Gorgias

The Gorgias is Plato's longest and most ferocious dialogue on what makes a life worth living. Through three successive interlocutors — the rhetorician Gorgias, his pupil Polus, and finally the young Athenian politician Callicles — Socrates is forced to defend the claim that the moral life is preferable to the politically powerful one, and that it is better to suffer wrong than to do it.

Callicles, the third and toughest opponent, defends with frank brilliance the position that conventional morality is a sham invented by the weak to constrain the strong. Socrates' answers to Callicles are some of the most morally serious arguments in Western philosophy. Nietzsche would later read the dialogue obsessively; the questions it raises about power, justice, and the form of a flourishing life remain among the most consequential in moral thought.