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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Isocrates Biography ISOCRATES, (Lat., from Gk. Isokrat¶s) (436-338 B.C.). Though one of the 10 Attic orators of the Alexandrian Canon (see CANON ALEXANDRINUS), Isocrates was rather a publicist and a pamphleteer than an orator. His long life, as De Quincey interestingly points out in his essay on Style, spans the century from Pericles to Alexander. In youth he was attached to the Socratic circle, and Plato in the Phædrus commends him, when he was still a youth, above other orators for a certain touch of philosophy that might lead to higher things. Elsewhere Plato seems to allude to him with irony as a rival teacher and the exponent of a competing ideal of culture. His first school, opened at Chios, was probably devoted to the professional rhetoric of the law courts, and he himself wrote forensic speeches, a few of which have been preserved. These, however, he was inclined to disavow in later days when his school at Athens came to represent (after 392 B.C.) what he regarded as the more broad and liberal training in essay writing and epideictic (display) oratory on large political and Hellenic themes. From personal participation in the combats of the law courts or the assembly he was shut out by a weak voice and an invincible timidity, though he seems not to have been lacking in moral courage. Isocrates stands for three things: 1. The idea that the Greeks should unite to conquer Persia. This is set forth in his most brilliant performance, the Panegyricus, which cost him 10 years and is supposed to have been published at Olympia in 380 B.C. Failing to influence Athens and Sparta, he appealed to individuals--Jason of Pheræ, the tyrant Dionysius, Philip of Macedon. The legend consecrated by Milton's sonnet that the "dishonest victory at Chaeronea, fatal to liberty, killed with report that old man eloquent," is sufficiently refuted by the tone of the letter to Philip. Indeed, the conquest of Asia by Alexander, though not accomplished by a union of Athens and Sparta, was in many ways a striking fulfillment of the prophecies of the Panegyricus, 2. Isocrates' ideal of culture as a faculty of elegant disquisition occupying the happy mean between the narrow utilitarianism of the advocate and the unprofitable subtleties of a Plato is to us, as exemplified in his writings, a ridiculous and platitudinous thing. But nevertheless his school did as much as the Academy of Plato to make the Athens of the fourth century the schoolmistress of Greece. Dissertations have been written about his pupils. Among .them were the historians Ephorus and Theopompus, and the orators Isæus, Lycurgus, and Hyperides. From that school, says Cicero, as from the Trojan horse, a company of naught but chieftains issued forth. 3. Isocrates, though not himself a great writer, holds a great place in the evolution of European prose. He was a pupil of the brilliant Sophist Gorgias (q.v.), who freely employed as ornaments of prose jingling assonance, alliteration, balanced antithesis of thought and expression, striking metaphor, and other rhetorical features of Greek poetry. Isocrates tempered the excess of these "Gorgian figures," but retained them so far as consonant with the genius of ornate but not extravagant prose. He also practiced and taught the smooth organic structure of the long rhythmical period, the avoidance of hiatus, the conscious variation of phrase and selection of synonym. These and many other traits of style employed by him in a mechanical and monotonous way were studied in him by the world's three great masters of prose--Plato, Demosthenes, and, later, Cicero. And Cicero has made them the common property of all educated men in theory if not in practice. Isocrates' 21 orations and 10 possibly genuine letters fill two small volumes of the Teubner texts. They have been partly translated into English by Freese, part i (London. 1894). They are not entirely free from dullness. There is an ample analysis and account of all of them in R. C. Jebb, Attic Orators, vol. ii (London, 1876). Consult also.: F. W. Blass, Attische Beredsamnkeit (Leipzig, 1868-80; 2d ed., 1887-93); id., Die Rhyhmen der attischen Kunstprosa (Leipzig, 1901); W. C. Wright, A Short History of Greek Literature (New York, 1907); Adams, "Recent Views of the Political Influence of Isocrates," in Classical Philology, vol. vii (Chicago, 1912): H. M. Hubbell, The Influence of Isocrates on Cicero, Dionysins, and Aristides (New Haven, 1913). There is a good English annotated edition of the Panegyricus by Sandys, and selected orations have been edited with German notes by Schneider (Berlin, 1888) The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 426. |