This rather reluctant admission by Gorgias is more than Polus can bear. If rhetoric does not produce the power necessary for dominating debate in the assembly, defending oneself in court, or taking whatever one wants, then what does it produce? At this juncture, “the situation of the dialogue enters into the argument.”^[14] Gorgias is shamed into silence, not only because Socrates has exposed the contradictions in his position, but because of the embarrassing presence of the vulgar and immoral Polus, a specimen of Gorgianic education. Polus is quite ready to admit what Gorgias is not—that he studies rhetoric because he wants power in the city. For is not the rhetor, like the tyrant, able to kill, expropriate, or imprison anyone he wishes at any time? To prove that the tyrant is both powerful and happy, Polus praises a contemporary tyrant, Archelaus, who had recently risen to the rulership of Macedonia through a series of particularly vile crimes.

The would-be tyrant Polus cannot believe that Socrates does not think Archelaus the happiest of men by virtue of his tyrannical power and envy him it accordingly. What is revealed here is the measure of Polus’s own tyrannical impulses as he gropes his rather inarticulate way toward the distinction that Callicles will make between nature and convention. Socrates, he thinks, is trapped by a conventional morality that does not give free reign to a man’s true impulses, calling “just” what the mass of men believe. He is not strong enough to break out of the conventional mold, as does Polus, who appeals, however inchoately, to a law of nature under which the stronger and superior rule. What Socrates conventionally calls “injustice” is naturally just. But as Callicles points out, Socrates manipulates Polus into confusing nature and convention in his answers and so traps Gorgias’s pupil into an admission he does not believe, that doing injustice is worse than suffering it, and further, that not paying the penalty for an injustice one had committed is worst of all.

The exchange with Polus is instructive because of Polus’s reliance on the many, the democratic practice of the vote, and his appeal to the example of the tyrant Archelaus. Polus associates rhetoric, democracy, and tyranny, implying that the democratic rhetor is really a tyrant at heart, willing to use the intimidation of numbers to get what he wants. Against this identification of power with tyranny and numbers, Socrates opposes his elenchus. Socratic elenchus appeals, not to the many, but to only one, and in that appeal seeks to produce real conviction in the listener. Its power depends on the “unforced force of the better argument,” not the thoughtless votes of the many. Nothing could be farther from the conventional conception of democratic power (as Gorgias and Polus represent it) than this model supplied by the practice of Socratic dialectic. And in this model, rhetoric has no place, unless it is to persuade the tyrant or would-be tyrant to pay restitution for the evils he has done. True rhetoric, then, is not in the service of a tyrant like Archelaus, who would use it to gain power over others, but in the service of justice, in order to gain control over oneself and learn moderation.

Socrates’ conversations with Gorgias and Polus reveal a fundamental antagonism between Athenian political practice and Socratic dialectic, an antagonism that culminates in Callicles’ prediction of Socrates’ death and Socrates’ assumption of the mantle of Athenian statesmanship. The rhetors and politicians merely flatter the demos, gratifying the citizens with pleasing words, as a cook gratifies the palate with pleasing food, in order to gain their favor and then their votes. Unlike the true politician or the doctor, the rhetor does not need to know anything, he only needs to seem to know, and just enough to be persuasive. Socratic dialectic, on the other hand, forces its participants to reflect on the nature and patterns of what they believe and do in order, not to persuade a mob, but to choose the good. Whereas rhetoric is given over to displays of verbal pyrotechnics as a means of concealing its ignorance, dialectic argues for the most important matters of justice in a singularly mundane fashion, which begins with familiar examples from everyday life—shoemakers, pastry cooks, and doctors. After the unhealthy display of the rhetors, Socrates will welcome the candid speech (parrhēsia) of his next interlocutor, Callicles.