Gorgias, Encomium of Helen in the English

Gorgias, Encomium of Helen

In the English language in the twenty-first century, the term "sophistry" still exists to refer to a plausible-sounding but misleading argument, an evaluatively negative term to describe bad reasoning. Although the term derives from the original Sophists in Athens in the 5th century BCE, the modern usage of the term is inaccurate in describing the likes of the Sophist Gorgias. By examining Gorgias' "Encomium of Helen" and the related "dissoi logoi" fragment (sometimes attributed to Protagoras) we can see the real origins of sophistry in legal argumentation. In a society -- like that of Athens, or like most of the contemporary world -- that believes in jury trials as a means of obtaining justice, a work like Gorgias' "Encomium of Helen" represents the idea that even the most unlikely candidates deserve a good defense.

Athenian sophists like Gorgias were basically teachers of rhetoric. Because Plato frequently depicted them as antagonists of Socrates, they are largely remembered negatively. However it is important to understand the Sophists within their historical context. To employ rhetoric skillfully, then as now, was a useful practice -- the chief example I would suggest bearing in mind is that of a trial by jury. We might consider the "dissoi logoi" fragment with this in mind. "Dissoi logoi" literally means, in classical Greek, "different words" or "different reasonings." And the fragment sets up the idea of logical argument as being not a unitary path to truth, but a question of different perspectives: the fragment translated literally states that "First it can be said that every object has two sides being certainly contrary to each other" (54). Williams, however, paraphrases this much more subversively as: "There are two arguments in every question, and both are true" (54). From a Platonic standpoint, this is dangerous, because there can be no such thing as two truths that stand in direct contradiction to each other. But in real-world practice, this makes perfect sense when we consider that opposing sides in a jury trial would each be permitted to make a speech, which would obviously have contradictory goals (either arguing for guilt or innocence).

This brings us to Gorgias' model for sophistic rhetoric in the "Encomium of Helen." It is important to recall that Helen of Troy was a byword for bad behavior in classical Athens. Helen was, of course, the cause of the Trojan War, when she threw over her rather boring husband Menelaus of Sparta for the young and beautiful prince Paris of Troy. Given the genuinely religious role that Homer's epics played in Athenian life, Helen might be understood as occupying a role not unlike that of Eve or Satan in the Book of Genesis: she is the most salient example of seductive bad behavior in the most culturally-central text that the Athenians had. Yet Helen had her defenders as well: the poet Stesichorus had written a standard denunciation of Helen, but then was struck blind by the gods, until he composed a retraction of his denunciation, and the dramatist Euripides offered a largely sympathetic portrayal of a post-Trojan-War Helen in a tragedy named for her. Gorgias' choice of topic, therefore, is not unlike a modern Christian law student being asked to serve literally as "devil's advocate" and compose a legal defense for the actions of the serpent in the Book of Genesis. An "encomium" is literally a work of formal praise, extolling the virtues of a person -- but to offer an encomium of Helen of Troy was, in Gorgias' time, an almost paradoxical notion. This is not a traditional encomium, because Gorgias must concede that its listeners are unlikely to think an encomium is possible for the subject. As Williams notes of the "Encomium of Helen," "although finding an equivalent case as a basis of comparison is difficult, we might consider the reaction today to an enthusiastic defense of Adolf Hitler" (64).

What is most fascinating, however, about Gorgias' "Encomium" is that Gorgias is well-aware of the perverse or paradoxical element in what he is doing. In trying to offer a legal defense of Helen, he in fact suggests that she herself might have been swayed by deceptive rhetoric:

….if it was speech which persuaded her and deceived her heart, not even to this is it difficult to make an answer and to banish blame as follows. Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity….All who have and do persuade people of things do so by molding a false argument. (Gorgias 65)