This book concentrates on the conversation between Socrates and Gorgias which takes place in the first part of Plato's Gorgias. Scholars writing on the Gorgias have tended to concentrate on the following two conversations held by Socrates with Polus and, especially, with Callicles. This first, relatively short, conversation is usually taken to be a kind of preface coming before Plato's 'real' philosophy. The present study challenges this assumption, arguing that the conversation between Socrates and Gorgias actually anticipates the message of the whole dialogue, which concerns the essence of rhetoric and its implications.

The book moves along two parallel lines. One is philological, presenting a painstaking analysis of the conversation between Socrates and Gorgias, and revealing a Socratic technique so far undetected - 'the associative-terminological method' - by which Socrates tries to teach Gorgias. The second line arising from the analysis pertains to rhetoric itself, which is found to be the first formal, and consequently neutral art. That is to say that rhetoric, in its role as a new art, effectively modifies the very notion of 'art'. One of its main consequences is a new answer to the question 'who is to blame for misusing art?' Until this dialogue there had been only two possible answers - the teacher or the student. Now with the entrance of rhetoric into the family of arts, as a formal and neutral art, rhetoric itself becomes a legitimate candidate.

Yosef Z. Liebersohn, Senior Lecturer in Ancient History and Philosophy at Bar-Ilan University, is the author of The Dispute concerning Rhetoric in Hellenistic Thought (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), and has published articles on Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Epicurus.

Cover: Socrates and Plato in a medieval picture.