Gorgias' epideictic speech, the Encomium of Helen, extols language's power as a mighty ruler able to sway our emotions, thoughts, and beliefs and to cast over us a durglike spell of distortion; meanwhile this fifth-century Greek sophist's earlier work of a more metaphysical nature, thought to parody the treatises of the Eleatic thinkers and entitled On Non Being, points out language's emptiness and inability to communicate reality. Although these two Gorgianic characterizations of language at first seem to contradict each other, both could be interpreted as indicative of a radical nominalism more commonly associated with modernist linguistic and literary theory that grants to language autonomy from and primacy over reality. Words in such a view are not representational but approach signifying nothing. More importantly perhaps, with this perspective Gorgias raises issues about language not satisfactorily dealt with until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

For example, as constitutive of reality, and so distorting, language, which Gorgias dubs a mighty ruler, would seem to be able to determine both what we perceive and can conceive while its metaphoric nature and opacity limit our access to truth which now becomes internal to language. Moreover, as autonomous from both reality and logic, language often seems like a bewitchment of our intelligence. Furthermore, the performative dimension attributed to radically nominalist language evokes the question of agency and intentionality, leaving us condemned to use a language that is ultimately using us. Lastly, the self-referential or tautological and empty nature of language, its distinct ontology, as described by Gorgias in On Non Being leads to the impossibility of saying anything as well as to the impossibility of knowing reality, and finally, to nihilism.

While in the context of fifth-century Greece, the revolutionary statements Gorgias makes in these two works concerning language's autonomy from reality represented a linguistic turning point, his self-conscious and self-referential approach to language and awareness of his own rhetoricity as well as his departure from traditional modes of language usage and genre speak to the appropriateness of scrutinizing this sophist's work through a modernist lens.