Episode 7: Plato vs. the Sophists: Rhetoric, Power, and the Making of Callicles

Plato vs. the Sophists: Rhetoric, Power, and the Making of Callicles

Who is Callicles, and why does he still matter?

He appears only once in the whole of Western philosophy — in a single Platonic dialogue written around 380 BCE. In 1959, the classicist Prof. E.R. Dodds proposed in his commentary on the Gorgias that some of Nietzsche's most notorious doctrines — the will to power, the critique of slave morality, the coming of the strong man — were inspired not by the philosopher who speaks through Socrates, but by the anti-Plato buried within Plato: Callicles by name.1 The claim proved contested. By 2021, scholars were still publishing systematic refutations of it. Whatever one makes of the Nietzsche parallel, the debate confirms that the argument Callicles voices has not been settled.

That argument, as Callicles states it at Gorgias 483c–484a, is this: justice is a story the weak tell to restrain the strong, and what we call civic progress is actually the suppression of natural superiority dressed in the language of equality. This episode asks where that argument comes from and what Plato does with it.

Episode 7 is the second of two episodes examining Plato’s counter-attack on the Sophist theory of civic progress. Where Episode 6 traced Plato’s positive vision — the philosopher’s ascent from the Cave toward genuine knowledge — this episode examines his critical case: that Sophist education, built on the art of persuasion rather than philosophy, does not produce better citizens. It instead produces Callicles. The argument moves across two dialogues. In the Meno, as Prof. W.K.C. Guthrie argues,2 the question of whether virtue can be taught leads Socrates to a conclusion that undermines the Sophist programme at its core. In the Gorgias, as Prof. E.R. Dodds demonstrates,3 Plato stages that conclusion dramatically — three interlocutors assert that rhetoric is not a path to civic virtue but to power, with its most controversial advocate found in the character Callicles.

The episode’s core claim, as Prof. George Klosko argues,4 is that Callicles is not Plato’s caricature of a bad student. He is what the Sophist programme produces when it works — when the tools of rhetorical education are applied consistently by a man of raw political ambition who is not constrained by philosophy. That is Plato’s indictment: not that Sophist education fails, but that when it succeeds, Callicles is what it produces.

Key Moment 1 — Can Virtue Be Taught? The Question That Undoes the Sophist Promise

The Meno opens with a deceptively simple question: can virtue be taught? For the Sophists, the answer had to be yes — their entire civic programme depended on it. Rhetoric, properly mastered, would make men better citizens and through them a better city. As Prof. W.K.C. Guthrie traces in his commentary,2 Socrates leads Meno through a series of examinations that dismantle this assumption. If virtue were a form of knowledge, it could be taught, yet he saw no evidence that there were teachers to do so. Socrates concluded that virtue, if it exists, must arrive through something closer to divine dispensation. This removes the entire philosophical foundation on which the Sophist theory of civic progress rests.

Key Moment 2 — Three Interlocutors, One Argument — What Callicles Says That Gorgias Would Not

Prof. Dodds observed that the Gorgias is structured as a dramatic progression in candour.3 Gorgias presents rhetoric as a neutral technical skill — powerful but morally indifferent. His student Polus goes further: he claims that rhetoric serves power, but does not justify its use. Callicles stakes the strongest position. He takes the Sophist tools — the mastery of persuasion, the priority of political success — and applies them without the qualifications his teachers required. What Gorgias concealed and Polus half-admitted, Callicles states as a principle: the strong not only have the right to rule but the obligation to do so.4 Rhetoric is the tool they deploy.

Key Moment 3 — Where Does Callicles Fit? Three Readings, No Clean Answer

Drawing on Prof. Tyson Retz’s framework of Progress as a curatorial lens, Callicles resists easy categorisation. One reading places him in Retz’s first category, No Progress: he has no collective telos, no arc for the polis, no direction society is supposed to be moving toward. The strong man takes what nature entitles him to, now. A second reading pushes him toward Retz’s fifth category, Anti-Progress: Callicles has absorbed the Sophist civic programme and is actively repudiating it. A third reading, developed within the Sophist rehabilitation tradition,5 finds in Callicles a modern conception of progress: a forwardly directed vision in which the naturally superior man, freed from convention, must realise his full capacities. Which of these readings one attributes to Callicles is not a question this episode resolves. It is a question the episode leaves open.

Connecting the Dots

Episode 7 completes the arc that Episode 5 opened. In Episode 5, the Sophists presented their case: human beings had progressed from primitive conditions through the accumulation of technē — skill or practical knowledge. This progress could be extended through education, and through the teaching of rhetoric. Episode 6 introduced Plato’s opposition to this claim: genuine knowledge cannot be transmitted like a craft he argued, and the philosopher who ascends toward it is not a process that the Sophists can replicate. Episode 7 closes the argument at the level of politics. The question turns to what civic education produces — and Callicles is Plato’s answer.

Callicles is also where the series’ central question sharpens. As Prof. G.B. Kerferd establishes,6 the Sophist tradition built its theory of progress on technē — the idea that teachable skill drives human advancement. Callicles is what that tradition inevitably produces when technē is applied to power without moral constraint. He is not an aberration but the expected outcome. That problem — of technical mastery deployed without moral warrant — does not end in fifth-century Athens. Episode 8 asks where Plato’s institutional answer to Callicles leads, and whether the founding bet he made in establishing the Academy holds.

Connection to Notions of Progress

Notions of Progress traces how human beings have understood their own capacity for advancement — and Callicles poses a challenge that cuts to the centre of that question. He does not reject progress. He reframes it: progress for whom, on whose terms, and justified by what. This episode surfaces that challenge through the scholarship rather than resolving it. Which of the three readings one brings to Callicles — No Progress, Anti-Progress, or a conception of progress that Prof. Dodds finds echoed in Nietzsche himself — is a question the listener is invited to hold.

For Further Reading

Primary Sources

Plato. Gorgias, 447a–527e. The full dialogue, with the Callicles exchange at 481b–527e as the essential reading. The three-interlocutor structure — Gorgias, Polus, Callicles — is the dramatic spine of this episode’s argument. Any standard translation serves; the Cooper and Zeyl translation in the Hackett Complete Works is recommended.

Plato. Meno, 87c–100b. The concluding section of the dialogue, where Socrates arrives at the conclusion that virtue cannot be taught. Read before the Gorgias to feel the full weight of what the Sophist programme is being measured against.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols, “What I Owe the Ancients,” §2. The passage in which Nietzsche identifies Thucydides as his cure for Platonism and locates the Sophists as the culture of the Realists. Cited by section number — edition-independent.

Further Context

Dodds, E.R. Plato: Gorgias. Oxford University Press, 1959. The authoritative commentary on the dialogue. The Introduction addresses the historicity of Callicles — whether Plato invented him or drew on a real figure — and the Appendix, “Socrates, Callicles, and Nietzsche” (p. 387), makes the case for reading Nietzsche as Callicles’ intellectual heir. That claim has been contested, but Dodds remains the essential starting point for anyone who wants to understand why Callicles has refused to stay in the fifth century.

Klosko, George. The Development of Plato’s Political Theory. Oxford University Press, 2006, Ch. IV, pp. 39–54. The argument that Callicles is not Plato’s caricature of a bad student but the coherent endpoint of the Sophist civic programme. Klosko’s reading is the scholarly foundation for this episode’s central claim.

Guthrie, W.K.C. A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. IV. Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 284–311. A more cautious reading than Dodds on the historicity question, and a careful reconstruction of the Gorgias’ political argument. Where Dodds is willing to make bold interpretive moves, Guthrie holds back. Reading both together gives the full range of the debate.

Kerferd, G.B. The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 19–27. Establishes that Callicles and Thrasymachus represent the same coherent tradition — the political uptake of Sophist reasoning — rather than isolated provocations. Essential for understanding why Callicles is not an aberration but an argument with a lineage.

Viidebaum, Laura. “Thus Spoke… Friedrich Nietzsche on the Sophists.” Humanities, Vol. 14, No. 141, 2025. Confirms that Nietzsche’s engagement with Sophist culture was sustained and complex, running through his lecture notes from 1871 onward. The deeper connection runs through Thucydides as the supreme product of Sophist culture — a thread the series will return to.

Barney, Rachel. “The Sophistic Movement.” In A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, edited by Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin. Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 77–97. Prof. Barney frames the interpretive problem at the heart of this episode with precision: is Callicles a canonical representative of Sophistic thought, as Nietzsche assumed, or a feral — and quite possibly fictional — politician who happens to be friends with Gorgias? That question, posed at p. 78, has no settled answer. Her chapter is the best single introduction to what is genuinely contested about the Sophistic movement: the fragmentary evidence, the diversity of the thinkers grouped under that label, and the deeper difficulty that almost everything we know about them reaches us through Plato, the philosopher who made it his life’s work to refute them.

Question 1

Is Callicles a warning or a diagnosis? Plato presents him as the endpoint of Sophist education — but Prof. Rachel Barney argues he is quite possibly Plato’s own construction. Can a philosopher refute a position he has himself designed?

Question 2

Prof. George Klosko argues that Callicles is the expected outcome of Sophist paideia applied to political ambition. If that reading holds, what does it imply about technical mastery coupled with the absence of an underlying moral compass?

Question 3

Applying Prof. Tyson Retz’s framework: does Callicles correlate with No Progress — the absence of any collective telos or forward direction — Anti-Progress — the active repudiation of progress as a civic ideal — or a conception of progress entirely his own?

Footnotes

1 Dodds, E.R. Plato: Gorgias. Oxford University Press, 1959. Appendix: “Socrates, Callicles, and Nietzsche,” p. 387.

2 Guthrie, W.K.C. A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. IV. Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 241–265.

3 Dodds, E.R. Plato: Gorgias. Oxford University Press, 1959, pp. 1–30.

4 Klosko, George. The Development of Plato’s Political Theory. Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 39–54.

5 Barney, Rachel. “The Sophistic Movement.” In A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, edited by Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin. Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 77–97, esp. p. 78.

6 Kerferd, G.B. The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 19–27.