"Sacred incantations sung with words are bearers of pleasure and banishers of pain, for, merging with opinion in the soul, the power of the incantation is wont to beguile it and persuade it and alter it with witchcraft. There have been discovered two arts of witchcraft and magic: one consists of errors of the soul and the other of deceptions of opinion. All who have and do persuade people of things do so by holding a false argument. For if all men on all subjects had both memory of things past and awareness of things present and foreknowledge of the future, speech would not be similarly similar, since as things are now it is not easy for them to recall the past nor to consider the present nor to predict the future.
For speech constrained the soul, persuading it which it persuaded, both to believe the things said and to approve the things done. The persuader, like the constrainer, does the wrong and the persuaded, like the constrained, in speech is wrongly charged."

Per a mi, Helena, es uno de os personajes que ha dado más juego a la hora de trabajar la historia antigua. No hablo de si desencadenar el conflicto de Troya -o ser el pretexto de eso- tiene orígen en un acto heroico, romántico, covarde o consentido... Hablo de que se han escrito textos tan preciosos como éste a partir de esta história...

Basically the man is defending Elena’s going to Troy, even though her lawful husband was in Sparta. I do not agree with Elena being innocent, but the author wrote in the end that “he did it for fun”, so that’s why i give it 3 stars

io nichilista

A marvelous rhetorical approach by Gorgias Leontinus who tries to defend Helen (the beautiful woman because of whom it's said that Trojan War started). This book is reported as an essay for the nature and the power of oration. What is so interesting here is that he uses familiar -for people of ancient times- examples to prove how "vision" can play a major role for people's decisions. Vision called "όψις" in ancient Greek, is what triggered Helen to follow Paris whose beauty is has been known ever since. Through his report in "vision", he wants to put a great issue on the table; the issue of "convincing", showing the strength of oration skills, which can have the same affect as the strength of physical compulsion. In that way, he had the chance to refer to "orators" who did not attempt to speak the truth, but only the plausibility. Gorgias is the first one to who equals even the art of painting to sham and charm and expresses the theory that art is an illusion. I shall close this review with the ambiguous last words in this book: "εμόν δέ παίχνιον" , with which he's provoking his audience to consider whether all he said was true or plausibility like the rest of orators.
So,totally recommended among a variety of ancient literature pieces.

Free Helena

if i could play devils advocate ! i would have had better points than he had