Subscribe to Read | $0.00
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Read Anywhere and on Any Device!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
Translation by Douglas Malcolm MacDowell. Original text included with commentary and notes.
A marvelous rhetorical approach by Gorgias Leontinus who tries to defend Helen (the beautiful woman because of whom it's said that Trojan War started). This book is reported as an essay for the nature and the power of oration. What is so interesting here is that he uses familiar -for people of ancient times- examples to prove how "vision" can play a major role for people's decisions. Vision called "όψις" in ancient Greek, is what triggered Helen to follow Paris whose beauty is has been known eve...
"Sacred incantations sung with words are bearers of pleasure and banishers of pain, for, merging with opinion in the soul, the power of the incantation is wont to beguile it and persuade it and alter it with witchcraft. There have been discovered two arts of witchcraft and magic: one consists of errors of the soul and the other of deceptions of opinion. All who have and do persuade people of things do so by holding a false argument. For if all men on all subjects had both memory of things past
“How then can the blame of Helen be considered just? Whether she did what she did, invaded by love, persuaded by speech, impelled by force or compelled by divine necessity, she escapes all blame entirely.”When we think of classical Greek philosophy, we think of Socrates and Plato (men we call proper philosophers) and anyone who thought before them we call Sophists. Now a sophist in ancient Greece was simply a teacher, who taught rhetoric, art, sometimes mathematics, and other subjects to the Ath...
One of the perks of having children in college is that I have been exposed to lots of great works of writing that I missed in my youth. My youngest is an auditory learner and a classics major, so I have spent countless hours reading writings from the ancient world to him. Many of the works of ancient Greeks and Romans have been lost forever or are only known because other writers have paraphrased their work. Gorgias was luckier than that. He was a Sophist of the 5th century BCE and four of his w...
While the text was good, not only did this edition have a facing translation for every single page(!), but it also had some typos in the Greek. Commentary was fairly lacking as well, and the only reason this is higher than one-two stars is because Gorgias himself is just a joy to read :)
Read for class
Para um livro deste género, gostei bastante. Foi uma leitura interessante. No entanto, não sei se teria gostado tanto deste livro se não o tivesse estudado e aprofundado em aula.
Per a mi, Helena, es uno de os personajes que ha dado más juego a la hora de trabajar la historia antigua. No hablo de si desencadenar el conflicto de Troya -o ser el pretexto de eso- tiene orígen en un acto heroico, romántico, covarde o consentido... Hablo de que se han escrito textos tan preciosos como éste a partir de esta história...
Haha I love Gorgias-- he's hilarious. Don't agree with any of his nihilism or anything, but Encomium of Helen is fun&short read.
A pretty easy read, but his style is quite artificial so it makes it an awkward read sometimes. A good text to springboard discussion about many aspects of Ancient Greek thought.
