Excerpt from The Influence of Isocrates on Cicero, Dionysius and Aristides Gorgias on the other hand was first of all a rhetorician. Such philosophical principles as he possessed were of a negative rather than a positive character. His study of eristic was hardly a serious pursuit; rather a means for maintaining paradoxes to amuse his audience. He ridiculed the sophists who Claimed to teach virtue. To him Persuasion was the end of all education, the source of all power. Persuasion enables its possessor to control all men, and therefore is the best preparation for the chemo: fiios. With this as his theory he concentrated all his energy on the technique of rhetoric as the instrument of Persuasion, and particularly on the development of the graces of style. By including epideictic with forensic oratory as the object of his teaching, and by introducing the devices of poetry into prose he prepared the way for large changes in the field of rhetoric. But in every thing except form Gorgias was weak. It was the brilliancy of his style rather then the content of his speeches which won for him the immediate applause of Athens. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.