Gorgias shares with his friend Protagoras the glory and guilt of selling rhetoric to the world. Protagoras concluded that he was wasting his time trying to sound the secrets of the universe in a short lifetime, burned his books in the marketplace, and turned to teaching rhetoric, achieving the immortal fame of being the first man to make a hundred minas at the trade. His famous dictum that man is the measure of all things led only too easily to the rhetorical gospel that anything goes, "the Philistine morality" which in the end destroyed Greek civilization. (Hugh Nibley, "Victoriosa Loquacitas," CWHN 10:246-47.)
Monday, June 24, 2013
Nibley on Rhetoric II
More on the development of rhetoric from Hugh Nibley:
