. Socrates says that Callicles will think it a myth, and he a logos (523a). Souls are judged naked, by naked judges, Minos, Rhadamanthus and Aeacus. The judge sees the soul itself, and the tyrant’s soul is full of scars, each wrong it did marked on it (524e to 525a). The court of Athens that Callicles foresaw is answered by a court that cannot be flattered.
The myth takes about a sixteenth of the whole (523a to 527e). It comes when argument has done what it can, and the dialogue says why: Callicles has not been persuaded, and will not be. The eschatology is inherited, Orphic and poetic, and its judges are evoked rather than made; what is made is the reversal, the trial of Socrates turned into the trial of the soul, so that the conversation that began with a sneer at coming late ends with the one judgment no orator can reach.
Act III · The Twelve
Subtract and see what goes. The three conversations are a ladder, and each rung is required: every interlocutor takes up the position the last was ashamed to hold. Gorgias will not say that the orator may be ignorant of justice; Polus says Gorgias was shamed into it (461b); Callicles says Polus was shamed in turn (482c to e), and states the doctrine naked. Take one away and the ladder breaks; the catalogue of Athenian statesmen (515c to 519d) is required too. What holds the axis below the dialogue’s other figures is length: the proof that punishment benefits the wrongdoer, run through the analogy of medicine two and three times (476a to 479e), and the second half of Socrates’ monologue, rehearsing conclusions (506c to 509c). A twentieth or more could go without loss of argument.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and much of it holds. Rhetoric before a crowd is a knack, empeiria, of producing gratification, not a craft with knowledge of the good: it stands to justice as cookery stands to medicine, and the scheme of four flatteries (464b to 465c) is still the sharpest account of what a politics of pleasing does. Power without knowledge of one’s good is no power: the tyrant does what seems best to him, not what he wants (466d to 468e). Doing wrong is worse for the doer than suffering it. And the counterdisclosure, Callicles’ case for the stronger (483b to 484c), is put more forcefully than any defender has put it since. Held below 9.0 because some conclusions, the judgment on Pericles among them, are asserted against evidence the dialogue itself supplies.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Height comes three times, in two registers. The cold height is Callicles’ great speech (482c to 486d): the lion’s whelp tamed by incantations, who shakes them off and tramples the writings and spells that held him (484a), and the prophecy, put in the enemy’s mouth, that Socrates, dragged into court by some worthless man, would stand helpless and be put to death (486a to b). The tragic height is Socrates’ answer (521d to 522e): that he is one of few Athenians, not to say the only one, who attempts the true political craft, and that he will be tried like a doctor prosecuted by a cook before a jury of children (521e). The myth is the third. Between them run long stretches of question and answer that are argument, not elevation; frequency holds the figure at 8.5.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Myth built, in two ways. The closing myth is load-bearing: it restates the argument’s conclusion as a trial and reverses the trial Callicles foretold, so that the Athenian court that will condemn Socrates is answered by a court where the judge sees the soul naked and the tyrant’s soul is full of scars (524e to 525a). Socrates says Callicles will take it for a myth, and he for a logos (523a). Lesser myths serve the argument: the leaky jar (493a to c), the stone curlew (494b). And the figures are built: Socrates before the city’s court and Callicles, the man of nature who will not be persuaded, have become the philosopher and the man of power. Held below the top because the eschatology is inherited, Orphic and poetic, and its judges are evoked, not made.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the Socratic conversation, in Plato’s shorter dialogues and other followers’ writings, and against it the rhetorical culture of Gorgias’ own display pieces. The turn: the interlocutors are set in escalating order, so that the form becomes a struggle between the long speech and the short question, makrologia and brachylogia, raised at the outset (449b to c) and again with Polus; and when the question fails, the dialogue ends in a speech and a myth. Socrates conducting both sides alone (505d to 506c) takes the method to its limit. The stake was high: Pericles, Cimon, Miltiades and Themistocles are named as flatterers who left the city worse (515c to 519a), within a generation of Socrates’ execution by that city. Much of the method is inherited from the earlier dialogues, and the figure sits at the gate.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The dialogue’s thesis is that persuading crowds by speeches is flattery and that only question and answer between two people can produce knowledge; the form enacts the thesis and tests it. Gorgias, master of the long speech, is made to answer briefly; Polus, who imitates his teacher’s jingling style in his first speech (448c), cannot hold the short form; Callicles answers only to oblige Gorgias and at last refuses, and Socrates is left to question himself. The myth comes when argument has done what it can, and the dialogue says why. A treatise could state the four flatteries; it could not show the method failing to persuade the one man who most needs it. Held below 9.0 by the inconsistent dramatic date, a form left loose.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence over two and a half millennia. Aristotle’s Rhetoric opens by answering the claim that rhetoric is no art; Isocrates kept up his quarrel with Platonic philosophy; Aelius Aristides wrote a long defence of oratory, and of the four statesmen, against it; Olympiodorus wrote a commentary in the sixth century. In the modern reading, Nietzsche’s will to power has been traced to Callicles since Dodds’s appendix on the subject (1959); Vlastos and Irwin made the arguments against Polus and Callicles the test cases of the Socratic elenchus; Arendt and later political theory read the dialogue as the founding quarrel of philosophy and politics. Its questions are still argued: whether the arguments against Polus are valid, whether Callicles is refuted or only shamed, whether Socrates’ true political craft is politics at all. It keeps yielding.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is Greek prose and thought of the early fourth century BC, rhetoric, the sophists, Socratic literature and the poets, and through them Western literature and philosophy both. The force: it constitutes the quarrel of philosophy and rhetoric as a quarrel, defining rhetoric against a standard of knowledge and putting the case for the stronger man in its classic form, so that both sides of a long argument take their terms from it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Aristotle’s Rhetoric; Cicero’s synthesis of eloquence and wisdom, made against it; Quintilian’s good man skilled in speaking; the humanists’ defence of rhetoric; Nietzsche’s Callicles; the modern debate on propaganda, which still uses its words, flattery, pandering, the cook and the doctor. Very wide, but within Plato’s work the Republic carries the same argument further, and the dialogue’s reach often runs through it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence. The dialogue survives complete in the main Plato manuscripts, the Clarke Plato of 895 among them, with no lacuna that touches its structure; nothing is charged to form, and nothing to its fabric. It was read without a break in the Greek world through late antiquity, where Olympiodorus commented on it in the sixth century, and through Byzantium. In the Latin West it went unread for about a millennium. Since its return it has been read continuously, taught wherever ancient philosophy and political theory are taught in the West, and widely translated. It has outlived the Athenian Assembly and courts it attacks. Set at the top of the band below that of a text whole and read without a break, for the Latin West’s long silence, though the text itself was never lost.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Judged on the Greek. The command is of character through style: Polus’ first speech in Gorgianic antithesis and assonance (448c); Gorgias’ courtesy and vanity; Callicles’ opening proverb of war and battle, with its sneer at coming too late for the feast (447a); his great speech, with Pindar’s nomos the king of all (484b) and the Zethus and Amphion of Euripides’ Antiope turned against Socrates (485e to 486c). The building is masterly: three conversations, each roughly double the last, each opened by the previous loser’s embarrassment; the prophecy of the trial placed in the enemy’s mouth and answered in the friend’s. Charged: the argument from the fine and the shameful is closer to sleight (474c to 475e), and the Polus section’s restatements are flat. Very high craft, not the highest.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One law governs the whole, and the dialogue names it: order, taxis and kosmos. The good soul is ordered as a good ship, house or body is (503e to 504d); the wise say that heaven and earth, gods and men are held together by community, friendship, orderliness and justice, and that is why the whole is called a kosmos (507e to 508a); and Callicles has neglected “hē isotēs hē geōmetrikē”
“geometrical equality” (508a). Take the two most distant elements, Polus’ jingling opening and the naked judgment of souls: the first is disorder dressed as eloquence, the second order unmasked, and both obey the law. Held at 8.8 by the dramatic date, which the work never resolves, and by the change of register between the questioning and the myth, which some readers feel as a change of law; it is read here as completion.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged at the dialogue’s scale: wide, and held by one question, what way of life one must live (500c). The soul: desire, pleasure, shame, order and disorder. The body: medicine, gymnastics, cookery, hunger and thirst, itching and scratching (494c). The city: the Assembly, the courts, the Council (473e), the tyrant in Archelaus of Macedon. History: the statesmen of the fifth century and the democracy that judged them, ostracised Cimon and nearly executed Miltiades (516d to e). The sacred: the myth, and the body as a tomb (493a). Nature against law. All are routed through the one question, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what it does not hold: the family, labour as labour, women, any world beyond a few Athenian rooms and one conversation. It is the scale of an argument, not of a world.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.4, then The Bottomless Well and The Made at 9.0, then The Unconcealment and The Living Form at 8.9. A text complete over two and a half millennia; a body of answers from Aristotle and Aelius Aristides to Nietzsche, Vlastos and Arendt, with its questions still open; character built through style and three conversations each roughly double the last; the four flatteries and Callicles’ case for the stronger, both still the sharpest statements of their kind; and a form that enacts its thesis and shows it failing.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.3, held by what the dialogue does not hold: the family, labour, women, any world beyond a few Athenian rooms and one conversation, though the one question routes soul, body, city, history and the sacred through itself. Next, The Inevitable at 8.4, held by the restatements of the Polus section and the second half of Socrates’ monologue. Then, among the gated axes, The Swerve at 8.5, held at the gate because much of the method is inherited from the earlier Socratic dialogues.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.4, The Unconcealment at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.4, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Plato’s Gorgias, scored as the dialogue transmitted in Greek: one work, complete, Stephanus pages 447a to 527e, eighty-one pages, the longest of the dialogues after the Republic and the Laws, in the text of the medieval manuscripts as edited by Burnet (Oxford, 1903) and by E. R. Dodds (Oxford, 1959, with commentary). The Clarke Plato of 895 is among the manuscripts; a sixth century commentary by Olympiodorus survives. The date of composition is uncertain, and the dramatic date is inconsistent within the dialogue. It is weighed here as written work, philosophy in literary form, its thought through its form. No text was in hand, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Plato’s Greek. Greek is quoted only where its words are certain, in transliteration, with a close English rendering beneath; other words are given in English as substance, not quotation. References are to Stephanus pages, approximate to the section where a letter is given. The proportions given are measured in Stephanus pages. Translations · Donald Zeyl (Hackett, 1987), for sense; Terence Irwin (Clarendon, 1979), with his notes; Lamb’s Loeb and Dodds’s commentary behind them. None is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the dialogue. The sound of the Attic prose is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. Matters that could not be verified, among them the date of composition, any trace of Callicles outside this dialogue, the course of the text’s return to the Latin West, the extent of its local textual problems and how far Cicero and Quintilian argue with it by name, are not given.