II. ISOCRATES

This duel of oratory has been loudly lauded and devoutly studied in every generation. But in truth it represents almost the nadir of Athenian politics; we cannot see nobility in this street-corner contest in vituperation, this mean quarrel for public praise between two secret recipients of foreign gold. Isocrates is a little more attractive, and carries down into the fourth century something of the grandeur of the fifth. Born in 436, he lived till 338, and died with Greek liberty. His father had made a fortune by manufacturing flutes; he gave his son every educational advantage, even sending him to study rhetoric with Gorgias in Thessaly. The Peloponnesian War, and the example of Alcibiades, ruined the flute business, and destroyed the family fortune; Isocrates had to go forth and earn his living by the sweat of his pen. He began by writing speeches for others, and thought of becoming an orator. But he suffered from shyness and a weak voice, and a strong distaste for the crudities of political strife. He abominated the demagogues who had captured the Assembly, and shrank for a time into a quiet pedagogic life.

In 391 he opened the most successful of Athenian schools of rhetoric. Students came to him from all the Greek world; perhaps their variety of origin and outlook helped to form his Panhellenic philosophy. He thought that all other teachers were on the wrong track. In a pamphlet Against the Sophists he denounced both those who professed to turn any numbskull into a pundit for three or four minas, and those who, like Plato, hoped to prepare men for government by training them in science and metaphysics. As for himself, he admitted that he could get results only when the student possessed some natural talent. He would not teach metaphysics or science, for these, he argued, were hopeless inquiries into insoluble mysteries. Nevertheless, he gave the name of philosophy to the instruction provided in his school. The curriculum centered upon the arts of writing and speaking, but these were taught in connection with literature and politics;⁵ Isocrates offered, as we should say, a cultural course as opposed to the mathematical course given in Plato’s Academy. The art of speech was the goal, as being then the chief medium of public advancement; the Athenian state was governed by argument. So Isocrates taught his pupils the use of words: how to arrange them in the clearest order, in rhythmic but not metrical sequence, in polished but not ornate diction, in smooth transitions of sound and thought,* in balanced clauses and cumulative periods; such prose, he believed, would please the refined ear as much as poetry. Out of this school came many leaders of the Demosthenic age: Timotheus the general, Ephorus and Theopompus the historians, Isaeus, Lycurgus, Hypereides, and Aeschines the orators, Speusippus the successor of Plato, and, some say, Aristotle himself.⁶

Isocrates was not content with forming great men; he wished to play some part in the affairs of his time. Unable to be either an orator or a statesman, he became a pamphleteer. He addressed long speeches to the Athenian public, to leaders like Philip, or to the assembled Greeks at the PanheRenic games; instead of delivering these he published them, and thereby unconsciously invented the essay as a literary form. Twenty-nine of his discourses remain, and rank among the most interesting survivals of Greek antiquity. His first great pronouncement, the Panegyricus† struck the theme of all his thought—the theme of his old master Gorgias—a call to Greece to forget its little sovereignties, and become a state. Isocrates was a proud Athenian—“So far has our city distanced the rest of mankind in thought and speech that her pupils have become the teachers of all the world.” But he was a prouder Greek; to him, as to the Hellenistic age, Hellenism meant not membership in a race, but participation in a culture; and that culture, he felt, was the finest that men had yet created anywhere.⁷ But all around this culture were “barbarians”—in Italy, Sicily, Africa, Asia, and what we should now call the Balkans. It saddened him to see the barbarians becoming stronger, and Persia consolidating her control of Ionia, while the Greek states consumed themselves in civil war.

For many as are the ills that are incident to the nature of man, we have ourselves invented more than those that nature lays upon us, by engendering wars and factions among ourselves. . . . Against these ills no one has ever protested; and people are not ashamed to weep over the calamities that have been fabricated by the poets, while they view complacently the real sufferings, the many terrible sufferings, that result from our state of war; and they are so far from feeling pity that they even rejoice more in each other’s sorrows than in their own blessings.⁸

If the Greeks must fight, why not fight a real enemy? Why not drive the Persians back to their plateau? A small detachment of Greeks, he prophesied, would defeat a large army of Persians.⁹ Such a holy war might at last give unity to Greece; and the choice was between Greek unity or triumphant barbarism.

Two years after publishing this appeal (378) Isocrates, turning theory into practice, toured the Aegean with his ex-pupil Timotheus, and helped to formulate the terms of the second Athenian Confederacy. The rise and fall of this new hope of unity formed one more disappointment in his long life. In a brave and vigorous pamphlet On the Peace he condemned Athens for again corrupting an alliance into an empire, and called upon her to sign a peace that would assure every Greek state against Athenian encroachments. “What we call empire is in reality misfortune, for by its very nature it depraves all who have to do with it.”¹⁰ Imperialism, he said, had ruined democracy by teaching Athenians to live on foreign tribute; losing that, they now wished to live on state contributions, and exalted to the highest offices those who promised them most.

Whenever you deliberate on the business of the state you distrust and dislike men of superior intelligence, and cultivate instead the most depraved of the orators who come before you; you prefer . . . those who are drunk to those who are sober, those who are witless to those who are wise, and those who dole out the public money to those who perform public services at their own expense.¹¹

In his next address, the Areopagiticus, he spoke more leniently of democracy. “We sit around in our shops denouncing the present order,” says a timeless passage, “but we perceive that even badly constituted democracies are responsible for fewer disasters than are oligarchies.”¹² Had not Sparta made a worse mistress for Greece than Athens had been?—and, “Have not we all of us, because of the madness of the Thirty, become greater enthusiasts for democracy than those who occupied Phyle?*¹³ But Athens had ruined itself by carrying to excess the principles of liberty and equality, by “training the citizens in such fashion that they looked upon insolence as democracy, lawlessness as liberty, impudence of speech as equality, and license to do what they pleased as happiness.”¹⁴All men are not equal, and should not be equally free to hold office. The institution of the lot, Isocrates felt, had lowered disastrously the level of Athenian statesmanship. Better than this “mob rule” was the “timocracy” of Solon and Cleisthenes; for then amiable ignorance and eloquent venality had less chance of being raised to leadership; able men rose naturally to the top, and the Areopagus, receiving them after their term of office, became automatically the mature brain of the state.

In 346, when Athens came to terms with Philip, Isocrates, now ninety, addressed an open letter to the Macedonian King. He foresaw that Philip would make himself master of Greece, and begged him to use his power not as a tyrant, but as the unifier of autonomous Greek states in a war for the liberation of Greece from the King’s Peace, and of Ionia from Persian rule. The war party denounced the letter as a surrender to despotism, and for seven years Isocrates held his pen. He spoke once more in 339, addressing his pamphlet to the Greeks who were gathering for the Panathenaic games. The Panathenaicus is a weak and prolix repetition of the Panegyricus; the style trembles in the old man’s hand; but it is an astonishing performance for one who was only three years short of a century. Then in 338 came Chaeronea; Athens was defeated, but Isocrates’ dream of a unified Greece was about to come true. A late Greek tradition says that when the news came he forgot about Philip and unity, and thought only of his native city humiliated, the days of her glory ended; and that, at the age of ninety-eight, having at last lived long enough, he starved himself to death.¹⁵ We do not know if this is true; but Aristotle tells us that within five days after Chaeronea, Isocrates was dead.