Isocrates

Isocrates (born 436 bce, Athens—died 338, Athens) was an ancient Athenian orator, rhetorician, and teacher whose writings are an important historical source on the intellectual and political life of the Athens of his day. The school he founded differed markedly in its aims from the Academy of Plato and numbered among its pupils men of eminence from all over the Greek world.

Early life and influences

Isocrates was born into a prosperous family shortly before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 bce). He passed his youth in a gloomy period following the death of Pericles, the great Athenian leader and statesman, a period in which wealth—both public and private—was dissipated, and political decisions were ill-conceived and violent. He would have been 14 years old when the democracy voted to put to death all male citizens of the small Thracian city of Scione. Isocrates was deeply moved by a desire to see Greece united and at peace and was influenced by, among others, the Sicilian sophist Gorgias, who not only inspired his pupil with a taste for Gorgianic prose but also put before him as the cure for Greece’s ills the Panhellenist program—that is, union of Greeks in an attack on the Persian empire and the settlement therein of the impoverished, thus securing peace between and within cities. This became and remained Isocrates’ political creed. In the closing years of the Peloponnesian War, Isocrates lost his inherited wealth and began to earn money by writing speeches for others to use in the courts. A few of these speeches survive. This was, in fact, the conventional start to a career as an orator, but, since he lacked both the voice and the self-confidence necessary for a public speaker, he turned his attention to education, and for more than 40 years his main effort was to prepare for successful public life those who could afford to pay his heavy fees.

Of his hundred pupils the most notable were Timotheus, the Athenian general, prominent in Athens’s history between 378 and 355; Nicocles, the ruler of Salamis in Cyprus; and the two greatest Greek historians of the 4th century—Ephorus, who wrote a universal history, and Theopompus, who wrote the history of Philip II of Macedon. In this way his influence permeated both politics and literature.

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Ancient Greece

At the same time, he continued to publish a series of speeches on the state of Athens and of Greece. How far these influenced his contemporaries has been fruitlessly debated. Their importance for historians is that they provide an index of Panhellenist, conservative Greek opinion, and whoever reads with attention the “Panegyric” (380), “On Peace” (355), “On the Areopagus” (354?), “To Philip” (346), and the “Panathenaic” oration (begun 342, completed 339) will have gained considerably in understanding of the larger issues of the age.

Isocrates as rhetorician

Isocrates was a man of no great intellectual power, and it is not surprising to find him contemptuous of the philosophical subtleties of the Platonic circle. He cared above all for polished expression; he is said to have taken 10 years in the composition of the “Panegyric,” and a man who could expend effort on such showpieces of oratory as the “Encomium of Helen” (390) clearly had little of real intellectual importance to say. His defects and his preferences showed themselves in the system of education that he developed. Unfortunately, his discussion in the speeches “Against the Sophists” and in “On the Exchange” tells one more of what he objected to in other systems than of what he actually had in his own, but it can be safely asserted that, whereas the training of the Platonic Academy was essentially philosophical, that of Isocrates was almost entirely given over to rhetoric, the art of persuasion.

There is indeed a strong suspicion that Isocrates would lend his talents to any cause whatsoever, merely for the pleasure of presenting it well. The so-called Cyprian orations—“To Nicocles” (c. 372), the “Nicoles” (c. 368), and the “Evagoras” (c. 65)—are concerned with the laudations of monarchs, while the “Archidamus” (366) puts into the mouth of the heir to one of the Spartan kings a speech full of praise for Sparta and Spartanism. One is correspondingly less impressed when in the “Panegyric” and “Panathenaic” orations he professes admiration for Athens. Such exaltation of style and indifference to matter is contemptible, and, insofar as his purpose in his system of education appears to have been to train others to a similar facility, he can hardly escape the censure he accorded to other rhetorical schools.

Isocrates did have beliefs, however, some of which are revealed in “On the Areopagus,” composed at the end of the Social War, when Athens’s fortunes were at their lowest for 50 years. In this work he commends the ancient constitution of Athens, under which the aristocratic council of the Areopagus exercised a general supervision over the conduct of citizens. Isocrates’ proposals for returning to the system in operation before the days of democracy were not practical but display profoundly conservative inclinations.

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His other mainstay was Panhellenism, and this is what chiefly interests historians. In the “Panegyric” he developed the theme that many, notably Gorgias and the rhetorician Lysias, had recently argued: he called on Sparta to establish concord in Greece by recognizing the fitness and right of Athens to share with Sparta hegemony in Greece and by proceeding with the national crusade against Persia. This amounted to a reassertion of the political faith of the great 5th-century opponent of Persia, Cimon. More than 30 years later, in the letter “To Philip,” Isocrates appealed to the king of Macedonia to reconcile the Greeks and lead them against Persia. Since Philip was on the point of intervening in Greece to settle the Second Sacred War (355–346), many have believed that Isocrates was prepared to submit his country to an outside master.

This is unjust, for Isocrates, a political innocent, had only the vaguest idea of what the consequences of such a policy might be. He had in fact made earlier similar appeals to Agesilaus, king of Sparta, to Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse, and to Alexander, tyrant of Pherae in Thessaly, none of whom could conceivably have become political master of Greece. The truth is that Isocrates was seeking merely a military leader. These earlier appeals came to nothing, and in the 350s, when Greece was divided first by the Social War, precipitated by the Athenian policy of sending cleruchies (colonizing groups) to Samos, the subjection of Cos and Naxos to Athenian jurisdiction, and the arbitrary demands of Athenian generals for money, and then by the Sacred War, fought as a result of the refusal of the Phocians to pay a fine levied by the Amphictyons, and when Persia was again threatening, there could be no question of Greece uniting to attack. Isocrates thus had to confine himself to pleading for peace, notably in the speech “On Peace” at the end of the Social War.

Isocrates’ disillusionment and death

The rise of Philip led him to hope that all was not lost—he had his general at last. But he never paused to ask what would happen to Greece when Macedonia had succeeded in gratifying Panhellenist dreams. And, when all hopes for peaceful relations between Athens and Philip faded, he promptly forgot about Philip, and in his last great speech, the “Panathenaic” oration, Philip has no part. After the Battle of Chaeronea, at which Greek independence was lost and as a result of which Philip indeed became master, Isocrates in despair starved himself to death (338).

Historians debate whether he was the prophet of the Hellenistic world, that great expansion of Hellenism resulting from the foundation of cities in Asia by Philip’s son Alexander the Great and his successors. Certainly, he adhered to the Panhellenist idea that Asia should be colonized by the Greeks, but he appears to have envisaged no more than the colonization of Asia Minor, and the actual Macedonian settlements were far from the comfortable retreats Isocrates had dreamed of for the poor of Greece. He had, furthermore, merely thought of exporting the poor. He had no vision of the great new common market that would save Greece from misery. So perhaps the title “prophet” is too much. But he did see that at the heart of Greek troubles was poverty, and in his unwavering belief in colonization he showed a common sense denied in this matter to his greater contemporaries, Plato and Aristotle.