From the Introduction by Chris Emlyn-Jones:

p. xxvii - "For Plato's Socrates, oratory is not an art, since, by his own admission, Gorgias does not aim to produce knowledge of right and wrong, but only to persuade - to produce conviction. Instead of aiming at making people better (he cannot, because his art does not include knowledge of right and wrong), he panders to their desires, like a confectioner tempting children. If you engage in pandering you do not have to know what people really need; all you require is experience of what will satisfy them."

now don't that sound terrifyingly familiar?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZNnq...

What they neglect to tell you in school is that Plato is straight up funny. Example:

Callicles (to Socrates): By the gods! You simply don't let up on your continual talk of shoemakers and cleaners, cooks and doctors, as if our discussion were about them!

Also if you haven't read this and you have a test on it tomorrow, here's the summary:

Socrates: ...a person who wants to be happy must evidently pursue and practice self-control (507d).

If leaders and politicians and all those other orators and sophists claim to be caretakers of men, and to cultivate justice and goodness in them, it is a hypocrisy then for those leaders to bemoan and decry how men act unjustly towards themselves, each other, or towards the leaders in questions; for this represents a failure on the part of the leaders, and indicates their own lack of justice. In truth, even the most powerful of leaders and politicians will be found to have only really fulfilled the immediate pleasures of men (if even that) through flowery rhetoric, bloody wars, and impressive projects; like pastry makers and fast food cooks appeasing the appetites of children, in contrast to the doctors that possess knowledge of what food is good for the body, what food is bad for the body, and of the medicines that improve the health of children.

Callicles is a great interlocuter to Socrates here, and gives what feels like a proto-Nietzschean argument regarding the natural right of the better to take a greater share of society and pursue pleasure, with its stifling in 'self-satisfaction' being nothing more than the life of a stone or a corpse, and a kind of moralising by the weak and many who create the artificial laws of the polis. But Socrates gets even Callicles to admit that there are good kinds of pleasure and bad kinds of pleasure, and so one might conclude that pleasure is subordinate to, or a means to, the good. This ties in with the important question of whether it is worse to inflict injustice or to suffer injustice, a question all the more pertinent if you really do have the power to inflict injustice. "For it is a difficult thing Callicles, and one that merits much praise, to live your whole live justly when you've found yourself having ample freedom to do what's unjust." All in all, a great dialogue.

I just re-read Plato’s Gorgias. This time, I read the translation done by James H Nichols, Jr. It was recommended by a friend.

Gorgias is a tremendously nuanced and layered dialogue. But it is also fair to say that it is the dialogue that presents Socrates' extended argument that it is worse to inflict an injustice than to suffer an injustice. (Spoiler: inflicting an injustice damages one’s soul. Suffering an injustice does not.)

I recommend Gorgias for readers of all stripes.

Sacrilegious though it surely is to give Plato such a low rating, Gorgias reminded me of why I disliked reading the Socratic dialogues in school. The content is good but the pace of the argument is awfully slow. One feels that Socrates could have used at least 20% fewer words without conceding his thoroughness.

Great.
A superb and entertaining crash course on rhetoric. One can only dream of having the swift and skillful rhetoric of Socrates.

Important dialogue on ethics. Also the early roots of later Stoic philosophy, perhaps? Socrates insists, correctly, that it is better to suffer evil than to do it, and that the free-est man is one who is master over himself. He insists this against his opponent Callicles, who claims that the one who is his own master is still a slave, and that all desires and passions should be satisfied without delay or moral consideration. He espouses the idea too that the strong have a right to exert themselves over the weak, and that this right is natural. "Social Darwinism" and eugenics, really. The more things change the more they stay the same.

I am giving this long-winded and dim-witted work three stars on the Platonic scale because it is vastly inferior to the six other works that I have read by Plato (i.e. "The Republic", "The Symposium" and the four dialogues on the death of Socrates.) As part of the overall Platonic corpus, "Gorgias" would be worth five stars.
The nominal subject of "Gorgias" is rhetoric which Gorgias makes a living teaching. Plato spends the two-thirds of the work pages making two points: (1) rhetoric is not a science having a concrete subject (such as physics or medicine) but it is simply a group of techniques for persuasion; and (2) in practice rhetoric reduces to flattering the audience and as such is fundamentally dishonest. The problem is not that Plato is wrong that he takes too long to make his case.
The final third of "Gorgias" is devoted to the thesis that it is worse to the perpetrator of an injustice than it is to be the victim of an injustice. I am in agreement with this idea which is central to both Platonism and to Christianity. My complaint is that Plato presents this idea better elsewhere.

This is my introduction to ancient literature, and a spectacular one at that. I did not expect to be engaged in Socrates’ flawless arguments, repetitive yet ingenious questioning, and shockingly relevant message about the duty of the authentic rhetorician and politician- to make people better and lead communities with virtue and self-discipline instead of indulging their audience in flattery. Although that is the main thread of the dialogue, the “rabbit trail” arguments about justice, self-restraint, and the definition of rhetoric were fascinating, as well. Every person who aspires to become proficient in rhetoric or who wishes to run for public office needs to read this. And although I don’t want to get into politics here, by considering Plato’s definition of a good politician, it really shouldn’t require deep thinking to know that, ahem… today’s politicians across all spectrums don’t meet that definition.

nunca he sufrido más con un libro

We should devote all our own and our community's energies towards ensuring the presence of justice and self-discipline, and so guaranteeing happiness.

So Socrates wanted to make Athens great again and along the way gave the pundits and consultants the what for. His argument is measured and allows the three stooges to defeat their own assertions in fits of bumbling exasperation. The virtues of work and health are explored with nary a word about the lamp above the Golden Door. This notion of moderation was embraced during the Enlightenment but has recently fell from grace Quoting The Tick, Evil wears every possible mitten. That said the argument of the good, the moral hinges here on a tiny necessity, the afterworld , a world of never ending happiness, you can always see the sun, day or night.

Well the current corruption of these words Good and Great have launched their own raid on the Dialogues. Plato asserts most of politics is flattery and power. Socrates knew that and wound up on a state sponsored trip across the Styx.

All we can do is resist. Resist.

This is one of Plato's more interesting dialogues, if only because in this case the dialogue breaks down. Callicles just cannot seem to accept Socrates's notion that it is better to have evil done to oneself than to commit evil. He agrees with the questions which are put to him, but then he keeps going back to the notion that hedonism is really preferable to morality.

Socrates even looks forward to his own trial and death. At one point, he says:

You've already told me often enough that anyone who wants to have me executed will do so. Don't make me repeat my reply that it would be a bad man killing a good man, And don't go on about how he'll confiscate all my property, because otherwise I'll have to repeat myself and say: "He may take it, but it'll do him no good. He was wrong to take it, so he'll only put it to wrong use, which is contemptible -- or, in other words, bad for him."

Actually, besides Callicles, here are two other participants in the dialogue, namely the eponymous Gorgias and Polus, especially at the beginning.

It is curious that a dialogue that begins on the subject of rhetoric turns into one on the importance of being a good and moral person and encouraging others to be so.