Title: The term encomium (G. eulogy, lit.

"good words") refers to an oratorical genre in which a person, event, or thing is praised. In Aristotle's Rhetoric, the encomium is
included under "epideictic oratory" (lit. "showing forth" or "displaying"), one of three primary divisions of oratory, along with "forensic" and "legislative" oratory.

Kennedy has inserted headings to indicate the rhetorical structure of the text. The terms for these headings are traditional, with a mix of Latin and English terms typically
used in English scholarship. Recently, however, there has been a move to use the Greek terms; and this may explain Kennedy's use of prooemion to name the first part
of the text. I've added the Greek, Latin, and English terms where Kennedy omits them because you're likely to see them in our readings:

I find much of Kennedy's analysis confusing. First, there appears to be an omission of a second "proof" that would correspond to the second set of reasons. More
importantly, the analysis doesn't correspond to Gorgias's own enumeration of arguments.

Specific Passages

¶1:"Fairest ornament [kosmos] to a city is a goodly army …": kosmos is an interesting word because, although it is used in the oldest texts to mean "ornament," it is used
more frequently to mean "order" and the "visible, physical universe." If we translated Gorgias's use as "ornament," this should be understood not as mere "decoration"
but as "a mark, or source of pride, honor."

¶2:"I wish by giving some logic to language [logismon tina tôi logôi] …." - A good example of how the Greek word logos means both "logic," or "reasoning" and
"language." A more literal translation of logismon, here, is "reasoning power."

¶5:"I shall proceed to my intended speech [logos] and shall propose the causes for which Helen's voyage to Troy is likely [eikos] to have taken place." - As we saw in
Hinks's "Tisias and Corax and the Invention of Rhetoric," a key feature of Sophistic teaching is the idea that arguments should be made from "probable reasons" (eikos,
i.e., what seems probable, or likely). This position reflects the skeptical position held by Gorgias and other Sophists that the truth cannot be known and, thus, cannot
serve as the basis for argument.

¶9: "All poetry I regard and name as speech having meter [logon ekhonta metron" - This statement is usually understood to mean that poetry differs from prose only in
the former being metrical; thus prose has the same capacity as dramatic poetry to arouse emotion.

¶11: "it is easy neither to remember the past nor to consider the present nor predict the future" - Another statement of the skepticism typical of the Sophists.

¶11: "on most subjects most people take opinion as counselor to the soul." - Two important terms in Greek thinking about the relationship between language and
thought:

1. The Greek for "opinion" is doxa, which is often translated as "belief"; the conceptual dichotomy of belief and knowledge is a key opposition that drives the history
of Western philosophy.
2. The Greek for "soul" is psychê, which is translated as "soul," "spirit," or "mind." Aristotle, in On the Soul (Peri Psyche, De Anima), identifies two older trends in
theorizing psychê: psychê as the principle of movement (kinesis) and of perception (aisthesis). This second trend may explain Gorgias's emphasis on perception
in his final argument regarding the power of love (erôs).

¶14:"The power of speech has the same effect on the condition of the soul as the application of drugs [pharmaka] to the state of bodies …" - As we will see in our
reading of Plato, this kind of analogy --which seeks to understand the mind by comparing it to the body -- becomes a central feature of Greek and Western thought. For
example, just consider the phrase "body politic."And as the rest of the paragraph indicates, the pharmakon can be either a medicine or a poison -- a point that is crucial,
we will see, to Derrida's reading of Plato's Phaedrus.