Gorgias

Also known as Gorgias of Leontini

Classical

Born c. 483 BCE, Leontini

Died c. 375 BCE

The sophist who argued that nothing exists, and that if it did, no one could know it, and if they could, no one could say it.

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. The performance is 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.

Places

Ideas

Skepticism Being

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.”
— GorgiasShare

“Speech is a powerful lord, which with the smallest and most invisible body accomplishes the most divine works.”
— GorgiasShare

Works

On Non-Being

fragmentary

c. 440 BCE·Greek

Gorgias's notorious treatise, surviving only in summary, that runs a chain of arguments to three impossible conclusions: nothing exists; if anything did, it could not be known; and if known, it could not be communicated. Part logic, part provocation, it pushes the limits of reason and language to their breaking point.

Life & Moments

c. 483 BCE

Born in Sicily

Born at Leontini in Sicily, he would carry the new art of persuasion to mainland Greece.

427 BCE

The Embassy to Athens

Came to Athens as an envoy and stayed to teach rhetoric, dazzling the city and charging high fees for the power of words.

427 BCE

The embassy that dazzled Athens

Led an embassy from Leontini to Athens in 427 BCE, asking help against Syracuse. His speeches, in a style of balanced clauses and rhyming sounds no Athenian had heard, took the city by storm, and made professional rhetoric a Greek institution overnight.

Influence

Influenced by

Empedoclesteacher in Sicily
Ancient tradition makes Gorgias a student of Empedocles, which would place the origins of Greek rhetoric in the same Sicilian circle that produced the four roots and the poem on purification.

Influenced

Platoprovoked
Plato made Gorgias the foil of a dialogue, spending a career answering the sophist's claim that persuasion might matter more than truth.
Sextus Empiricusthe argument preserved by a skeptic
Almost everything we have of On Non-Being comes through Sextus, who reproduced the three theses in order to catalogue them among the arguments that unsettle any claim to knowledge.