Gorgias of Leontini (483–375 BC): Pre-Socratic philosopher

Gorgias of Leontini was born in Sicily, where rhetoric has its roots. He was the son of Charmantides of whom nothing is known; his brother was the physician Herodikos. Gorgias' s sister was married to Deicrates, and she gave birth to a certain Hippokrates, whose son Eumolpos dedicated a statue of Gorgias at Olympia.

The tradition makes him a pupil of Empedocles, and receives some independent support from the reports of Plato and of Theophrastus on Gorgias’s holding Empedoclean a theories of the illumination of the sun and of optics and color.

Philostratus, a second- (or third-) rate writer of later antiquity, reports that Gorgias is the man ‘to whom we believe the craft of the sophists is to be traced back as it were to its father’.

It is possible that Gorgias had firsthand knowledge of events that took place during the Persian wars, and he was an old man at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War; he contributed to and witnessed the evolution of Greek science.

In his extant texts Gorgias claims that language does not represent external objects or communicate internal states, but merely generates behavioural responses in people. It has been argued that this perspective erodes the possibility of rationally assessing speeches by making persuasiveness the only norm, and persuasive power the only virtue, of speech.
Gorgias of Leontini (483–375 BC): Pre-Socratic philosopher