Is <i>Gorgias</i> an Early Draft of an Unfinished Dialogue?

Abstract

The argument that Gorgias is an early draft rests on non-literary considerations. The location of the conversation of the interlocutors in our Gorgias is indeterminate. The content of the participants’ speeches are the core of Plato’s dialogues and would naturally have been composed first. Supplying a physical location for the discussions would have been a secondary task. Unlike Gorgias, in all early and middle period Platonic dialogues, the locations of the conversations and even the bodily posture of the interlocutors are specified with the possible exception of Meno regarding location. There is a second compositional device peculiar to Plato’s dialogues, namely the insertion of dramatic incidents and/or remarks which correspond to specific topics addressed in Socrates’ speeches and in those of his interlocutors elsewhere in a dialogue, sometimes confirming and sometimes refuting a specific opinion. Like the specifications of the location of the conversations, these too would have been worked into dialogues after the speeches were composed. In Gorgias, there are two incomplete instances of this literary device at 487c1–d2 and 471d5–10. Tied in knots by Socrates’ elenchus, Callicles goes so far as to endorse a life of unfettered gluttony, which is in contradiction with his intention to be a mover and shaker in Athenian politics. The latter ambition is incompatible with the life-style of a glutton. No less contradictory is Callicles’ opinion that individually weak citizens, but collectively strong, whom he terms a “motley pack of slaves and a random assortment of worthless men,“ set down the nomoi of what is just and the sympathy he expresses for the unjust strongman and, on the other hand, the information supplied by Socrates that Callicles is a lover of the dēmos and obeys its every whim. Why then did Plato never return to the task of specifying the location of the conversations and providing the missing details of the significant incidents? Writers report that characters in their books sometimes acquire a kind of fictional autonomy of action and speech seemingly independent of the author’s intention. This effect seems to have occurred in Gorgias: Callicles’ core opinions radically contradict one another and as they stood could not be reconciled, in contrast to Socrates’ interlocutors in every other dialogue whose opinions are non-contradictory and of a piece. In all the other dialogues, Plato was interested in types; the malleability of a person’s opinions and behavior, as are found in realistic novels, was a literary genre yet to be invented..