He was not only successful in persuading the Athenians to make an alliance with Leontini; he had made such an impression that he moved to Athens himself and took pupils, reputedly at high tuition. His flair for the spectacular persisted in his extremely poetic, almost incantatory style and in such gestures as his offering to speak extemporaneously on any subject proposed.
However, although he took an active part in political and religious affairs and a statue of him was erected in a temple of Apollo, his radical philosophical skepticism, his remunerative teaching, and a general respect for the deceptive powers of language made him an ideal target for attacks on the new sophistic movement. Many charges leveled unfairly against Socrates in Aristophanes' Clouds (423 B.C.), for instance, might with more justice have been directed at Gorgias. He traveled to other Greek cities as well, teaching and delivering speeches. He is said to have maintained an abstemious lifestyle that included remaining a bachelor and refusing invitations to symposia. These austerities may have been healthy, because he is said to have lived well past his hundredth birthday.
The notorious series of propositions first set forth in his lost volume Concerning Nature or What is Not may be conceived as a riposte to Empedocles, who sometime in the fourth century B.C.
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