medicine, and what cosmetics are to gymnastics. All of these activities are aimed at surface adornment, an impersonation of what is really good (464c–465d). Bruce McComiskey has argued that Gorgias may have been uncharacteristically portrayed by Plato, because "… Plato's Gorgias agrees to the binary opposition knowledge vs. opinion" (82). This is inaccurate because, "for Gorgias the sophist, all 'knowledge' is opinion. There can be no rational or irrational arguments because all human beliefs and communicative situations are relative to a kairotic moment" (83). The pitiful tyrant (466d–481b) Socrates then advances that "orators and tyrants have the very least power of any in our cities" (466d). Lumping tyrants and rhetoricians into a single category, Socrates says that both of them, when they kill people or banish them or confiscate their property, think they are doing what is in their own best interest, but are actually pitiable. Socrates maintains that the wicked man is unhappy, but that the unhappiest man of all is the wicked one who does not meet with justice, rebuke, and punishment (472e). Polus, who has stepped into the conversation at this point, laughs at Socrates. Socrates asks him if he thinks laughing is a legitimate form of refutation (473e). Polus then asks Socrates if putting forth views that no one would accept is not a refutation in itself. Socrates replies that if Polus cannot see how to refute him, he will show Polus how. Socrates states that it is far worse to inflict evil than to be the innocent victim of it (475e). He gives the example of tyrants being the most wretched people on earth. He adds that poverty is to financial condition as disease is to the body as injustice is to the soul (477b–c). This analogy is used to define the states of corruption in each instance. Money-making, medicine, and justice are the respective cures (478a,b). Socrates argues that just penalties discipline people, make them more just, and cure them of their evil ways (478d). Wrongdoing is second among evils, but wrongdoing and getting away with it is the first and greatest of evils (479d). It follows from this, that if a man does not want to have a festering and incurable tumour growing in his soul, he needs to hurry himself to a judge upon realising that he has done something wrong. Socrates posits that the rhetorician should accuse himself first, and then