Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust, online at

W.W. History of Philosophy. Net. Today's episode, Virtue meets its match,

Plato's Gorgias. Ancient philosophers spent a lot of time arguing about the nature of the good life.

One of their most abiding themes was the question of how to live.

In particular, they usually wanted to show us that the best way to live is to be virtuous.

But why be virtuous?

You could instead follow the example of, say, Arcalaeus, the king of Macedon,

who seized power by killing several of his family members, including his own seven-year-old half-brother, whom he tossed into a well and drowned.

Okay, that might sound a bit radical.

But can we really be sure that Arcalaeus made the wrong choice? He may have had blood on his hands, but those hands held the reins of power in a mighty state.

And let's be honest, we've all performed the odd misdeed to get what we want, so why not go for broke and perform these

most outrageous injustices if it will allow us to fulfill our desires, not just today,

but for the rest of our lives, exercising absolute power as a tyrant.

This is a central question posed in Plato's dialogues, and never with more urgency than in his

early masterpiece, the Gorgias.

We've already met the namesake of the dialogue in an earlier episode about the Sophists.

Gorgius was a teacher of rhetoric, and as you might recall from that episode,

the author of several works which still survive today,

and would show off his way with words, as well as his conviction that words have an almost

irresistible power.

You might also remember that Plato, in dialogue, pits Socrates against opponents who are Sophus and teachers of rhetoric.

We already saw an example last week in Plato's euthedemus, and the verbal sparring there is typical of these encounters,

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