The Gorgias is divided into three main sections of unequal length. The shortest of the three sections is Socrates' opening conversation with Gorgias, which is followed by a longer conversation with Polus, and then by Socrates' much longer confrontation with Callicles. This movement from briefer to lengthier conversations would seem to mirror the dialogue's ascent in intensity. That is, the dramatic tension is greater and the themes are more profound in the Polus section than in the Gorgias section, and the Polus section is surpassed in turn by the Callicles section. Yet the impression conveyed by this movement, as I stressed in the introduction, should not lead us to overlook the crucial question of the unity of the dialogue: What ties the three sections together? Nor should we overlook the fact that the dialogue is called Gorgias, a title that may be intended to call attention to the special importance of the opening section of the dialogue as somehow holding the key to its unity.

A more obvious reason that the dialogue is named after Gorgias is that he is the person to whom Socrates has come to speak as the dialogue opens (447a1–c4). He is also by far the most eminent of Socrates' three interlocutors. A man who in his own time and for several generations afterwards would need no introduction, Gorgias was one of the ancient world's most famous rhetoricians and teachers of rhetoric.