A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology. By various writers. Ed. by William Smith. Illustrated by numerous engravings on wood.

~ GORGIAS. GORGIAS. 283
GORGE (r6p-v), a daughter of Oeneus and have no trace of an earlier journey, we must reject
Althaea, and the wife of Andraemon. When Ar- the statement that the great Athenian statesman
temis metamorphosed her sisters into birds, on and the historian Thucydides were among his disaccount of their unceasing lamentations about their ciples. (Philostr. yit. Soph. p. 493, Epist. 13, p.
brother Meleager, Gorge and Deianeira alone were 919; comp. Dionys. Hal. Epist. ad Pomp. 2, Jud.
spared. (Anton. lib. 2; Ov. Met. viii. 532; de Tkiucyd. 24.) But his Sicilian oratory, in which
Apollod. i. 8. ~~ 3, 5.) According to Apollodorus, he is said to have excelled Tisias, who was at
she became the mother of Tydeus by her own Athens at the same time with him, perhaps as amfather. Her son Thoas led the Aetolians against bassador from Syracuse (Pans. vi. 7. ~ 8; Plat.
Troy. One of the Danaides likewise bore the Phaedr. p. 267), must have exercised a considername of Gorge. (Apollod. ii. 1. ~ 5.) [L. S.] able influence even upon eminent men of the time,
GO'RGIAS (rop-Tas), one of Alexander's offi- such as Agathon, the tragic poet, and the rhetoricers, was among those who were brought reluct- cian Isocrates. (Plat. Symnp. p. 198; Dionys.
antly from Macedonia by Amyntas, son of Andro- Hal. de Isocrat. 1, de Compos. Verb. 23; Isocrat.
menes, when he was sent home to collect levies in Panath. i. p. 334, ed. Lange.) Besides Polus, who
B. C. 332. (Curt. vii. 1, ad fin.; see Vol. I. p. 155, is described in such lively colours in the Gorgias of
b.) Gorgias was one of the commanders left by Plato, Alcibiades, Critias, Alcidamas, Aeschines,
Alexander in Bactria to complete the reduction of and Antisthenes, are called either pupils or imithe Bactrian insurgents, and to check further re- tators of Gorgias. (Philostr. p. 493, &c., comp. p.
bellion, while the king himself marched to quell 919; Dionys. de Isaeo, 19; Diog. Laert. ii. 63,
the revolt in Sogdiana, B. c. 328. (Arrian, Anab. vi. 1.)
iv. 16.) He accompanied Alexander in his Indian In his earlier years Gorgias was attracted,
expedition, and, together with Attalus and Me- though not convinced, by the conclusions to which
leager, commanded the mercenaries at the passage the Eleatics had come: but he neither attempted
of the Hydaspes against Porus in B. C. 326. (Arrian, to refute them, nor did he endeavour to reconcile
Aenab. v. 12; comp. Curt. viii. 13; Plut. Alex. 60; the reality of the various and varying phaenomena
Diod. xvii. 87, &c.) This is perhaps the same of the world with the supposition of a simple,
Gorgias whose name occurs in Justin (xii. 12) eternal, and unchangeable existence, as Empedoamong the veterans whom Alexander sent home cles, Anaxagoras, and the atomists had done. On
under Craterus in B. C. 324; and, in that case, he the contrary, he made use of the conclusions of the
must be distinguished from the Gorgias who is Eleatics, for the purpose of proving that there was
mentioned by Plutarch (Eum. 7) as one of the nothing which had any existence or reality; and in
officers of Eumenes in his battle against Craterus doing this he paid so much attention to externals,
and Neoptolemus in Cappadocia, in B.c. 321. [E.E.] and kept so evidently appearance alone in view,
GO'RGIAS (ropylas), of Leontini, a Chalci- instead of truth, that he was justly reckoned among
dian colony in Sicily, was somewhat older than the sophistS. His work, On Nature, or On that
the orator Antiphon (born in B. c. 480 or 479), which is not, in which he developed his views, and
and lived to such an advanced age (some say 105, which is said to have been written in B. c. 444
and others 109 years), that he survived Socrates, (Olympiod. in Plat. Gory. p. 567, ed. Routh.),
though probably only a short time. (Quintil. iii. i. seems to have been lost at an early time (it is
~ 9; comp. Xenoph. Anab. ii. 6. ~ 16; H. Ed. doubtful whether Galen, who quotes it, Opera, vol.
Foss, de Gorgia Leontino, Halle, 1828, p. 6, &c.; i. p. 56, ed. Gesner, actually read it); but we
J. Geel, Histor. Crit. Sophistarum, in the Nova possess sufficient extracts from it, to form a definite
ActaLiteraria SoietatisRheno-Trajectinae, ii. p. 14.) idea of its nature. The work de Xenoph. Gorgia
The accounts which we have of personal collisions et Melisso, ascribed to Aristotle or Theophrastus,
between Gorgias and Plato, and of the opinion contains a faithful and accurate account of it, though
which Gorgias is said to have expressed respecting the text is unfortunately very corrupt: Sextus
Plato's dialogue Gorgias (Athen. xi. p. 505), are Empiricus (adv. Math/. vii. 65, &c.) is more superdoubtful. We have no particular information re- ficial, but clearer. The book of Gorgias was
specting the early life and circumstances of Gorgias, divided into three sections: in the first he endeabut we are told that at an advanced age, in B. c. voured to show that nothing had any real exist427, he was sent by his fellow-citizens as ambas- ence; *in the second, that if there was a real
sador to Athens, for the purpose of soliciting its pro- existence,-it was beyond man's power to ascertain
tection against the threatening power of Syracuse. it; and in the third, that existence could not be
(Diod. xii. 53; Plat. Hipp. Maj. p. 282; Timaeus, communicated, even supposing that it was real and
ap. Dionys. Hal..Jud. Lys. 3.) He seems to have ascertainable. The first section, of which we have
returned to Leontini only for a short time, and a much more precise and accurate account in the
to have spent the remaining years of his vigorous Aristotelian work than in Sextus Empiricus, shows
old age in the towns of Greece Proper, especially on the one hand that things neither are nor are
at Athens and the Thessalian Larissa, enjoying not, because otherwise being and not being would be
honour everywhere as an orator and teacher of identical; and on the other hand, that if there
rhetoric. (Diod. 1. c.; Plut. de Socrat. Daem. 8; were existence, it could neither have come to be
Dionys. I. c.; Plut. Ilipp. Maj. p. 282, b., Gorg. nor not come to be, and neither be one nor many.
p. 449, b., Ml/eno, p. 71, Protag. pp. 309, 315; comp. The first of these inferences arises froman ambiFoss, p. 23, &c.) Siivern (Ueber Aristoph. V5gel, guity in the use of the term of existence; the
p. 26, in the Memoirs of the Royal Acad. of Berlin) second from the fact of Gorgias adopting the conendeavored to prove that Gorgias and his brother clusion of Melissus, which is manifestly wrong, and
Ilerodicus, a physician of some note, settled at according to which existence not having come to be
Athens, but there is not sufficient evidence for this is infinite, and-applying Zeno's argument against
opinion. As Gorgias did not go as ambassador to the reality of space-as an infinite has no existAthens till after the death of Pericles, and as we ence. Gorgias further makes baduse of another