Birth
Born in Sicily
Born at Leontini in Sicily, he would carry the new art of persuasion to mainland Greece.
Words
“Nothing exists; and if anything did, it could not be known; and if it could be known, it could not be put into words.”
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Gorgias came from Sicily to Athens as an ambassador and dazzled the city with a new power: persuasion as an art. He took no fixed doctrine, charged high fees, and showed that a skilled speaker could argue any side of any question. His little treatise On Non-Being runs a chain of arguments to three impossible conclusions — nothing exists, the existent cannot be known, the known cannot be communicated — half logic, half dare. Plato made him the foil of a dialogue and spent a career answering the unsettling idea that rhetoric might matter more than truth.
