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[T]he good is not the same as the pleasant, my friend, nor the evil as the painful.

Herein lies a foundation for the overall line of reasoning operating within Gorgias. This quotation from 497d (addressed to Callicles) explains Socrates's placement of medicine, gymnastics and justice against cookery, beautification and rhetoric; it helps to justify controlling rather than satisfying desires in an effort to seek virtue. It plays into a discussion of power, as well as the question of justice, all because of its inherent distinction. Throughout most of the text, Socrates endeavors through these (and various other) matters to show that his fellow citizens have come to mistake things directly pleasant for those that comprise a more long-term good and well-being, to the detriment of Athenian society. Underlying them all, however, is this one principle of the good and the pleasant being frequently not the same; the evil and the painful existing as oftentimes separate. In a certain sense, the entire work embodies an attempted proof of this assertion.

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