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Fascinating stuff. In "Gorgias," Socrates talks to an orator, convincing him that oratory isn't that great because either you need to be an expert in other fields or a liar to be good at it. Then some rambunctious people take over the discussion for the orator, saying that all power is good (one of them sounds like a more lucid Nietzsche or a more profound Trump) to which Socrates says that doing wrong to others is the worst thing you can do against yourself, finishing that maneuver off in affir...
I read both Plato's Gorgias and Plato's Phaedrus each semester for my Rhetoric in Western Thought classes and I use Plato's Phaedrus each time I teach undergraduate or graduate classes on Persuasion. Plato is interesting and intriguing. He is literary, poetic, and uses the dialectical interactions as ways to interest the reader and keep them wondering what is going on--at least somewhat. Students regularly seem frustrated because Plato, even in an English translation, is not easy to discern. He