Old Greek Guys and Their Rhetoric

Socrates and Plato are the student/teacher tag team that dominated the Ancient Greek intellectual and philosophical scene following The Sophists.

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Socrates was a principled, stubborn thinker who believed in the practice of dialectic - an intense process of one-on-one questioning in which one person questions the other in an attempt to make them talk against themselves and reevaluate what they think they know. The incessancy of this process earned Socrates the nickname "the gadfly" presumably because his questioning nagged at people and he refused to buzz off - to the point that he was executed by the state.

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Plato was Socrates' most successful student. He went on to write stories in the form of dialogues between Socrates and someone being questioned by him. Socrates and Plato both disliked writing and Socrates never wrote anything down, so everything we know about him is from Plato who begrudgingly did so. That said, we will be looking at their epistemology as a package deal (partially by necessity).

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This dynamic duo firmly believed in the concept of absolute truths - for example that  a pure, true form of Justice existed somewhere in the universe. For them, that place was called the Nomeunal World (or the world of Forms). This world is where our souls come from before they inhabit our bodies, therefore our souls already know the nature of absolute truths and the process of dialectic can help us remember. 

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Because the dynamic duo was so invested in remembering transcendent, preexisting knowledge, they didn't trust rhetoric as it spoke to and inspired conviction in the masses without the individual barrier-breaking of dialectic. In Plato's text Gorgias, he describes rhetoric as cosmetics for the soul - that it is surface level knowledge and pales in comparison to real dialectic learning and remembering. That said, toward the end of his life, Plato started to come around about rhetoric as he began to embrace a "noble rhetoric" that could keep the soul from steering toward the impure pleasures of the body. 

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TL;DR:

Absolute truth exists in the soul's knowledge - we have to get rid of false (*cough* rhetoric) manmade truths through the process of dialectic (like a cheese grater, but for your brain).