GORGIAS AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSUASION

Although the stated objective of Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen may be doubted1— to free Helen from blame for leaving her home and husband to go to Troy withParis (2) — it surely contains a serious point. The speech seems more accurately anencomium of the logos, than Helen, leading Charles Segal to conjecture that it‘may even have served as a kind of formal profession of the aims and the methodsof his art’ (1962:102). Some regard it as one of our best insights into the state oflate fifth century rhetorical theory (Kerferd 1981:78).