there’s no way I can get there while being afraid to make mistakes that others can correct.
Understood, but here your mistakes had effectively been corrected in advance by the OP and me. If you wanted to query what I’d said you could have done so, instead of substituting something quite contrary and very misleading to the OP and anyone else.
However, I’m stuck with trying to extract any clear thought from these literal renderings.
Literalness is not the same as accuracy. But you can’t go playing fast and loose with neoplatonic Greek (still less with Sophoclean), and you can’t expect to extract clear thought from renderings the Greek is incompatible with.
The passage has to be read in the context of the larger discussion to fully make sense. Here we’re in the midst of discussion of competing “divisions” (διαιρέσεις) and subdivisions (υποδιαρεσεις), as so often in technical treatises of all sorts. Go back to chapter 10 and it’s stated that philosophy is divided into 2 (not 3), the theoretical and the practical. The theoretical is discussed in c.11, and here in c.12 he’s concerned with the practical, το πρακτικον. Aristotle divides το πρακτικον into 3: ηθικον, οικονομικον, πολιτικον. Platonists reject this and divide it into 2: νομοθετικον and δικαστικον. All these distinct terms are explicated.
This is where we come in. The question under consideration is why Plato—by which he means Platonists—doesn’t accept the Aristotelian division into 3. To show the differences between them he adduces a passage from the Gorgias (ἥπερ πόλει, καὶ ἰδιώτῃ, αὐτῷ πρὸς ἑαυτὸν καὶ πρὸς ἑτέρους) and interprets it, distortively, as being tantamount to saying that the ηθικον, οικονομικον, and πολιτικον constitute a single state (ἕξις), inasmuch as it encompasses all three. You can read the details. The discussion hereabouts incidentally serves to clarify the sets of terms we find in the following mention of the Alcibiades passage, which is brought in merely as back-up for this deconstruction of the Aristotelian tripartitioning. For example a preceding section on the Platonists’ various objections to the Aristotelian threefold scheme concluded by saying that every τεχνη and επιστημη (this being an allusion to Aristotle’s definition of philosophy) has as its aim “benefiting either one or few or many” ἢ ἕνα ὠφελεῖν ἢ ὀλίγους ἢ πολλούς. That helps explain the intrusive addition of ολιγους to what’s said of the Alcibiades passage that had me a bit puzzled.
“And in the Alcib. he says that someone who persuades one person also persuades few and many; for the same man can persuade one and many.” (This latter is drawn from the pseudo-Platonic Alcibiades, decontextualized.) He then confronts the possible objection that “It’s not necessarily the case that the man who persuades many people also persuades just one, if that one is a private individual.” (There might be an individual in the otherwise persuaded crowd who is not persuaded, for instance, or an individual not in a group setting might resist persuasion that is effective with a crowd. I think of another Elias, Canetti and his Masse und Macht.) (In your latest you are again misconstruing this bit: πολλους is object of τον πειθοντα. What I say three times is true?) He counters this by retorting “He’s persuaded if he’s the same sort of person as the many.” (τοιουτος οιοι are correlative. “He’s just like us” εκεινος τοιουτος οιοι ημεις.) Then we move on to another passage.
You’re right to say Elias is not concerned with persuasion as such. He’s just using the passage as a confirmatory supplement to his analysis of the Gorgias quote, to show that what applies to one person also applies to many (and to few), thereby effectively collapsing the Aristotelian partitioning into “ethical” “economic” and “political.” The entire treatise situates itself within the battle between (neo-)Platonists (such as Elias) and Aristotelians.
So pulling out the translations from above: “And in the Alcib. he says that someone who persuades one person also persuades few and many; for the same man can persuade one and many. ‘But no,’ says someone [i.e. comes the objection], ‘it’s not necessarily the case that the man who persuades many people also persuades one, if that one is a private individual’; and we say [i.e. and our reply to that is] that he is persuaded if he’s the same sort of person as the many.”
I’ve tried in what I’ve said above to show how this is intelligible in context. It’s little more than a parenthesis really.
(Interesting, incidentally, how the exegetical techniques are identical to those often applied to the New Testament. You have a variegated but now bounded and diachronically leveled corpus of writings presupposed to be internally consistent and inerrant, every single part of which has to be harmonized willy-nilly with every other part. All it takes is uninterrogated dogma, the very thing Socrates was opposed to.)