Platos Gorgias
CALLICLES: Yes.
training and improvement of the souls of the citizens, and strives to say what is best, whether welcome or unwelcome, SOCRATES: Then now we have discovered a sort of rheto-to the audience; but have you ever known such a rhetoric; ric which is addressed to a crowd of men, women, and chil-or if you have, and can point out any rhetorician who is of dren, freemen and slaves. And this is not much to our taste, this stamp, who is he?
for we have described it as having the nature of flattery.
CALLICLES: But, indeed, I am afraid that I cannot tell you CALLICLES: Quite true.
of any such among the orators who are at present living.
SOCRATES: Very good. And what do you say of that other SOCRATES: Well, then, can you mention any one of a rhetoric which addresses the Athenian assembly and the former generation, who may be said to have improved the assemblies of freemen in other states? Do the rhetoricians Athenians, who found them worse and made them better, appear to you always to aim at what is best, and do they from the day that he began to make speeches? for, indeed, seek to improve the citizens by their speeches, or are they I do not know of such a man.
too, like the rest of mankind, bent upon giving them pleasure, forgetting the public good in the thought of their own CALLICLES: What! did you never hear that Themistocles interest, playing with the people as with children, and trying was a good man, and Cimon and Miltiades and Pericles, to amuse them, but never considering whether they are who is just lately dead, and whom you heard yourself?
better or worse for this?
SOCRATES: Yes, Callicles, they were good men, if, as you CALLICLES: I must distinguish. There are some who have said at first, true virtue consists only in the satisfaction of a real care of the public in what they say, while others are our own desires and those of others; but if not, and if, as we such as you describe.
were afterwards compelled to acknowledge, the satisfaction of some desires makes us better, and of others, worse, and SOCRATES: I am contented with the admission that rheto-we ought to gratify the one and not the other, and there is ric is of two sorts; one, which is mere flattery and disgrace-an art in distinguishing them,can you tell me of any of ful declamation; the other, which is noble and aims at the these statesmen who did distinguish them?