This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1887 edition. Excerpt: ... PREFACE. The dialogue which occupies the larger part of this volume, although generally known by the name of the rhetorician Gorgias, sometimes bears the sub-title of Rhetoric. This latter may seem a strange designation for a work the aim of which is nothing less than to discover wherein happiness, or, what to Plato is a synonymous term, The Good, consists. But, as his great master had brought down philosophy from the "world of pure thought" to the daily haunts of men, -- to the street, the market-place, the public Assembly; so Plato deemed no subject so trivial that its relation to The Good might not profitably be ascertained, none so remote that it might not form a connecting link between men's daily lives and the universal object which "every soul pursues, and for the sake of which it does all that it does."1 Surely, then, the art which was more persistently and systematically cultivated than any other by the Athenians of the time of Socrates and Plato is no inappropriate heading to this search after "the best way of life." Chief among the causes contributing to the popularity of rhetoric or, as it has been defined, "the power of discerning every possible means of persuasion upon every subject " 2 was the recent establishment of dikasteries or courts of justice, in which large numbers of the citizens 1 Republic, 505 E. 3 Aristotle, Rhet. i. 2, p. 1355 b 26. were compelled to sit daily as jurymen. The necessity which was thus laid upon every Athenian to take an active interest in questions of law, and still more the innate love of litigation which rendered a summons before a tribunal a matter of frequent occurrence, naturally predisposed the public mind to listen with favour to teachers who promised to impart "the faculty of p