A Good Statesman

            Plato’s, Gorgias, is now at the point where Socrates is restating all the arguments he has made throughout the book. While still arguing with Callicles, he brings up the argument of good statesman and the cities they were in charge of.  The purposes of these jobs were to make the citizens better then what they were. Socrates believes that if you are going to be a good statesman, you have to have impacted the citizen in some way because they should become better people. Socrates challenges Callicles on the choice of former politicians he considered “good”.

            In the beginning of the argument, Socrates questions if Callicles thought if he changed any one of his citizens’ lives when he decided to become part of public service. Callicles takes offense to this and Socrates just wants to know how the Athenian people are going to be managed (Gorgias, 117). He goes on to being up the former member of the community that Callicles considered to be good. He seems to be confusing pleasure over good again. Socrates began to pick at each and every man.

            Within Pericles, “what he should have done is leave them more moral than when he found them” (Gorgias, 119). The reason of leading others should be about making them better people and a better society. What Plato is showing in Socrates is that morals are what make a person good and a statesman should be good. If you mix up pleasure with good while being a leader, the people are bound to turn. As Socrates quotes Homers that “to be moral is to be tamed” (Gorgias, 119). The job of a statesman or a politician entails keeping their community in order. If you don’t have order and give into pleasure or freedom, then there is no good in what they are doing. Socrates won his argument with Callicles’s argument that Pericles was a good statesman because he ended up leaving the Athenians worse off than when he started. The others were also proven wrong by Socrates and were all eventually thrown out.

            Socrates also states that these men wouldn’t have been thrown from their reign if they were good from the start. He uses the analogy that “ good wagoners- ones who don’t get thrown out of their wagons in the first place… after they’ve been looking after their horses and have improved as wagoners” (Gorgias, 120). He believes that because they were also rhetoricians that their authenticity and flattery weren’t up, that it affected their power as well. I think that if a politician isn’t able to persuade the people to be better, then how are they supposed to be good politicians?