T his paper is an effort-which none of the characters in the dialogue maketo listen carefully to Socrates' most famous attack on rhetoric. This locus classicus is found in the Gorgias within the opening pages (461-466) of Socrates' conversation with Polus. In it he charges that rhetoric, Gorgias' skill, is a defective art and no more than base sucking up or flattery. He completes his condemnation by likening rhetoric, as Shakespeare's Faulconbridge does, a millennium and a half later, to sweet, sweet poison for the age's tooth, (King John, I, I), a debased confection in place of healthy food. It is not only characters in the dialogue who fail to make a searching inquiry into Socrates' condemnation. Many rhetors since that time, smarting from the sting of what Plato has Socrates say about rhetoric, have taken the passage as unproblematically expressing a blanket condemnation of rhetoric. But I believe it is not necessary to read Socrates' condemnation of rhetoric in that fashion, and I attempt a reading in which the condemnation is less absolute. In the interest of disclosure I should say that I undertake this analysis in an Aristotelian spirit. My interest in the passage began with Aristotle's allusion to it in the opening sentence of his Art of Rhetoric (1354a) and continues to be guided by what I believe Aristotle has to teach about rhetoric. It is also guided by a realization that Plato, a dramatic poet, achieves his effect, in dramas that have little overt action, almost entirely by rhetoric, that is, by the creation of a coherent voice through which we approach each character. Whatever Plato's ultimate understanding of the relation of wisdom and art (Roochnik), any argument that Plato has contempt for rhetoric must, sooner or later, deal with his constant and loving use of it in his work. The passage in question forms the first part-about a fifth of the bulk-of Socrates' dialogic encounter with Polus. This paper is thus limited to reflection on a fragmentary part of that encounter, for Socrates' condemnation of rhetoric emerges in four Stephanus pages. Nevertheless, it is a fragment that, like all of the pieces of a Platonic dialogue, spirals into place in the larger encounter and beyond that in the dialogue as a whole. I argue that our assessment of Socrates' argument is decisively affected by our grasp of the dramatic context in which it appears in several decisive ways. One obvious event that demands dramatic explanation is Polus' intervention in what had been a discussion between Gorgias himself and Socrates and his subsequent ineptness. Indeed, Polus is so inept that the pages barely qualify as part of a conversation, or at least a conversation with Polus. What we have is

New research into the pre-Socratic arts of discourse (technai log6n) has not only enriched our understanding but also increased our respect for the work that the great pre-Socratic thinkers did.1 In this paper I want to encourage a rereading of the texts of Plato and Aristotle with the results of this research in mind. If scholars would accept that Plato and Aristotle, at least some of the time, reflected an understanding and respect for the work of the sophists and rhetors similar to the one now emerging, the result might well be a new, fruitful, and richer reading of the texts of Plato and Aristotle. I believe that as a result, both Plato and Aristotle would emerge as more rhetorical and nuanced than they have been previously thought to be. This seems a strange expectation. First, it is well known that Aristotle, for example, seldom seems to allude to particular individuals who were sophists with anything but scorn. Certainly, when he uses the word sophist as a general term, it is used in a pejorative sense for the besetting vices of philosophy and philosophers: self-promotion through speech and victory at any cost in speech. Such usage is itself a reflection on those who claim the name as a serious description of their work.