Probability Over Truth
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Socrates — Τεισίαν δὲ Γοργίαν τε ἐάσομεν εὕδειν… τῶν ἀληθῶν τὰ εἰκότα τιμητέα μᾶλλον… σμικρὰ μεγάλα καὶ τὰ μεγάλα σμικρὰ φαίνεσθαι ποιοῦσιν… ῥώμην λόγου.
Amid the comic parade of teachers, Socrates stops on the two founders who define the sophistic art at its root: Tisias, the Syracusan credited with inventing courtroom rhetoric, and Gorgias, the most dazzling sophist of them all. 'Let them sleep,' he says — but not before naming their central doctrine, and it is the exact thing the whole argument has been circling. They 'saw that probabilities are to be honored more than truths,' pro tōn alēthōn ta eikota... timētea mallon — that in the art of persuasion what matters is not what is true but what seems likely to an audience. And he adds the corollary: by the 'force of speech,' rhōmē logou, they can make 'small things appear great and great things small,' distorting the true proportions of matters at will. In two clauses Socrates has stated the creed he means to refute: rhetoric as the art of the plausible, cut loose from the true, powerful enough to reshape how big or small, important or trivial, anything seems.
Socrates keeps up the roll-call of rhetoric-teachers and their specialties — Evenus of Paros with his 'hints' and 'side-praises' — but pauses on the two who matter most. Let Tisias and Gorgias sleep, he says: the men who decided that probabilities deserve more honor than truths, and who, by the sheer force of their speech, can make small things look great and great things small.
These two names carry the weight of the whole critique, so it is worth knowing who they are and what they stood for. Gorgias of Leontini was the supreme theorist of the power of speech; his surviving Encomium of Helen calls logos 'a great potentate,' a force that works on the soul as a drug works on the body, able to stop fear, banish grief, and produce any conviction it likes — and, crucially, able to do all this regardless of the truth. Tisias, with his teacher Corax, was remembered as the founder of forensic rhetoric in Sicily, and above all as the master of the argument from eikos, 'the probable': the technique of winning a case not by evidence but by what a jury will find likely. Socrates will dissect Tisias's signature example a few pages later — the courtroom argument in which a weak man who assaulted a strong one pleads that it is improbable he would have dared, while the strong man pleads that it is improbable he would have attacked when he'd be the obvious suspect — showing that 'probability' can be flipped to either side and so proves nothing about the truth. The phrase that fixes their error is that they honored the probable 'more than' the true. It is not that probability has no place; a speaker must indeed reckon with what an audience will find likely. The error is the ranking — putting seeming above being, making plausibility the master rather than the servant of truth. And the image of making 'the small great and the great small' names the moral danger precisely: the force of eloquence can invert the real weights of things, magnify a trifle into a crisis and shrink an atrocity into nothing, so that a whole community loses its sense of proportion. This is not a hypothetical worry for Plato. He had watched Athenian assemblies talked into treating the momentous lightly and the trivial as urgent, and he had watched a jury persuaded that the wisest man in the city was a danger to be killed. The 'force of speech' unmoored from truth is exactly the power that does this. So Socrates lets Tisias and Gorgias 'sleep' — dismisses them with a courteous yawn — but their doctrine is the live antagonist of the whole dialogue, the fully developed form of the claim that persuasion needs no knowledge, and everything he builds about a true rhetoric grounded in dialectic and the knowledge of souls is the answer to these two sleeping men.
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