What to advise the city on
SocratesCome now, let’s see what on earth we are actually saying about rhetoric: for my part, not even I myself can yet make out what I am saying. Whenever the city holds a gathering about choosing doctors, or shipbuilders, or some other body of craftsmen, isn’t it that the rhetorician will give no advice then? For clearly, in every choice, one must choose the man most skilled in the art. Nor will he when it concerns the building of walls or the construction of harbours or dockyards—it will be the master builders; nor again when there is advice to be given about choosing generals, or drawing up troops against the enemy, or seizing positions: then it is those versed in generalship who will give advice, and the rhetoricians will not. Or what do you say to such things, Gorgias?
For since you say that you are an orator yourself and that you make others rhetoricians, it’s only right to find out from you about what belongs to your own art. And consider that I am now furthering your interest too: for perhaps someone here indoors does in fact want to become your pupil, as I notice some—a good many, I’d almost say—who would perhaps be ashamed to question you. So when you are questioned by me, consider that you are being questioned by them as well: “What will we get, Gorgias, if we keep company with you? What will we be able to advise the city about? Only about the just and the unjust, or also about the things Socrates was speaking of just now?” So try to answer them.
GorgiasWell, Socrates, I will try to unveil for you clearly the whole power of rhetoric; for you yourself have shown the way well. For surely you know that these dockyards and the Athenians’ walls and the construction of the harbours came about on the advice of Themistocles, and some of them on Pericles’, and not on the craftsmen’s.