Gorgias

Plato's most combative dialogue. Socrates faces three opponents — the famous orator Gorgias, his student Polus, and the political insider Callicles — in an escalating argument about power, pleasure, and the good life. Callicles' defense of unrestrained ambition makes him one of philosophy's most memorable antagonists, and Socrates' reply — that it is better to suffer wrong than to inflict it — is the moral spine of the Platonic corpus.