Arts that work by speech
SocratesDo I understand, then, what kind of art you want to call it? I’ll soon know more clearly, though. But answer: we have arts. Isn’t it so?
GorgiasYes.
SocratesNow, of all the arts, I think, some consist mostly of work and need little speech, while some need none at all, but what the art does could be carried out even in silence—painting, for instance, and sculpture and many others. It is arts of this kind that you seem to me to be speaking of, the ones you say rhetoric is not concerned with. Or isn’t it?
GorgiasYes indeed, you take me quite rightly, Socrates.
SocratesBut there are other arts that do carry out everything through speech and need, so to speak, either no work besides or very little: arithmetic, for instance, and calculation and geometry, and even draughts, and many other arts; some of these have roughly as much speech as action, while most have more, and in general all their action and accomplishment is through speech. It is as one of these that you seem to me to speak of rhetoric.
GorgiasWhat you say is true.