to minds of a particular quality in speculative moments.
The ordinary human comment upon it is given by Plato in that last moment of intolerable strain, when Phaedo veils his face, and Crito starts to his feet, and "Apollodorus, who had never ceased weeping all the time, burst out in a loud and angry cry which broke down every one but Socrates."
As for the Gorgias, it seems to fulfil a prophecy put into the mouth of Socrates in the Apology: "You have killed me because you thought to escape from giving an account of your lives. But you will be disappointed. There are others to convict you, accusers whom I held back when you knew it not; they will be harsher inasmuch as they are younger, and you will wince the more." The Gorgias is full of the sting of recent suffering. It begins by an inquiry into the nature of Rhetoric; it ends as an indictment of all 'rhêtores' and politicians and the whole public life of Athens. Rhetoric is to realstatesmanship as cookery is to medicine; it is one of the arts of pleasing or 'flattery.' There are two conceivable types of statesman: the true counsellor, who will oppose the sovereign when he goes wrong; and the false, who will make it his business from childhood to drink in the spirit of the sovereign, to understand instinctively all his likes and dislikes. He will be the tyrant's favourite, or the great popular leader, according to circumstances, but always and everywhere a mere flatterer, bad and miserable. "He will kill your true counsellor, anyhow," retorts Callicles, the advocate of evil, "if he gives trouble!" "As if I did not know that," answers Socrates — "that a bad man can kill a good!" Callicles admits that all existing politicians are of the worse type, imitators of the sovereign, but holds that Themistocles and Kimon and Pericles were true
