Gorgias (Oxford World's Classics)

In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates meets three men with different ideas about what persuasive speech can achieve. Gorgias teaches rhetoric, Polus defends its power, and Callicles questions whether conventional ideas of justice should restrain the ambitious. Their exchange moves from public speaking to punishment, pleasure and the unsettling possibility that doing wrong may be worse than suffering it.

Robin Waterfield translates the dialogue for Oxford World’s Classics, with an introduction and notes that place its arguments in historical and philosophical context. The further Socrates presses his opponents, the harder it becomes to treat political influence as proof that a life has been well lived.