Nicholas Schweers

Maj McDonald

9/22/16

This reading was a rather dense reading. While it would seem, because of its conversational textual format, that merely served to get me more lost. From what I understand, the conversations held between Socrates and others, were about oratory, and whether it was as important as many rhetoricians and Sophists believed. Socrates used lots of verbose and run on sentences to essentially silence his opponents who were saying that oratory was the art of persuasion. His main points were that there were other forms of persuasion than giving speeches, such as arithmetic and other sciences or forms of math. Socrates, while he had paragraphs at a time to rebuttal his opponents, only allowed his opponents to say a word or two. By doing this, he was allowed to shape the argument to where what he wanted to be understood was the only thing that could be shown. Anyone, with enough planning, could form arguments to go their way like this. If Georgias or any of the others could have talked as much, the writing would most likely have been very different.