Plato's charge that rhetoric was not an art, then, was somewhat analogous to the denial of a place among the sciences to sociology or psychology. Such a charge, even if unaccompanied by any implications concerning the doubtful morality of persuading ignorant multitudes, was enough to injure the subject.

In denying that rhetoric is an art, Plato gives it a place among the pseudo-arts. In the hierarchy of arts and pseudo-arts, the higher arts aim at the production, real or apparent, of permanent conditions; the lower, at the removal, real or apparent, of temporary derangements. Sophistry is distinguished from rhetoric and placed above it. Sophistry is an imitation of the statesman's art, which is higher than the art of the pleader, because the pleader only remedies miscarriages of justice, while the statesman has the opportunity to create permanent institutions which give society an organization based upon justice. We probably agree today in paying more honor to the statesman than to the trial lawyer. In the Gorgias, the sophist is the sham statesman; the rhetorician is the pleader who "makes the worse appear the better reason," and forgets justice in the winning of his case.

The second argument against rhetoric in the dialogue with Polus is that rhetoric, in spite of appearances, does not really confer power. People who do not know, in the philosophical sense (and Plato believed that very few could know anything in the philosophical sense), what is really good for them, have no power, for they are unable to do what they will. When they do evil, they are not doing what they will, for no one really wills to do evil; he only makes a mistake in the art of measuring. The Socratic belief that no man errs voluntarily is again the basis of the argument. The minor premise, that rhetoricians have not the philosophical insight to know what is really good for them, Plato believes may safely be assumed. The third and fourth assertions about rhetoric which Socrates established against Polus gain significance when considered in relation to the conditions of Athenian court procedure. With a jury of five hundred-somewhat predisposed to convict any wealthy man, since his goods would be at the disposal of the state-innocent persons were liable to be convicted on the flimsiest of charges. The size of the jury made oratory a much more important matter than evidence. This would make it quite as possible for the guilty to escape punishment, as for an innocent man to suffer at the hands of

his enemies. Any practical-minded person would therefore conclude that rhetoric was of great importance to the innocent as a protection against injury, and to the guilty as a means of avoiding a just penalty. Socrates, however, denies both of these claims, and advances his famous paradoxes in support of his argument. Rhetoric is not of great importance as a protection against suffering wrong; the really important thing is to keep oneself from doing wrong, for doing wrong is a greater evil than suffering wrong. The dialectic by which Socrates establishes this is hardly as noble as the conclusion which he reaches, but Polus is not able to offer any effective opposition. Again, rhetoric as a means of escaping punishment is of no great service, for the man who is punished for his injustice is happier than he who is not punished. This Socratic thesis is a matter of feeling and belief rather than of logical proof, but against Polus it was not difficult to establish dialectically. If it is honorable to inflict punishment on a guilty person, then it must be honorable to receive it. Punishment, as a deliverance of the soul from evil, should be welcomed by the guilty as a medicine.

When Polus seems to be hopelessly defeated, Callicles takes up the argument. In the discussion with him the argument turns more directly to the contrast of philosophy and rhetoric as ways of life. In the words of Socrates:

We are arguing about the way of human life; and what question can be more serious than this to a man who has any sense at all: whether he should follow after that way of life to which you exhort me, and truly fulfill what you call the manly part of speaking in the assembly, and cultivating rhetoric, and engaging in public affairs, after your manner; or whether he should pursue the life of philosophy, and in what this differs from the other.'

Callicles vigorously attacks philosophy, upholds rhetoric, and offers in its support the doctrine that might makes right, that justice is but an artificial convention invented by the many weak to protect themselves against the few strong, that the law of nature decrees that the strong should take what they can get, and that in a society full of conventions, rhetoric offers the strong man the means of getting what he wants. The Socratic argument in reply to this passes into the realm of ethics, and deals with the self-seeker as such, rather than merely with the rhetorician.

Socrates is disposed to admit that there might conceivably be a 1 Gorgias, 500.

true and noble art of rhetoric. The true rhetorician would attempt to improve the people, rather than to please them. He would attempt this, not only for the moral benefit of the people, but also because any process which does not improve souls is not really an art; it is an ignoble flattery. Among such flatteries are music, poetry, drama, and painting. They may occasionally improve the people, but for the most part they are to be viewed with distrust.

Although there might be a noble rhetoric, and true rhetoricians, none such have ever existed. All statesmen and rhetoricians of the past, even the best, such as Themistocles, Cimon, Miltiades, and Pericles, have failed to make the citizens any better.1 The proof of this is that the citizens treated these men very ungratefully and unjustly, which they would not have done if they had been taught justice by the statesmen. The professional teachers of rhetoric, even though the teaching of justice should be a part of the instruction in rhetoric, dare not trust their own pupils to treat them justly, for they exact a fee instead of leaving it to the pupil's sense of honor.

Socrates is further offended at the pretentiousness of rhetoric and rhetoricians. If rhetoric occasionally saves a life in courts of law, there are other life-saving arts which are equally important, and much more modest. A swimmer may save many lives, but he is not likely to boast that he practises the greatest of the arts. Or a pilot, if swimming seems to be a contemptible example, is also a great lifesaver. But he keeps his modesty. If he has any philosophy in him, he knows that some of the lives he has saved were probably not worth saving; but a rhetorician never seems to indulge himself in such sobering reflections.

Rhetoric destroys the integrity of a man's soul, for it involves conformity to the ways of the multitude. The philosopher, on the other hand, sees further:

The noble and the good may possibly be something different from saving and being saved, and that he who is truly a man ought not to care about living a certain time; he knows, as women say, that none can escape the day of destiny, and therefore he is not fond of life; he leaves all that with God, and considers in what way he can best spend his appointed term.'

Ælius Aristides, a sophist of the second century A.D., replied to the charges made against rhetoric in the Gorgias. One of his discourses is devoted to a defense of the four statesmen here attacked. For a discussion of this see André Boulanger, Elius Aristide et la sophistique dans la province d'Asie au IIe siècle de notre ère, Paris, 1923.

2 Gorgias, 512.

The dialogue closes with a myth of the after-world, in which the judgment that bestows rewards and punishments is not based upon appearances, as are the judgments won by the rhetoricians, but upon the true nature of the soul. The myth sums up the whole argument of the dialogue. The fundamental contrast is between appearances and reality; the rhetorician deals with appearances, the philosopher with reality.

In the Gorgias, the rhetoricians appear to be men bent upon getting on in the world. They seem to believe that an unjust man who escapes punishment, and practises his injustice on such a large scale that he is conspicuously successful, is a man to be envied and imitated. It is easy for us, made familiar with the doctrine that injustice is an evil, through the teachings of Plato, of the Stoics, and of Christianity, and accustomed at least to pay lip-service to it as a truism, to suppose that Plato was upholding the traditional righteousness against a peculiarly corrupt set of public teachers, the sophists and rhetoricians. It should be remembered, however, that public opinion in Athens was not with Plato. Instead of regarding Gorgias and Polus and Callicles as especially corrupt, we should regard Plato as the reforming philosopher, attacking public opinion through its prominent representatives. That Plato himself took this view is shown by his remark in the Republic that the youth are not corrupted by individual sophists, but by the public.1

It is also worthy of note that this attack upon rhetoric is itself a rhetorical triumph. The rhetoricians are ridiculed for their inability to reason closely, and to defend themselves against the dialectic of Socrates; but the triumph of the Platonic Socrates is not a triumph of logic over oratory. John Stuart Mill has put this clearly:

This great dialogue, full of just thoughts and fine observations on human nature, is, in mere argument, one of the weakest of Plato's works. It is not by its logic, but by its 0os that it produces its effects; not by instructing the understanding, but by working on the feelings and imagination. Nor is this strange; for the disinterested love of virtue is an affair of feeling. It is impossible to prove to any one Plato's thesis, that justice is supreme happiness, unless he can be made to feel it as such. The external inducements which recommend it he may be taught to appreciate; the favorable regards and good offices of other people, and the rewards of another life. These considerations, however, though Plato has recourse to them in other places,

are not available in the Gorgias. . . . It is the picture of the moral hero, still tenax propositi against the hostility and contempt of the world, which makes the splendor and power of the Gorgias. The Socrates of the dialogue makes us feel all other evils to be more tolerable than injustice in the soul, not by proving it, but by the sympathy he calls forth with his own intense feeling of it. He inspires heroism because he shows himself a hero. And his failures in logic do not prevent the step marked by the Gorgias from being one of the greatest ever made in moral culture.1

VII

The Phædrus, which has been described as a dramatized treatise on rhetoric, contains three speeches upon the general subject of love; one of which Plato introduces as the work of Lysias, a noted rhetorician of the day, and two of which are put into the mouth of Socrates. It is in a comparison of these speeches that Plato's ideas about rhetoric are expressed. At the close of the final speech upon love, delivered by Socrates, Phædrus expresses his admiring approval; he fears that Lysias, whose speech he had just read to Socrates, could not produce anything as good; indeed, he had already been reproached for his speech writing. Socrates remarks that it is not writing speeches, but writing them badly, that is disgraceful. This opens the way for a discussion of the entire practice of speaking and writing.

Socrates enunciates as the first rule of good speaking:

The mind of the speaker should know the truth of what he is going to say. . . . There never is nor ever will be a real art of speaking which is unconnected with the truth."

This rule of Socrates is contrasted with the prevalent conception of rhetoric. Rhetoric is usually considered to be an "art of enchanting the mind by arguments"; it has no concern with the nature of truth or justice, but only with opinions about them. Rhetoric draws its persuasive power, not from truth, but from harmony with public opinion. This conception of rhetoric, however, Plato thinks inadequate. The objection here is not, as is often stated, from high moral motives. In the Gorgias and elsewhere it is stated that the 1Op. cit., IV, 291, 292.

2

'Plato had no doubt that a philosopher could easily outdo a rhetorician at his own art. He wrote the Menexenus in order to satirize the conventional funeral oration and to show how easily a philosopher could dash off such a speech.

3

3 Phædrus, 259.