GORGIAS: After all this, Socrates, I should be disgraced if I refused, especially as I have promised to answer all comers; in accordance with the wishes of the company, then, do you begin, and ask of me any question which you like. SOCRATES: Let me tell you then, Gorgias, what surprises me in your words; though I dare say that you may be right, and I may have misunderstood your meaning. You say that you can make any man, who will learn of you, a rhetorician? GORGIAS: Yes. SOCRATES: Do you mean that you will teach him to gain the ears of the multitude on any subject, and this not by instruction but by persuasion? GORGIAS: Quite so. SOCRATES: You were saying, in fact, that the rhetorician will have greater powers of persuasion than the physician even in a matter of health? GORGIAS: Yes, with the multitude,—that is. SOCRATES: You mean to say, with the ignorant; for with those who know he cannot be supposed to have greater powers of persuasion. GORGIAS: Very true. SOCRATES: But if he is to have more power of persuasion than the physician, he will have greater power than he who knows? GORGIAS: Certainly. SOCRATES: Although he is not a physician:—is he? GORGIAS: No. SOCRATES: And he who is not a physician must, obviously, be ignorant of what the physician knows. GORGIAS: Clearly. SOCRATES: Then, when the rhetorician is more persuasive than the physician, the ignorant is more persuasive with the ignorant than he who has knowledge?—is not that the inference? GORGIAS: In the case supposed:—yes. SOCRATES: And the same holds of the relation of rhetoric to all the other arts; the rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know? GORGIAS: Yes, Socrates, and is not this a great comfort?—not to have learned the other arts, but the art of rhetoric only, and yet to be in no way inferior to the professors of them?