- Lived:
- c. 483–375 BCE · born in Leontini, Sicily; taught all over the Greek world
- Tradition:
- Greek Sophist; the first great theorist of persuasion — and the most radical skeptic of the ancient world
- The Big Idea:
- Truth may be unreachable and unsayable — but speech is a power in its own right, working on the soul the way a drug works on the body.
- In their words:
- "Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the smallest and most invisible body accomplishes the most godlike works."
- If you remember one thing:
- Gorgias argued — brilliantly, and maybe half-jokingly — that nothing exists, that nothing could be known even if it did, and that nothing could be communicated even if it were known. Then he spent a century getting rich proving the third claim wrong.