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Plato's Treatment of Callicles in the ‘Gorgias’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

G. B. Kerferd
G. B. Kerferd
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Extract

Three main views have been put forward as attempts to answer the question what were the political affiliations of Callicles in Plato's Gorgias. According to one view Callicles is seen as the very archetype of the tyrant and the oligarch, a man prepared to indulge in himself an unbridled lust for power, the absolute antithesis of the democrat and all that democracy stands for, giving expression to a doctrine, in the words of Grote, ‘not simply anti-popular – not simply despotic – but the drunken extravagance of despotism’. This view was associated with repeated attempts to identify Callicles with one or other of the known oligarchs in the fifth century – Critias being the favourite. Such attempts are now generally abandoned. But the overall view of Callicles' doctrine probably remains the orthodox one, at least in the English-speaking world, and the comparison with Nietzsche and Carlyle has become commonplace.

According to a second view, however, the opposite is the case – Callicles was not aristocratic, oligarchic or tyrannical in his views, rather he was a democrat, indeed even ‘the typical Athenian democrat’. Finally it is possible to distinguish a third view, according to which initially Callicles is presented as a champion of absolutism but is shown as undergoing ‘a strange transformation’ in the course of the dialogue to a position more in accord with ‘the growing love of equality’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 20 , 1974 , pp. 48 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

1 History of Greece (1883 ed.), VII. 193Google Scholar.

2 Thus Dodds, E. R., Plato: Gorgias (Oxford, 1959), p. 282Google Scholar; Guthrie, W. K. C., History of Greek philosophy, III (Cambridge, 1969), p. 102Google Scholar; Kagan, Donald, The great dialogue (New York, 1965), pp. 126–7Google Scholar; Friedländer, P., Plato, I (London, 1958), p. 142Google Scholar; Crombie, I. M., An examination of Plato's doctrines, I (London, 1962), p. 248Google Scholar.

3 Lamb, W. R. M., introduction to the Gorgias in the Loeb Plato, p. 252Google Scholar. For other expressions of this view see Burnet, J., Greek philosophy: Thales to Plato (London, 1914), p. 120Google Scholar; Wilamowitz, , Platon, I (Berlin, 1920 2), p. 211Google Scholar; Untersteiner, M., The Sophists (Eng. tr.), p. 328Google Scholar; Levi, A., Storia della Sofistica (Naples, 1966), pp. 40–1Google Scholar. According to Raeder, Hans, Platons philosophische Entwickelung (1920 2), pp. 117–18Google Scholar, Callicles' affinities are not with oligarchy but with tyranny, ‘die natürliche Fortsetzung’ of democracy.

4 Gomperz, Theodor, Greek thinkers (Eng. tr.), I. 406–7Google Scholar.