Isocrates I Book

This book provides some helpful context for Isocrates and his works, as well as nice translations of many of those works. Given my interests, I was especially drawn to Against the Sophists and the Antidosis.

One of his earlier works, Against the Sophists is Isocrates attempt to create a space for his school and pedagogy in Athens. He does so by critiquing "sophists" as braggarts and amoral deceivers. Instead of honestly admitting the importance of "the student's experiences or … his native ability," these so-called instructors claim to be able to teach anyone to be an effective rhetor as if "the science of speeches is like teaching the alphabet" (9). Learning to make effective political speeches is "a creative activity" that cannot be taught via "an ordered art," but requires both student and teacher to attend to "circumstances (kairoi), propriety … and originality" (12-13). Isocrates presents himself as an honest teacher--one who admits the limits of instruction and the importance of the speaking abilities "innate in the well-born" (14), but who can nevertheless offer useful training in "knowledge of the forms (ideai) that we use in speaking and composing all speeches" as someone who "knows something about them" (16).

The Antidosis is a fictional legal defense written by Isocrates near the end of his life. It is based on an actual situation in which a wealthy citizen used legal means to successfully offload his responsibility for funding a trireme onto Isocrates by claiming Isocrates was the wealthier of the two. In the speech, Isocrates replaces the actual citizen with the fictional Lysimachus, who is characterized by Isocrates as a habitually litigious sykophant. Isocrates uses the speech not only to defend himself against Lysimachus' charges, but to defend his relatively apolitical lifestyle, his pedagogy, and his legacy. He argues that he has done great things for Athens, associating himself with "the more leisured of the Greeks" and claiming that most of his means "come entirely from outside Athens" (39)--thus he was not a financial burden on the city's citizens. He has not made his money as a despicable litigator or a speechmaker for court cases, but instead wrote speeches "of a political character … to be delivered in panegyric assemblies" (46). He associates these sorts of speeches and thus himself with "philosophy," while he associates court speeches with the "political meddling" of sykophants like Lysimachus. He uses examples and passages from his past speeches as evidence of his goodwill towards Athens and Greece (56). In addition to citing past speeches, he cites the names of some of his students who went on to do great things for Athens. Responding more directly to Lysimachus' "slander" that he "possessed great wealth," Isocrates notes "that none of the so-called sophists has earned much money" (155). In an interesting reversal from his earlier Against the Sophists, Isocrates associates himself with some of the sophists--though not the "quibblings" of the older sophists (271)--and worries that he "might incur some harm from the popular prejudice against the sophists" (168). He offers a long encomium of philosophy, which he presents as the purview of real sophists, in order to defend both himself and his practices. He sets up philosophy as a sort of proto-liberal arts education for the aristocratic youth who should rightly be at the forefront of Athenian democracy, and he presents himself as a relatively apolitical (apragmonestatoi) man who has quietly espoused and offered that education (217).