in the Republic than in any other dialogue, the verbal similarity tending
to show that they were written at the same period of Plato's life. For the
Republic supplies that education and training of which the Gorgias suggests
the necessity. The theory of the many weak combining against the few
strong in the formation of society (which is indeed a partial truth), is
similar in both of them, and is expressed in nearly the same language. The
sufferings and fate of the just man, the powerlessness of evil, and the
reversal of the situation in another life, are also points of similarity.
The poets, like the rhetoricians, are condemned because they aim at
pleasure only, as in the Republic they are expelled the State, because they
are imitators, and minister to the weaker side of human nature. That
poetry is akin to rhetoric may be compared with the analogous notion, which
occurs in the Protagoras, that the ancient poets were the Sophists of their
day. In some other respects the Protagoras rather offers a contrast than a
parallel. The character of Protagoras may be compared with that of
Gorgias, but the conception of happiness is different in the two dialogues;
being described in the former, according to the old Socratic notion, as
deferred or accumulated pleasure, while in the Gorgias, and in the Phaedo,
pleasure and good are distinctly opposed.

This opposition is carried out from a speculative point of view in the
Philebus. There neither pleasure nor wisdom are allowed to be the chief
good, but pleasure and good are not so completely opposed as in the
Gorgias. For innocent pleasures, and such as have no antecedent pains, are
allowed to rank in the class of goods. The allusion to Gorgias' definition
of rhetoric (Philebus; compare Gorg.), as the art of persuasion, of all
arts the best, for to it all things submit, not by compulsion, but of their
own free will--marks a close and perhaps designed connection between the
two dialogues. In both the ideas of measure, order, harmony, are the
connecting links between the beautiful and the good.