GORGIAS (c. B.C.), Greek sophist and rhetorician, was a native of Leontini, Sicily. In 427 he headed an embassy to ask Athenian protection against the Syracusans. He subsequently settled in Athens, and supported himself by oratory and by teach ing rhetoric. He died at Larissa, Thessaly. His chief claim to rec ognition consists in the fact that he transplanted rhetoric to Greece, and contributed to the diffusion of the Attic dialect as the language of literary prose. He was the author of a lost work On Nature or the Non-existent HEpi -rov µl ovros crepe 4va€Cws (fragments ed. by M. C. Valeton, 1876), the substance of which may be gathered from the writings of Sextus Empiricus, and also from the treatise (ascribed to Theophrastus) De Melisso, Xeno phane, Gorgia. Gorgias is the central figure in Plato's Gorgias. The genuineness of two rhetorical exercises (The Encomium of Helen and The Defence of Palamedes, ed. with Antiphon by F. Blass 1881) is disputed.
For his philosophy see SOPHISTS and SCEPTICISM. See also Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, Eng. trans. vol. i.; Jebb's Attic Orators, introd. to vol. i. (1893) ; F. Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit, i. (1887) ; and article RHETORIC.