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In its Golden Age, Athens was both the most powerful and most democratic of Ancient Greece's city-states. This exalted status called into being a new art - the art of oratory - with which the wealth and prominence of a political career could be won by mere speech. Itinerant teachers of the new techniques of persuasion bedazzled ambitious men with the prospect of power and, for a significant fee, taught them how to pursue it. By a miracle to which we owe the foundations of our Western Civilization, philosophy was born in Athens during this same period, most saliently in the person of Socrates, whose life coincided with the Athenian Golden Age. Socrates discovered the life of the mind and found a way to live that life with others, his fellow citizens, by an activity quite different from oratory and lecture, which he called dialogue. Plato's Gorgias presents the confrontation of these two forms in Socrates's meeting with Gorgias, the preeminent teacher of persuasive oratory, and one of his students, by then a rising Athenian politician. In these dialogues, Socrates and his interlocutors debate the political life versus the philosophical life, in a conversation that leaves no place for anyone to hide.
