Lysias is as prominent a figure in the Greek rhetorical tradition and prose canon as he is a shadowy one. While surely among the most widely read Greek authors, we do not really know much about him and questions around the authorship of the so-called Lysianic corpus have troubled critics since antiquity. In fact, the large number of speeches that had been attributed to him by the first century bce prompted Dionysius of Halicarnassus to have a longer discussion of the methods of testing Lysianic authorship (Lysias 10–12).Footnote ¹ Throughout antiquity and until the mid-twentieth century, the absence of solid biographical information and of any conclusive evidence about the author did not prevent scholars from constructing full-scale narratives about Lysias’ life and works, mostly based on Lysias’ own speeches and possible reconstructed encounters with other contemporary intellectuals.Footnote ² It was the groundbreaking (and highly controversial) work by Kenneth Dover which brought about a change in Lysias studies.Footnote ³ He argued for a very different view of Lysias (and, as Usher noted,Footnote ⁴ implicitly of all Attic orators) by questioning the ability of the existing texts to point us towards the ‘actual’ speeches of the historical Lysias. In his skepticism, Dover’s work was very much in keeping with the contemporary preoccupations and literary theories of the 1960s. Dover argues that the attribution of works to Lysias and the building up of his corpus to the size that Dionysius reports by the first century bce was a process that had started already during the orator’s lifetime, and that there was probably a particular boost for literary forgeries to be passed off under Lysias’ name immediately after his death.Footnote ⁵ In other words, through the examination of chronology, ideology and artistry, Dover concluded that there is very little that we can say with full confidence about Lysias and, in particular, about Lysias’ authorship of the speeches in the corpus. The many stages that go into the emergence of a text, from the litigant to the speechwriter to the bookseller to publication, processes that we generally ignore for the sake of simplicity,Footnote ⁶ are all highly susceptible to modification and could easily cast a shadow on any comfortable attribution of texts to an author ‘Lysias’ whom we actually know very little about.

There are problems with this view that have since been highlighted by others. For example, Dover uses pervasively the concept of a ‘consultant’ for the Greek translation of λογόγραφος, which in itself clearly stands for someone writing the speech (rather than an advisor); in subsequent criticism, Lysias is regarded as the writer and author of these speeches, and we see no hint in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ treatment of Lysias for a view of Lysias as a consultant and not a prose artist.Footnote ⁷ Dover’s challenge, which was met with significant resistance upon its publication, has nevertheless been a productive one and has since pushed scholars further to explore the less visible elements of rhetorical practice.Footnote ⁸

Lysias’ corpus has since been fruitfully examined as a historical source for this extremely fascinating time period (c.403–380 bce) for which it provides valuable and unique information, thus offering a rare window into the actual lives of Athenians.Footnote ⁹ In this context, it has mattered less whether or not the author of these speeches is Lysias or somebody else trying to come off as Lysias, as long as the texts could be relatively securely dated to the fourth century bce. This approach would have been unusual for ancient critics, who looked at the orators primarily (if not exclusively) as masters of style and rhetoric.Footnote ¹⁰ The earliest moment of Lysias’ reception in Plato’s Phaedrus, which in many ways (as will be argued below) came to determine the orator’s name and reception for posterity, is a good example. This chapter will follow the figure of Lysias and his image that emerges through his own writings but in particular through his reception in the works of others. In other words, we will not try to establish historical information about the actual person Lysias who lived and wrote in Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries bce, but rather examine the importance of the persona of Lysias, how this name ‘Lysias’ became significant in rhetorical studies, what kind of rhetorical tradition it was associated with, and how understanding and treatment of Lysias and his work changed from the fourth to the first century bce. This is no arbitrary choice, for the mentioned time frame captures the two crucial moments for the reception of Lysias and his corpus: the fourth century bce that marks Lysias’ activity as a speechwriter in Athens, and the first century bce when critics indicate that Lysias has become a chief representative of the tradition of rhetoric which is primarily concerned with style. Dover had once demonstrated our inability to get hold of the historical Lysias and to assess the authenticity of his corpus, but this chapter moves further and looks at what is left of τὸ Λυσιακόν (the ‘Lysianic’), taking therefore a closer and more cautious look at the figure of ‘Lysias’ and his shadow in his contemporary fourth century bce and later literary-rhetorical culture. Hence, without an ambition to tell a story of the practices and works of the historical person, this chapter will aim to ask (and answer) what is at stake in evoking the name (and author) Lysias.

1.1 Lysias …

Our primary evidence for Lysias’ life is limited to the following sources: Lysias’ speech 12 (Against Eratosthenes) and Against Hippotherses, Plato’s Phaedrus, Cleitophon and the Republic, and Apollodorus’ Prosecution against Neaira (§§21–3).Footnote ¹¹ Lysias’ speech 12 and Against Hippotherses (fr. 70 Carey), the latter of which survives in fragmentary form (we have roughly the last 200 lines of this speech), are generally taken to have been written by Lysias for his own court cases. The tone and first-person address make it highly likely that speech 12 was delivered by Lysias himself; Against Hippotherses, however, refers to Lysias in the third person which indicates that it had been delivered by someone else on his behalf.Footnote ¹² Which of the speeches was first, is unclear and depends on how we interpret the ambiguous and lacunous evidence of Lysias’ involvement in the restoration of democracy and – further – whether and how we look at the broader context of his career (including his possible literary ambitions).Footnote ¹³

The two speeches tell us that Lysias was a son of Cephalus, a wealthy Syracusan who moved to Athens at the invitation of Pericles and lived there as a metic when Lysias was born (12.4: οὑμὸς πατὴρ Κέφαλος ἐπείσθη μὲν ὑπὸ Περικλέους εἰς ταύτην τὴν γῆν ἀφικέσθαι […]).Footnote ¹⁴ The family suffered greatly under the Thirty (the main topic of both speeches), though probably not losing all its fortune, for Lysias seems to have been able to still give substantial support to the democrats after having fled and been deprived of his family property (fr. 70, 163 ff.). It is generally believed that after the Thirty Tyrants were overthrown in 403 bce, Lysias, in order to recover from financial difficulties, launched his career as a speechwriter.Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, speech 12 Against Eratosthenes on the murder of his brother Polemarchus appears to be the earliest speech in the corpus, and certainly one of the outstanding moments to determine his writerly success. This speech is also one of our best sources for the events that took place in Athens under the Thirty, and the speech itself displays very strong democratic and anti-oligarchical language. We have no independent evidence of Lysias’ political views, and it is very probable that this ideological language can be explained by the fact that at the time when the speech was delivered it was common to appeal to democratic values and governance in order to secure the benevolence of juries.Footnote ¹⁶ Nevertheless, the fact that speech 12 exhibits these democratic sympathies in such vehement fashion and that these pro-democratic emotions come from one of the wealthiest metics in Athens might have played an important role for the subsequent image of ‘Lysias’.Footnote ¹⁷ Furthermore, it is conceivable that the political implication of Lysias’ pro-democratic self-fashioning is also reflected in the reception of ‘Lysias’ in Plato and other philosophers.

The biographical tradition complicates the picture significantly in multiple ways. Dionysius of Halicarnassus is the author of the earliest, and most reliable, biography. He adds that at the age of fifteen Lysias left Athens with his brother Polemarchus to join the colonists at the founding of Thurii in Magna Graecia (D. H. Lysias 1.2), but returned to Athens in 412/11 after being exiled for pro-Athenian activity (‘Atticism’, ἀττικισμός, 1.3). From this data, Dionysius adduces the birth date for Lysias to around 459/8 and death to around 379/8 or 378/7. Ps. Plutarch’s account of Lysias’ life is dependent on Dionysius’ and supplemented by information derived from Lysias’ speeches and other material. The most relevant, if also most problematic, addition is the association of Lysias with the teaching of Tisias and Nicias. The latter is an unknown name in Sicily, probably a textual corruption,Footnote ¹⁸ but Tisias is – of course – famously linked to the early beginnings of rhetoric. The ancient tradition after Dionysius, who does not mention Lysias’ possible connections to the Sicilian rhetoricians,Footnote ¹⁹ continues to make references to the association of Lysias with rhetorical teaching (cf. Cicero Brutus 48).

The main complications added by the biographical tradition are twofold: first, there are some chronological challenges that emerge with dating Lysias’ birth to as early as 459/8, a tradition that seems to start with Dionysius and is followed by all other ancient sources.Footnote ²⁰ This early date is somewhat difficult to reconcile with the information we have about Lysias’ life from Apollodorus,Footnote ²¹ but it also poses difficulties for the dramatic date of Plato’s Phaedrus.Footnote ²² I would like to reiterate at this point that the question of the dramatic date is not in itself a problem, in as far as we are not trying to establish an actual or historical moment where Lysias would have met Phaedrus. There are plenty of historical inaccuracies, deliberate or not, in Plato’s work to make it clear that Plato’s attitude to his characters was not driven by aims for historical accuracy but rather by artistic and philosophical ambition.Footnote ²³ His envisioned character meetings were fictional and thus do not require us to conclude anything about an actual historical encounter.Footnote ²⁴ More important is the way in which Plato’s imagined dramatic date contributes to the overall representation of the character in view. In our case, a dramatic date before 415 bce (Dover’s 418–16 bce is an attractive proposal) would simply mean that Lysias spent quite some time in Athens between then and 403 bce when he allegedly took up speechwriting without engaging with rhetoric or at least without leaving for posterity evidence of any such potential (rhetorical or otherwise) activity. And as such, it turns out that the question whether the dialogue is envisioned to take place in the early or late 410s is not in itself a major one.

The second, and arguably more problematic, question emerges from the representation of Lysias’ rhetorical teaching and practice in that dialogue. The ancient evidence (the biographical tradition seems here in agreement with, or perhaps even dependent on, Plato’s Phaedrus 228a2) presents Lysias as having engaged in rhetorical activity (either through studying or teaching) much earlier than the proposed start of his speechwriting career.Footnote ²⁵ Even though it is often acknowledged in modern scholarship, the biographical tradition is not a reliable source and, with the absence of any independent evidence, Lysias’ possible pre-403 rhetorical activity is generally brushed aside.Footnote ²⁶ While it is indeed rather unlikely (and definitely not alluded to in the Phaedrus) that Lysias would have authored a technical handbook, Lysias’ overall characterization in the dialogue seems to make more sense if we consider the possibility of Lysias having had a sort of intellectual or rhetorical following before his speechwriting career started soon after the restoration of democracy in 403 bce.Footnote ²⁷ An independent source that seems to corroborate this view is Apollodorus’ Against Neaira, where Lysias is referred to as a sophist (σοφιστής, §21).Footnote ²⁸ Whether or not we should accept this detail about Lysias’ possible rhetorical activity in Athens before 403 bce, it is clear that the closer the dramatic date is to 403 bce, the more time Lysias has had to gain reputation in Athens and thus to deserve the wholehearted praise of Phaedrus as one of the ‘most clever contemporary writers’ (δεινότατος ὢν τῶν νῦν γράφειν, 228a2).

1.2 … and the Corpus Lysiacum

Let us move on from Lysias’ life to his output. Estimating by the number of speeches attributed to Lysias by the first century bce, he was either extremely prolific (especially given his ‘late’ start) and/or highly regarded enough to be used as a ‘mark of quality’ to raise the literary status of speeches written by others. In fact, the number of items (425) attributed to him in antiquity makes him by far the most productive speechwriter; the number of speeches that are attributed by Ps. Plutarch to other Ten orators, for instance, never exceeds 75.Footnote ²⁹ In comparison with the 233 speeches that Dionysius accepted as genuine in the first century bce, our modern editions present 34 or 35 speeches, plus fragments which in the most recent OCT edition amount to 145.Footnote ³⁰ All of the preserved speeches are contained in Codex Palatinus Graecus 88, now by scholars unanimously designated as MS X, which dates to the late twelfth or early thirteenth century.Footnote ³¹ X, the archetype of the majority of our medieval manuscripts, was organized largely by legal action,Footnote ³² and was very probably based on an anthology, which also contained orations by other Attic orators.Footnote ³³

A brief look at the entire corpus Lysiacum, which I take here to encompass all titles attributed to Lysias in antiquity, reveals Lysias as an author competent in a variety of rhetorical genres and legal proceedings. This tradition should be treated, however, with caution and no doubt some attributions go back to biographical details that have been attached to Lysias’ life and were later accepted as facts about his literary output.Footnote ³⁴ In antiquity, Lysias was credited with:Footnote ³⁵

1. 1 Display (epideictic) speeches, e.g. Ἐπιτάφιος (speech 2), Ὀλυμπιακός (fragmentary, speech 33), Ἐρωτικός (speech 35). Given the importance of Plato’s Phaedrus for the reception of Lysias, most references to this category of epideictic speeches primarily discuss, or depend on, the Ἐρωτικός.

2. 2 Dionysius preserves an example of a public or deliberative speech, Περὶ τοῦ μὴ καταλῦσαι τὴν πάτριον πολιτείαν Ἀθήνησι (fragmentary, speech 34). It is difficult to imagine, however, how or in what circumstances this speech could have been delivered by Lysias.

3. 3 Various sources suggest that Lysias authored letters and other writings of private content.Footnote ³⁶ Dionysius of Halicarnassus announces rather unexpectedly that he is not interested in Lysias’ letters, amatory discourses or the other works, because he wrote them for amusement (μετὰ παιδιᾶς).Footnote ³⁷ This is surprising indeed, especially since Dionysius was not interested in the legal argumentation but in Lysianic style and one would think that having access to variety of genres would have given Dionysius an even better and broader overview of Lysias’ art. This conundrum will be taken up with the closer examination of Dionysius’ criticism below.

4. 4 Both Ps. Plutarch (836b) and the Suda suggest that Lysias wrote a handbook or technical treatise on rhetoric. This, along with Lysias’ possible rhetorical activity, will be discussed below.

5. 5 The most important group of Lysias’ writings are his private courtroom speeches, which, within the boundary of private speeches, encompass a whole host of writings for different legal procedures. For the present purpose it is not necessary to divide these speeches further according to their underlying legal issues; it suffices to acknowledge that even within the category of private speeches Lysias seems to have been regarded as a competent writer on, for instance, cases regarding public/personal offense, murder or examinations for the holders of public offices.Footnote ³⁸

As this list demonstrates, Lysias’ speeches attest to a variety of rhetorical genres and legal procedures and, for this reason, it has been pointed out that Lysias’ surviving work shows a broader range of litigation than what we see in any other orator or speechwriter of the time.Footnote ³⁹ This aspect of Lysias’ writings is often overlooked in modern scholarship, where Lysias is mostly regarded as a writer of forensic speeches.Footnote ⁴⁰ There are two main reasons for this: first, the fact that, with the exception of Ἐπιτάφιος and Ἐρωτικός (both regarded as dubious by modern scholars), the majority of the Lysianic corpus that has come down to us consists of private speeches. The second reason, which is possibly directly related to the first, is that Lysias’ fame in the first century bce seems to have rested primarily on his forensic speeches and our prime witness for this view is Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who is not particularly interested in the legal procedures of the various private speeches (which would show Lysias’ capability in different legal contexts) but focuses mainly on the literary quality and style of Lysias’ writing.Footnote ⁴¹ More specifically, Dionysius is interested in a very particular kind of style, and he finds the prime examples for this ‘simple and effective’ rhetoric in Lysias’ private speeches. However, the ancient tradition (other than Dionysius) shows a close awareness of, and interest in, legal procedures. The Alexandrian edition of Lysias, for example, was organized broadly based on the underlying legal issue.Footnote ⁴²

The corpus Lysiacum brings together rhetorical writing at a rather large scale – from court speeches for a variety of juridical matters to epideictic speeches and a personal speech (speech 12) that allegedly gives us a sense of Lysias’ own voice early in his career. Despite the large variety of texts that constitute the corpus at the moment, we should also remember that we do not even have 10 per cent of the corpus that was available for ancient critics. In fact, none of the speeches cited and discussed by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the most prominent critic of Lysias’ rhetoric, have come to us through the manuscript tradition. From all this we can infer that Lysias was an important writer of the late fifth and fourth centuries bce, even though we would be also justified to wonder how much we would know about Lysias and his work had there not been one text in particular that did much to immortalize his figure to the history of rhetoric – Plato’s Phaedrus.

The only explicit reference to Lysias in the corpus of ancient orators is made in Apollodorus’ speech Against Neaira, which had long been included in the Demosthenic corpus.Footnote ¹ This speech, dating from around the 340s, mentions Lysias in a brief passage in connection with an argument about the background of Neaira who is accused of not being a citizen of Athens, but acting as if she was in legal marriage with an Athenian citizen. Sections §§21–3 make some personal, but not denigrating, remarks about Lysias: he is introduced as a sophist (Λυσίας ὁ σοφιστής, §21) who has a concubine Metaneira (from the same background as Neaira), whom Lysias wanted to initiate into the Eleusinian mysteries. According to this speech, Lysias hosted both Metaneira and Neaira at his friend’s place rather than in his home, because he did not want to embarrass his wife and family by the presence of the two concubines in his home. It is generally accepted that the mention of Lysias in this passage refers to the famous speechwriter Lysias,Footnote ² and this passage is usually included among sources for Lysias’ biography. As already mentioned above, it is interesting that Lysias is called here a sophist with the assumption that it will be clear to everyone who was meant. The resonance of this word in this context is not entirely clear. Perhaps referring to Lysias as a speechwriter or logographos (λογογράφος) would have been dangerous given the fact that the very speech was written by Apollodorus and delivered jointly by his brother-in-law as the main accuser and himself,Footnote ³ and a reference to another speechwriter might have made the jury suspicious. On the other hand, Lysias could not have been called a rhetor (ῥήτωρ) or orator either, because as far as we know he only delivered two speeches (if any) and could not participate in current politics. If we take Plato’s Phaedrus at face value and Lysias did indeed engage in a variety of rhetorical activity (instruction of sorts together with speechwriting), it may make more sense to call him a sophist and also assume the audience’s familiarity with him (cf. Phaedrus’ perception of Lysias in Plato’s dialogue).

It is noteworthy that the titles of speeches attributed to Lysias in antiquity mention many fifth- and fourth-century bce intellectuals and public figures, thus suggesting that he was involved (or was perceived as someone who could have been involved) in writing speeches (either prosecution or defense speeches) for them. Among the list the most famous is probably Lysias’ alleged defense speech for Socrates,Footnote ⁴ which will be discussed in more depth below. But there are also speeches mentioning Xenophon (speech 117, fr 259), Demosthenes (speech 37, fr 79–84), Nicias (speech 111, fr. 244), Isocrates (speech 75, fr. 178–9), Sophocles (speech 125, fr 269), Aeschines the Socratic,Footnote ⁵ and many more public figures of fourth-century bce Athens. Many of these titles are very possibly suspect, but it is nevertheless curious that Lysias seems to have been associated with writing speeches either in favor of or against famous public figures. The speech allegedly written by Lysias against Demosthenes’ guardianship (i.e. a prosecution speech of Demosthenes?) is a case in point: the title Against Demosthenes’ Guardianship (κατὰ Δημοσθένους ἐπιτροπῆς) evokes the famous guardianship (ἐπιτροπή) speeches of Demosthenes, which became fundamental for launching Demosthenes’ political career.Footnote ⁶ On chronological grounds of course Lysias’ authorship of a speech relating to Demosthenes is impossible, since Lysias probably died around 380 bce (379/8 bce according to Dionysius) and Demosthenes was born in 384 bce. Yet, the fact that Lysias was perceived to have written a speech in relation to that particular, and rather personal, event in Demosthenes’ life may tell us something about the image of Lysias as a speechwriter.Footnote ⁷ Namely that Lysias was associated with cases that mixed the highly personal with the highly political (e.g. Demosthenes’ first trial on his private matter about inheritance also launched his political career; Socrates’ private trial also brought philosophy to court and immortalized the philosopher). In the case of Demosthenes’ guardianship speech, since it could not have been written by Lysias for delivery in the actual trial, two solutions present themselves: either this fragment is a genuine speech by Demosthenes’ opponents (or the speechwriter they hired) wrongly attributed to Lysias, or a rhetorical exercise from a later period depicting an encounter between Lysias and Demosthenes. In both cases, attaching the speech to the Lysianic corpus manifests the biographical interests of later scholarship in finding links between famous ancient personages about whom they no longer possessed affirmative biographical information. Be that as it may, the extant speeches, fragments and titles have shaped our perception of Lysias as an author: he is depicted as a speechwriter who is most closely associated with private and personal cases, and it is worthwhile to explore whether this association was already made in the earliest reception of his works.

If (as our sources suggest) Lysias’ perceived talent in speechwriting did not lie in specialization in any particular kind of legal procedure or in any specific genre of rhetoric (forensic, epideictic, deliberative), it is probable that his reputation had something to do with his approach to certain themes or particular elements he used in composing his speeches. By merely looking at the corpus (including fragments), we will find little evidence to say anything more specific about this possibility. It is striking, however, that the Corpus, admittedly consisting of authentic and non-authentic speeches by ‘Lysias’, shows a great number of defense speeches,Footnote ⁸ and this is a genre that Usher has found to give most room for character portrayals.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, among Lysias’ extant speeches, some of his most vivid and well-known characters are developed in defense speeches.Footnote ¹⁰ This attempt to deduce characterization as the prime characteristic of Lysias’ speeches and the reason for his logographic fame is however based on a circular argument: from the content of the Corpus as we have it now suggestions are made about the particular abilities of ‘Lysias’, which are then taken to have preceded the Corpus and to have actually determined the focus of the existing corpus. Hence, while this discussion has not brought us closer to the early reception of, and reactions to, Lysias’ career and writings, this closer scrutiny of the various items of the Lysianic corpus seems to confirm that at the later stages of his reception when his speeches were collected more systematically by scholars and editors in Alexandria and Rome, Lysias’ fame does become associated with his success at characterization.

Valuable sources for the earliest reception of Lysias’ career and work are Plato’s dialogues, which, however, have their own particular focus and agenda and thus cannot be taken as genuine historical records of Lysias’ contemporary reception. Yet, before turning to Plato’s treatment of Lysias, I would like to briefly explore one of the most curious titles in the Lysianic corpus, The Apology for Socrates. This title stands out because it brings together two famous personages (Lysias and Socrates) around a watershed event of the early fourth century bce, an event which shows Lysias at the beginning and Socrates at the end of his career. The Lysias–Socrates encounter, whether imagined or not, gives us an interesting insight into the development of Lysias’ reception and all three versions of the story that circulated in antiquity are thus worth a closer look.

The story about the defense speech that Lysias had allegedly written and presented to Socrates is first attested in Cicero (De oratore 1.54, 231) and is subsequently elaborated by other authors.Footnote ¹¹ It should be noted that the story and its (re)interpretations are primarily focused on Socrates’ refusal of Lysias’ defense speech on the grounds that it is not suitable for him. In all extant versions of the anecdote, this is clearly the main focus of interest. In Cicero’s De oratore, Socrates is said to have read Lysias’ speech not unwillingly (non invitus) and commended the speech as ‘skillfully written’ (commode scriptam esse), but rejected it eventually on the grounds that it was not manly (virilis) and stout (fortis) enough, just as he would not wear comfortable Sicyonian boots for the same reason. In other words, Lysias’ speech was perceived by Socrates as not duly representing his character.

Diogenes Laertius’ version of the story emphasizes the rejection of Lysias’ speech by Socrates on similar grounds: Lysias’ speech does not fit him (οὐ ἁρμόττων), as would neither beautiful clothes nor shoes (οὐ γὰρ καὶ ἱμάτια καλὰ καὶ ὑποδήματα εἴη ἂν ἐμοὶ ἀνάρμοστα). Hunter has already shown how the mention of clothes and garment can be seen as parallel to the rhetorical embellishments of Lysias’ speech.Footnote ¹² However, given that Lysias had been praised by Dionysius in the first century bce for his ability to depict character (ἠθοποιία), in these later reworkings of this anecdote it must have been a deliberate point, and somewhat of an embarrassment for Lysias, that Socrates rejects the speech because of Lysias’ failure to depict a fitting character. There must have been calculated irony in sharing or transmitting these anecdotes about Socrates/Lysias while at the same time recommending Lysias as a model for characterization. As Cicero’s passage suggests, had Socrates accepted Lysias’ speech, he would not have lost the trial, for the speech, which probably showed Lysias at its best, was perfectly fitted to the expectations of the courtroom.Footnote ¹³ Socrates rejected, then, not only the rhetoric of the courtroom, but precisely this kind of rhetoric that operates with character manipulation which Lysias was so famous for.

The connection between rhetoric and character in Lysias’ speech is expressed even more strongly in the version of Valerius Maximus, where the story is narrated to exemplify the importance of gravitas among illustrious men, who have preferred death over life without gravitas.Footnote ¹⁴ The lack of gravitas appears to be also the criticism of Lysias’ speech by Socrates, who after hearing Lysias responded by saying that nam ego, si adduci possem ut eam in ultima Scythiae solitudine perorarem, tum me ipse morte multandum concederem (‘If I could be persuaded to deliver it in the farthest wilderness of Scythia, I should admit myself that I deserved death’). Moreover, Valerius Maximus concludes that spiritum contempsit ne careret gravitate, maluitque Socrates exstingui quam Lysias superesse (‘he despised life lest it be without gravity and preferred extinction as Socrates to survival as Lysias’).Footnote ¹⁵ The claim here is that accepting Lysias’ speech would commit Socrates to the kind of personality and character that is depicted in that kind of speech. This, however, is regarded to be in contrast with everything that Socrates came to represent, so that he would at any moment choose death over such a life. In sum, whatever the individual nuances of these different interpretations of the anecdote, all these stories make a clear association between Lysias’ skill and success as a speechwriter with a particular talent for creating persuasive characters, and Socrates’ refusal to profit from this skill, as it would not portray his character truthfully. This sheds some light on the perception of Lysias ‘the author’ in the later stages of his reception, and as will be discussed below, will find support in the way in which ‘the Lysianic’ is understood in Plato’s Phaedrus.

2.1 Plato’s Lysias

Plato is the first critic of Lysias and his Phaedrus is before Dionysius of Halicarnassus the most valuable engagement with, and record of, Lysias as a writer and intellectual. In the following pages, we will explore the extent to which our current, and presumably also the ancient, reception of Lysias is directly indebted to Plato’s dialogues, and what that means for Lysias’ Nachleben and the rhetorical tradition more generally.

The suggestion that Plato is directly related to the reception of Lysias might sound at first instance surprising. Sure, they are both interested in rhetoric, but from completely different angles and with different aims. What links the two? On the one hand, their intellectual environment: they both move in (the same) high circles of Athenian elite and thus share a similar background. On the other, literary and possibly also political feud: the praise of Lysias as the most accomplished contemporary writer followed by heavy critique indicates, among other things, a sense of rivalry between the writers. Politically speaking, Lysias’ speech 12 associates him strongly with pro-democratic sentiments and tries to play down his own elite status as much as possible (by emphasizing instead the struggles of the metic community). Plato’s references to Lysias consistently associate him with the political and intellectual circle that is cohabited by Plato: the anti-democratic elite. In the end, Lysias’ character seems to serve for Plato two different, but interconnected, functions. As a generic character he stands for speechwriters and pseudo-intellectuals (or rather, anti-intellectuals) in Athens more generally. This way Lysias becomes the representative of a kind of rhetoric that Plato finds particularly difficult and reprehensible. As a particular character, Plato is using Lysias to map out the field of rhetoric through its practitioners and their interrelationships in contemporary Athens.

Lysias is mentioned several times in Plato’s dialogues. The most extensive focus on Lysias is in the Phaedrus, but before embarking on a closer analysis of the representation of Lysias in this dialogue, let us briefly take a look at other dialogues which feature, in a more or less significant way, Lysias. Aside from the Phaedrus, Lysias is mentioned in two other dialogues: three times in the either spurious, dubious or incomplete dialogue Cleitophon, twice in the opening section (406a2, 406a6) and once in the concluding passage (410e4), and once at the beginning of the Republic (328b4).

Cleitophon, which appears to present an explicit attack on Socrates and his philosophical method, is a puzzling dialogue. The authenticity of the dialogue was not questioned in antiquity,Footnote ¹⁶ though scholarship from the nineteenth century onwards has been very critical of the dialogue and suspicious of its authenticity. The most important issue for scholarship has been the content of the dialogue and the fact that it lacks Socrates’ response at the end, which would address the accusations made by Cleitophon.Footnote ¹⁷ However, a closer look at the dialogue reveals that it has a coherent and finished structure, thus casting doubts on the notion that the dialogue was left unfinished and/or abandoned.Footnote ¹⁸ Furthermore, Slings argues that the Cleitophon belongs to a separate dialogue genre that he calls the ‘short dialogue’.Footnote ¹⁹ Most of Plato’s shorter dialogues are included in this category (many of which have also been considered spurious), and it has its own characteristic features with which the Cleitophon seems to conform.Footnote ²⁰ For the purposes of the current discussion, it is not totally irrelevant whether Plato was the author of the dialogue, especially if there is a sense of a rivalry between Plato and Lysias, literary and/or political, that emerges from looking at the way Plato portrays Lysias in his work. Having said that, however, my reading of the relevance of Lysias in the dialogue is not overly dependent on the authorship of Plato; as long as the dialogue can be safely placed in the context of the Academy (and the fourth century bce), something that has not really been doubted in scholarship thus far, my argument could be read independently from disputes about the authenticity of the Cleitophon.

One of the most important characteristics of short dialogues is that they go straight to the core of the problem that forms the central discussion in the dialogue, thus making every little detail and character mentioned even more relevant to the underlying issue. From this perspective, then, the fact that Plato introduced a conversation with Lysias as the starting point for the discussion in the short Cleitophon is significant. In fact, Lysias features (or is mentioned in passing) at the beginning of three of Plato’s dialogues (Phaedrus, Republic, Cleitophon) and disappears from the body of the work (except for the Phaedrus where Lysias is mentioned again at the end of the dialogue).Footnote ²¹ Let us take a closer look at the Cleitophon to see what kind of role Lysias might have on setting up the framework and central question of the dialogue.

Mentioning Lysias at the beginning of the dialogue seems to suggest some kind of engagement with rhetoric, speechwriting or an intellectual environment where these two are discussed and/or practised.Footnote ²² Slings goes further and points out that the dialogue has a clear structure that seems in line with the conventions of courtroom speeches.Footnote ²³ Indeed, the dialogue is essentially a long speech, incorporating dialogical (or pseudo-dialogical) elements, about Socrates’ virtues and shortcomings as a teacher. It is certainly relevant that the discussion that Cleitophon had with Lysias concerned Socratic teaching in particular and did not appear to have reflected on education in a more abstract sense (e.g. trying to answer questions such as ‘whether virtue is teachable?’). The object of criticism is not, therefore, philosophy and its usefulness, but rather Socrates’ teaching methodology – how to best educate and bring pupils to one’s preferred subject. We see here, then, how Lysias – in conversation with Cleitophon – has prompted a fundamental critique of Socratic teaching, clearly questioning Socrates’ protreptic method and its ability to do real philosophy. Socrates is regarded as an inspiration in the beginning, but afterwards as an obstacle to his students’ pursuit of philosophy. I believe that this is not a trivial question – Socrates’ character and his teaching methods seem to have been hotly debated in antiquity as they are today.Footnote ²⁴ The Cleitophon, therefore, whether or not an authentic work by Plato, evokes a very crucial concern about the Platonic dialogues and Socratic teaching methodology in particular. In this sense, it is not unimportant that it was precisely Lysias who seems to have brought up the question about Socrates’ teaching in the first place.

There are two further points that I would like to briefly mention in relation to the Cleitophon: first, our knowledge of Cleitophon and his association with Lysias, and second, the interpretation of Socrates’ silence at the end of the dialogue and how this might feed into the general picture of Lysias in Plato. To start with the second point, the fact that Cleitophon casts a rather unexpected and perhaps embarrassing light on Socrates’ philosophical activities seems to be agreed on by most commentators.Footnote ²⁵ If Socrates’ silence at the end of the dialogue is taken as an acknowledgement or confirmation of a problem in Socratic teaching, the Cleitophon depicts a problematic defeat of Socrates by an eloquent interlocutor and the dialogue could be compared in this respect with some passages of the Euthydemus or the Gorgias. What strikes us about these comparisons is that in those dialogues (i.e. in Euthydemus and Gorgias) Socrates puts forward explicit criticisms of his interlocutors throughout the work and we are invited to take the side of Socrates who, even if ridiculed within the dramatic context of the dialogue, still has the upper hand in the overall argumentative structure of the dialogue. In Cleitophon, however, Socrates’ explicit criticism of, and response to, his opponents is absent. To answer the second question, then, the dialogue certainly evokes crucial questions about Socratic method and Lysias is clearly associated with Athenian intellectuals who are overtly critical of Socrates.

The first point about Cleitophon and his character might help shed further light on the question. From the way Cleitophon is characterized in the dialogue, we understand that this is a man who is impatient to find out the right answers and, hoping to reach a state of clear knowledge, frequents several different philosophical schools and listens to many different philosophers who teach – we are led to assume – different things. Indeed, Cleitophon describes himself at the end of the dialogue as ἀπορῶν (410c9), but this should not surprise us by that point, not after we have followed his restless and eclectic switching between philosophical schools and arguments. In a sense, as much as the dialogue appears on the surface to focus on Socrates’ confusing protreptics, it actually gives the reader a close-up of an individual (Cleitophon) who is so enthused by and imbued in protreptic writings that he is unable to recognize philosophical thinking proper when he is confronted with it (e.g. in the Republic where he is unable to follow the discussion).Footnote ²⁶ Plato’s Socrates remains silent at the end of the dialogue, according to this reading, because Cleitophon’s criticisms grossly misrepresent Socrates’ philosophical method to the extent that they have simply no shared ground upon which to build a constructive discussion. What should Socrates possibly reply to Cleitophon’s claims of having been an ardent ‘fan’ of Socrates who he thought produced (praise?) songs (ὑμνεῖν) just like a god on a tragic stage (407b1: ὥσπερ ἐπὶ μηχανῆς τραγικῆς θεός)?Footnote ²⁷ Most importantly, Cleitophon has no patience for this kind of Socratic teaching: he makes use of the Socratic question–answer method, thus showing himself to be superficially aware of it, but he uses this not for the purposes of exploring the truth together with his interlocutors (and hence becoming more knowledgeable together with them), but rather to challenge them impatiently when they fail to give him a satisfactory definition.Footnote ²⁸ When summarizing Socrates’ views on justice (410a8–b2), Cleitophon dismisses him as merely contradicting himself or being, at best, ambiguous and undecided. This is a clear reference to Republic 1, but Cleitophon’s conclusion hardly represents what Socrates has to say about justice in this dialogue. We should note that the Republic is the only other dialogue by Plato where both Cleitophon and Lysias are mentioned as participating, even if not contributing (and this is important!), to the philosophical discussion.Footnote ²⁹ Lysias is a silent listener in the Republic (never directly exposed to a Socratic inquiry), but vocal among his associates about the shortcomings of Socrates’ views. There is a sense of insincerity in both Lysias’ and Cleitophon’s behavior that is directly alluded to in the beginning of the dialogue by Socrates’ direct confrontation with Cleitophon. Even though present, they expressed their criticisms of Socrates’ views behind his back without aiming to engage in a serious and open discussion of the topic. And looking at what else we know of Cleitophon, this is very suggestive. Apparently Cleitophon was a well-known figure in Athens, particularly notorious for his ‘flip-flopping political attitudes’.Footnote ³⁰ He seems to have had consistently oligarchic views and paved the way towards the oligarchy of the Four Hundred in 411.Footnote ³¹ Associating Lysias, the staunch proponent of democracy (or so it appears from his speech 12), with Cleitophon could be potentially damaging to both, but perhaps especially to Lysias, one of the richest metics in Athens who seems to have gone through a great deal to present himself as suffering along with the demos in the oligarchic coups. Plato took meticulous care in crafting the characters of his dialogues and we can therefore assume that none of the people mentioned in his works are there by accident.Footnote ³² So too for Cleitophon: it is certainly not accidental that Lysias’ name is dropped at the beginning of the Cleitophon and that it was a conversation between Cleitophon and Lysias that triggers this dialogue. This may seem a very subtle reading of the short dialogue for modern readers, but for the immediate audience of the dialogue it may have suggested more readily that Plato’s choice to bring together these two characters would cast problematic light on both Lysias’ political as well as intellectual allies.

Another scene portraying Lysias together with an admirer and potential student is referred to at the beginning of the Phaedrus. There, the whole discussion about rhetoric is prompted by Phaedrus’ admiration for the speeches of Lysias (δεινότατος ὢν τῶν νῦν γράφειν, 228a1–2), and for one speech in particular that he had heard delivered in Epicrates’ house. Phaedrus says that he had been sitting the whole morning indoors with Lysias and needs to take a walk outside the city to freshen up (227a2–5). Whoever else was present in Epicrates’ house with Phaedrus and Lysias we do not know, but the lack of references to a larger group suggests that we may plausibly suppose their encounter to have been a kind of ‘private lesson’ by Lysias. Phaedrus’ learning process is laid out in hypothetical terms by Socrates in 228a–b and is subsequently confirmed by Phaedrus: he had indeed received instruction from Lysias and had hoped to use Socrates to rehearse Lysias’ speech (228c6–7, 228d1–4, 228e4–6). Lysias is never portrayed as eloquent with the crowds in Plato (perhaps due to his metic status), but is frequently referred to in a one-to-one instruction setting (cf. Cleitophon and he never says a word in the Republic). As such, he stands in contrast to Socrates, who is often portrayed by Plato in conversation with a larger group of Athenians. The Phaedrus is in this sense a fascinating exception, especially given its focus on rhetoric, a topic that is tackled in the Gorgias in front of a large and contentious crowd. Socrates’ quest for knowledge is transparent and open for everybody to join, whereas Lysias’ skill will be learned and transmitted behind closed doors. It is a paradox indeed that despite all the pro-democratic rhetoric in speech 12, Plato chooses to characterize Lysias as an elite writer and instructor, inaccessible to the demos and uncomfortable in the public spotlight.Footnote ³³

The association of Lysias with Epicrates is a case in point. Much like Cleitophon, Epicrates was a rather controversial figure, well known for his wealth and influence, but notorious for questionable political behavior. Epicrates fought in 403 on the side of democracy (Demosthenes 19.277), like Lysias, but was later associated with corruption and taking bribes.Footnote ³⁴ In fact, alongside other sources, a speech by Lysias reveals that a certain Epicrates had a history of giving bribes (Against Epicrates 27.1–9). If this is indeed the same Epicrates mentioned in the beginning of the Phaedrus as Lysias’ host,Footnote ³⁵ then the (later) reader of the Platonic dialogue might be surprised to find the two depicted as associates.Footnote ³⁶ The image is made worse by mentioning Morychus, a well-known personage who was mocked in comedy for his gluttony and high living.Footnote ³⁷ The environment where Lysias stayed while in Athens was one dominated by wealth, abuse of power and political influence. In sum, we see in this first scene of the Phaedrus that Lysias is associated with morally (if not politically) dubious characters and this characterization offers another dimension to the introductory part of the dialogue, and one that challenges the overt praise with which Lysias is brought to the conversation by Phaedrus. The most clever Lysias (δεινότατος, 228a1) might acquire here another dimension: the clever and dangerous.Footnote ³⁸

But what exactly was Lysias doing in Epicrates’ house? Phaedrus says that he ‘spent a long time there [with Lysias], sitting down from early morning’ (227a3–4: συχνὸν γὰρ ἐκεῖ διέτριψα χρόνον καθήμενος ἐξ ἑωθινοῦ) and needs now to freshen up. This description seems to suggest a longer exchange than simply attending a speech performance. Also, it seems that Phaedrus made up the whole audience. Socrates seems to suggest that Lysias offered some sort of exegetical practice after having delivered the speech. The word Socrates uses immediately afterward to sum up Phaedrus’ stay, διατριβή (227b6), is ambiguous and could suggest either a study or simply ‘time spent’. In fact, Socrates himself finds it relevant to inquire what kind of gathering it was, only to reply to his own question immediately with a suggestion that it must have been ‘a feast of speeches that Lysias offered’ (227b6–7: ἢ δῆλον ὅτι τῶν λόγων ὑμᾶς Λυσίας εἱστία). Are these kinds of erotic display speeches the kind that Lysias was in the habit of composing and sharing with his admirers? Let us bear in mind the fact that the dramatic date of the dialogue suggests a time well before the oligarchic coup and thus the eventual start of Lysias’ speechwriting career. By the time the Phaedrus is composed, the reader would of course associate Lysias with his courtroom speeches and so an interesting anticlimax is built up at the beginning of the dialogue, where Phaedrus exposes the topic of Lysias’ speech: not at all a court speech for a famous personage or witty portrayal of an Athenian litigant, but rather a sophistic argument to win over a lover! In the very beginning of the dialogue, in other words, Plato turns the image of Lysias upside-down: we are not confronted with a staunch democrat and a courtroom speechwriter, but instead with an elitist intellectual who spends time with wealthy and morally questionable characters, producing and performing discourses that appear to have very little serious content to them.Footnote ³⁹

It is important to draw out another, arguably the most important, line of argument in Plato’s portrayal of Lysias – Lysias as an incapable practitioner of his own art. As we saw, the Cleitophon and the Republic depict Lysias as the silent character in group discussions who is not interested in philosophy (Republic), even though he seems eager to criticize in private the methods of the kind of philosophical examination conducted by Socrates (Cleitophon). The Phaedrus goes further and later on in the dialogue suggests more explicitly that Lysias does not have the mind for philosophy (279a3–b2).Footnote ⁴⁰ While Isocrates will grow out of his present activity (preoccupation with speeches: εἰ περὶ αὐτούς τε τοὺς λόγους, οἷς νῦν ἐπιχειρεῖ, πλέον ἢ παίδων διενέγκοι τῶν πώποτε ἁψαμένων λόγων, 279a5–6) and ascend to follow his more divine philosophical nature, as Socrates predicts, Lysias remains where he is, writing speeches as he has always done.Footnote ⁴¹ We will take a closer look below at the role and portrayal of Isocrates in this dialogue. For the time being, suffice it to say that there are good reasons for taking the comparison sketched out in this passage at face value and positioning Isocrates far higher in Plato’s (or Socrates’) overall estimation of contemporary rivals/teachers than has been hitherto considered.

Importantly, Lysias’ proclaimed inability does not only affect Lysias’ philosophical prospects. Socrates’ analysis and judgement of Lysias’ composition earlier in the dialogue pointed out that the latter has performed below the standards of his own (rhetorical) art. According to Socrates, Lysias’ speech was unnecessarily repetitive, failed to bring out a diverse set of compelling arguments in favor of the main point (235a3–6), and badly organized (e.g. the Midas epitaph in 264d). He grants Lysias his eloquent style (‘expressions are clear and well-rounded and finely turned’, 234e5–6), but claims that he could easily come up, on the spot, with an equally good (or even better) speech as that of Lysias (235c4–5).Footnote ⁴² The much-praised composition of Lysias that so delighted Phaedrus turns out to be an average example of the art at best. Lysias’ speech will be scrutinized also at a later stage in the dialogue: from 262c4 onwards Socrates analyzes the beginning of Lysias’ speech and finds it lacking of the kind of structure that he and Phaedrus had previously agreed should be exhibited in a successful composition. Throughout the dialogue, then, Lysias is constantly exposed as underperforming in an art that he is so famous for.

This tells us, of course, something about philosophy and something about rhetoric. Perhaps most obviously, by pointing to the impact of Lysias’ speech on both Phaedrus and Socrates, the dialogue indicates the power of rhetoric to force the listener to forget oneself and immerse oneself in the story.Footnote ⁴³ And it also suggests, through Socrates’ clear-headed analysis of Lysias’ speech, that philosophical training might be a good way to resist the temptation and illogical persuasion brought about by rhetoric. That much seems obvious. There remains the question about what this means eventually to Lysias, to his reputation and to his students. I propose that Plato’s discussion of Lysias has two dimensions: the general and the particular. On a general level, Plato’s Phaedrus marks the beginning of sustained attempts by philosophers to systematize the field of rhetoric. By weaving into his narrative a dizzying number of references to various contemporary and ancient orators and rhetoricians Plato not only demonstrates his competence in the field, but also offers a categorization of the different contributions rhetoricians have made and how to assess those. In the midst of the crowd of rhetoricians Plato singles out Lysias and Isocrates, thus creating through them an image of rhetoric as divisible into two larger categories. On a particular or individual level, Plato’s portrayal of Lysias comes to dominate the reception of Lysias and his writing. As a metic who had few (if any) opportunities for public appearance, and thus to leave a record of his persona in history other than through his own works, Plato’s scathing analysis of the incompetence of Lysias was going to leave a hostile trace in the reception history of this writer. The fact that posterity was not always very attentive to Plato’s sarcasm and seems to have missed that point on occasion (though not, as will be argued below, in the case of Dionysius of Halicarnassus), is another story. It is also relevant to note that Plato’s Phaedrus effectively gives us the only other speech by Lysias where the latter is portrayed as speaking in his own voice, therefore offering a competing account to Lysias’ speech 12.

It is clear, then, that Plato wrote the Phaedrus with a message about rhetoric in mind: the outlines of the art of persuasion, in all its messy contemporary context, are effectively drawn by two characters who offer contrasting visions for the art – Lysias and Isocrates.Footnote ⁴⁴ Indeed, the dialogue concludes with the request to report the outcome of Socrates’ conversation with Phaedrus to Lysias and Isocrates, as figures of particular importance to the field of rhetoric.Footnote ⁴⁵ The two are pitched against each other (279a3: δοκεῖ μοι ἀμείνων ἢ κατὰ τοὺς περὶ Λυσίαν εἶναι λόγους τὰ τῆς φύσεως) and that comparison is by no means neutral: Isocrates comes out from this juxtaposition as a stronger and worthier representative of rhetoric.

We might indeed ask whether Plato was in fact fair in his assessment of Lysias’ speech. Socrates appears naïve and/or insensitive to quite a few important aspects of Lysias’ speech, in particular to the possibility that some of what he and Phaedrus have recognized as faults might instead have a specific (and well-calculated) function in the context of the speech.Footnote ⁴⁶ For example, the lack of clear definition of love at the beginning of the speech, a fault that brings Lysias’ speech under renewed criticism (from 262c4 onwards), contributes to deliberately keeping the ambivalence about the topic and is therefore an important part of Lysias’ argumentative strategy in the speech.Footnote ⁴⁷ Phaedrus himself showed where he thought the real contribution of Lysias’ speech lies when he identified the particular twist to a commonplace topic as the very standout aspect of the speech (227c5–8). In other words, Lysias had set out to have a different agenda and strategy in composing the speech, so that Socrates’ criticisms that are founded on strong commitments to philosophy and truth might strike the reader as insensitive or simply wrong when applied to Lysias. As Ferrari points out, Plato/Socrates’ criticisms of Lysias run much deeper and eventually work towards a ‘whole-hearted rejection of Lysias’ way of life’.Footnote ⁴⁸

Based on what has been said thus far, it does seem that Lysias is represented in Plato’s dialogues as a rather particular kind of intellectual, one that is often present in crucial contemporary philosophical debates, but never really allows his views to be directly exposed, tested or challenged. This Platonic Lysias is a representative of a kind of rhetorical practice that aims to impress with persuasive tricks and amusing twists and deliberately shuns pursuing truth and knowledge in their own right. From Phaedrus’ adoring reaction we surmise that a writer like Lysias, whose plain style was appealing to the crowds but morally suspect, might have been an even more dangerous adversary to Plato’s philosophical project than many (or even most) of his rivals (Isocrates, Antisthenes, or sophists who would follow the path of Gorgias, Protagoras or Euthydemus) who may have been willing to engage with Socrates’ questioning of their activity. This is because Lysias’ style is alluring, simple and effective in bringing about persuasion (Phaedrus is presented as a test case of the appeal of Lysianic rhetoric), but his content is driving the audience further from philosophy and, eventually, from themselves.

Plato exercised a significant impact on the reception of Lysias and his writing skills more generally. While his portrayal of Lysias as an ‘anti-intellectualist’ might have been his own inventive take on Lysias and one that was perhaps not that obvious to subsequent readers of the dialogue, the carefully constructed Lysianic speech of the dialogue reflects some of the most distinctive stylistic elements of Lysias’ writing that have remained steadily fixed in the later perception of the writer. In particular, his Phaedrus seems to corroborate the general view of Lysias as the master of character delineation that was suggested above in analyzing other contemporary and later sources. Comparing all three speeches of the Phaedrus, we find the first, purportedly by Lysias, to stand out from the others by the number of references to characters and characterization in the speech. It is a paradox and at the same time a testament to the Lysianic writerly skill (albeit filtered through Plato) that this is perhaps also the only speech of the three that can actually be understood and delivered outside of its original context. The language of ‘Lysias’ is dominated by direct references to the speaker and the listener of the speech,Footnote ⁴⁹ clearly distinguishing the two roles in a way that we do not find in the other two discourses. The one, listener, is passively presented with the evidence and is expected to reach a decision by the end of the speech whereas the speaker is persuading the other to vote in his favor. By contrast, in his first (‘Lysianic’) speech Socrates, after invoking the Muses,Footnote ⁵⁰ begins with a mythical and a more general account of the situation at hand (237b3: ἦν οὕτω δὴ παῖς, μᾶλλον δὲ μειρακίσκος, μάλα καλός […]) and then embarks on looking for a (abstract) definition of love (237c9–d1). Contrary to that of ‘Lysias’, this speech is structured in such a way that one would see no reason to emphasize characters or to draw attention to the speaker and the listener as representing different sides of the discussion (e.g. a young desired boy at the receiving end of the speech versus the older man overcome by desire for the boy). Indeed, in this speech both are included in the narrative as if representing the same position of someone who is exploring the question of love. They are depicted as pursuing the argument together. This difference is crucial and becomes even more poignant with the conclusion of the speech, where the argument is developed into its most sinister results and reaches its climax in the horrific claim that ‘just as the wolf loves the lamb, so the lover adores his beloved’ (241d1: ὡς λύκοι ἄρνας ἀγαπῶσιν, ὣς παῖδα φιλοῦσιν ἐρασταί). That kind of love will end up very badly for the beloved (he will be eaten and dead) and probably no ἐραστής would be willing (at least openly?) to subscribe to this view. Thus, contrary to the first Lysianic speech, we are led to assume that the speaker of the second speech can by no means be an ἐραστής himself.

Not only is Socrates’ argumentation in his first speech more abstract and general,Footnote ⁵¹ his speech is also much more serious than the first speech by ‘Lysias’. In fact, part of the attraction of ‘Lysias’ speech is the relative ease with which one can see that the speech is not meant to be taken seriously, and that the speaker himself is clearly infatuated by the listener whom he wants to persuade. This speech plays with the listener, who probably realizes but accepts the pretense of the speaker to be a non-lover, and with the reader, who might not accept but is amused by the arguments and the particular twist in approach to the topic presented in the speech. In other words, Plato’s depiction of a ‘Lysianic’ speech in the Phaedrus lays particular emphasis on what is later assumed to be the two particularly Lysianic features in speeches:Footnote ⁵² first, the emphasis on the characters of the speech, which plays a central role in the argumentation,Footnote ⁵³ and secondly the amusing playfulness or superficiality of the speech, which is reached by not actually pursuing the arguments in any serious and thorough way, but by simply evoking different examples or commonplaces that are loosely twisted to fit the point. In order for the speech to pass among Plato’s readers as potentially Lysianic, it must have exhibited some characteristic features of Lysias’ writerly skills that were already acknowledged by Plato’s time.Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus, Lysias’ reputation for character delineation and amusement may well have been already established at least in some intellectual circles of the fourth century bce. Be that as it may, Plato’s portrayal of Lysias in the Phaedrus launched a tradition in the interpretation of Lysias, and all subsequent associations of Lysias with the allure and playfulness of rhetoric probably go back, in one form or another, to Plato’s dialogue.

2.2 After Plato

Plato’s possible rivalry with Lysias was picked up by at least one ancient reader – Diogenes Laertius (henceforth DL), who points out in a list of Plato’s innovations that Plato was the first of the philosophers to speak against (ἀντεῖπε) Lysias and to record the latter’s speech verbatim in the Phaedrus (3.25: Καὶ πρῶτος τῶν φιλοσόφων ἀντεῖπε πρὸς τὸν λόγον τὸν Λυσίου τοῦ Κεφάλου ἐκθέμενος αὐτὸν κατὰ λέξιν ἐν τῷ Φαίδρῳ).Footnote ⁵⁵ No other orator or rhetorician is mentioned in a context of direct rivalry with Plato, and it is remarkable that the importance of the Phaedrus seems to lie for DL in the fact that it is the first to challenge and analyze Lysias.Footnote ⁵⁶ It could of course be argued that DL is simply thinking of the beginning of the dialogue and is not really a reliable source for the contemporary reception of Lysias (be that in Plato or in other authors). However, this is a valuable reminder that Plato’s Phaedrus had a very crucial role to play in the reception of Lysias. Interestingly, Lysias and his father Cephalus feature also in the list of works reported for the next head of the Academy, Speusippus,Footnote ⁵⁷ even though we cannot really say much more about the significance of this.Footnote ⁵⁸ It is perhaps surprising that as far as we can tell Lysias is not explicitly mentioned by Aristotle nor is he given much attention to in the subsequent Peripatetic tradition.Footnote ⁵⁹ Aristotle’s possible stylistic allusions to Lysias do not enable us to say much more about his engagement with Lysias.Footnote ⁶⁰ The only Peripatetic who seems to have taken more interest in Lysias, or whom we at least know discussed Lysias explicitly in his work(s), was Theophrastus. Unfortunately, however, Theophrastus’ views on Lysias are completely lost save for an out-of-context quotation in Dionysius’ essay Lysias, where he quotes a passage from Theophrastus’ On style (fr. 692 Fortenbaugh) in order to then contest the latter’s views on Lysias.Footnote ⁶¹ Based on a speech that Dionysius did not consider authentic, Theophrastus had apparently counted Lysias among those who are overly keen on antitheses, balanced structures and suchlike; a writer who strives for crude and overdone wording and chases after poetic effect rather than realism (fr. 692.2–3). As a response, Dionysius points out that this speech is simply not written by Lysias. In any case, the absence of any more serious engagement with Lysias in Peripatetic sources seems to indicate that a considerable difference was felt to exist between Lysias and Isocrates: while Lysias is not mentioned even once in the Rhetoric, Isocrates is the most frequently quoted contemporary author in Aristotle’s Rhetoric.Footnote ⁶²

Lysias is indeed more often compared to Isocrates and most famously so in Plato’s Phaedrus, which is the only extant work until Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ critical essays in the first century bce where the two authors are explicitly compared.Footnote ⁶³ Perhaps there are further reasons than we know of for Plato to play the two against each other in his dialogue. It is quite plausible, for instance, and has been tentatively suggested by some scholars, that there was a personal rivalry between them.Footnote ⁶⁴ Whitehead goes as far as to propose that Isocrates abandoned his logographic activity due to the unsurpassable success rate of Lysias,Footnote ⁶⁵ and even though it is impossible to prove with any certainty, this view is quite appealing. Isocrates remains very skeptical and negative throughout his career towards speechwriters, and as far as our evidence from Plato goes, Lysias seems certainly to have been among the most accomplished speechwriters of his time. Todd points out two sets of speeches in which Lysias might have written the defense and Isocrates the accusation speeches: Isocrates’ Against Euthunous (speech 21) and Lysias’ defense On behalf of Euthunous against Nikias (speech 57–8, fr. 117–19); Isocrates’ accusation speech Trapezitikos and Lysias’ Trapezitikos (speech 134, fr. 285), which has been argued to have been the defense speech from the same trial.Footnote ⁶⁶ In both cases Lysias is associated with the defense and Isocrates with the accusation speech. We have also fragments from a speech allegedly written by Lysias that seem to have been directed against Isocrates – πρὸς Ἰσοκράτην αἰκίας (fr. 178–9 Carey, preserved in Pollux 8.46 and Photius II.236). It is unclear who delivered this speech (and of course, Lysias’ authorship is anything but certain), but it could still be used as evidence for the perceived antagonism between the two, even if the historical accuracy of this source is dubious.Footnote ⁶⁷ In other words, even though we have no other source for the two writers being played against each other in their fourth-century bce reception, there is some evidence that suggests that there might have been some antagonism between the two,Footnote ⁶⁸ not least because, a point made in Plato’s Phaedrus, they advocated completely different approaches to rhetoric.

We have seen thus far a number of important aspects about Lysias and what he came to mean for rhetoric. It is important to acknowledge, first of all, that there is little evidence of Lysias outside his own works and those of Plato, which requires anyone reconstructing Lysias’ legacy to depend heavily also on Plato’s philosophical dialogues. Since the influence of the Phaedrus on the rhetorical tradition was enormous (as will be demonstrated throughout this book), it is very difficult to find independent evidence for Lysias’ importance for his contemporary rhetorical and oratorical scene that does not draw explicitly on either Lysias or Plato. The claim, for example, that Lysias was very popular or even the best writer of the time depends solely on the description of Lysias by Phaedrus in the dialogue, and we have no other independent evidence to back this up.Footnote ⁶⁹ It seems reasonable enough to accept it, but we should always be careful about generalizing such claims from our meagre outside evidence. In other words, Plato’s early reception of Lysias left an immense mark on Lysias’ future reception, simply through there being no other surviving external evidence.

What is, then, the image that we get from this early reception of Lysias? Lysias’ own speech 12 clearly offers an attempt to shape his image in pro-democratic and popular terms, either to win benevolence from his audience (real or imagined) at the post-Thirty euthunai trial against Eratosthenes, or to shape his reputation as a democratic writer whose services could be sought by those needing to shape up their court cases. Or both. Plato’s reception clearly undermines this image and consistently portrays him as enjoying the company of morally questionable political players. This interpretation resulted from a rather meticulous and subtle reading of Plato’s characterization and, as such, might have been missed by ancient readers as it certainly has been missed by most modern scholars.Footnote ⁷⁰ But Plato’s reception of Lysias overtly challenges Lysias’ reputation as the most accomplished writer of the day (as Phaedrus claims in 228a) and offers as support a critical analysis of Lysias’ technique, pointing out all rhetorical faux pas and missed opportunities. Plato gets his hands dirty and demonstrates here in detail how criticism ought to be conducted, and it is in these passages that he has made an invaluable contribution to the rhetorical tradition. Equally important is the fact that Plato does not only stop there, but also offers possible improvements, here in the light of two additional speeches that he constructs in the Phaedrus in order to overcome the errors of Lysias. The latter becomes, eventually, a representative of a kind of rhetoric that makes no claims for moral improvement and invites itself to be assessed solely on the basis of style.

Plato’s Phaedrus uses, then, the figure of Lysias in two separate but related ways: first, Plato makes suggestions about Lysias’ intellectual circle and alludes to the moral depravity of the orator and, by implication, of the kind of rhetoric that he promotes. This is, in essence, an ad hominem attack on Lysias. An analysis of Socrates’ second speech in the Phaedrus, which aims to correct the stylistic and structural mishaps of the first, but retain the argumentative core, shows clearly the unacceptable moral dispositions that underpin Lysias’ rhetoric. Socrates reacts in horror and is forced to deliver a palinode. The conclusion seems to be that rhetoric ought not to be conceived in a moral vacuum and Lysias has to be informed of the implications and directed to a correct path (278c). Secondly, Plato constructs Lysias as a representative of a kind of rhetoric and singles him out from a wide array of writers and rhetoricians mentioned in the dialogue. Lysias is highlighted from all the rest and the speech Plato writes on his behalf becomes a generalizing, and hugely influential, account of rhetoric as style.

We now turn to Isocrates, a complex figure, whose reputation, appreciation and position in the tradition of rhetoric and philosophy are often debated. Focus of the following discussion will primarily center on the way in which Isocrates frames himself within this intellectual tradition and how he becomes conceptualized as a representative of a philosophical-rhetorical tradition that sees itself as separate from (though not necessarily opposed to) the kind of rhetoric epitomized in the figure of Lysias. Isocrates is an author and teacher of the elite, a writer rather than performer, a philosopher rather than entertainer.

Isocrates’ works contain a substantial amount of information about his life. With hindsight we might say that the decision to draw attention to his persona in his writings gave him a privileged position to craft his own reception and reputation in an almost unprecedented way.Footnote ¹ We learn about his family background and education, about his struggles after the Thirty,Footnote ² about his inability to pursue a political career,Footnote ³ and, last but not least, about his contributions to the Athenian intellectual life of the time.Footnote ⁴ These biographical snippets do not, of course, necessarily tell us much about the historical Isocrates,Footnote ⁵ but they give us a sense of how Isocrates might have wanted his image to emerge from his works and support the building blocks of his philosophy. The direct tone and first-person address of many of his discourses also enhance his image as a teacher and didactic philosopher, something that will become an important element of his reception in post-fourth-century bce rhetorical tradition. Furthermore, Isocrates seems to have regarded his work as a comprehensive whole and often refers back to, or comments on, his previous writings, explicitly denying any significant change in the character of his work.Footnote ⁶ We might say, then, that Isocrates had developed a strong sense of ownership over his work and his literary output is planned with extreme care, thus creating (and controlling) the interpretative paradigms for its evaluation. In order to put his thought in context and elucidate what kind of contributions he expected to (and did) make, it is important to unpack the way he talks about his work and to situate it within his current intellectual landscape. This will also help us get a better sense of Isocrates’ role and later prominence in rhetorical theory.

Even though few philosophers today would consider Isocrates as their intellectual predecessor,Footnote ⁷ he was quite probably among the first to open a school of philosophy in Athens,Footnote ⁸ and portrays himself as proposing a radical alternative to the philosophical thought of his time.Footnote ⁹ That Isocrates conceived of a philosophical enterprise very differently than (say) Plato did, is clear from his writings and this topic has received increased attention in recent scholarship.Footnote ¹⁰ What exactly Isocrates meant with philosophia and the kind of impact he expected to exert with his work are still, however, hotly debated. In this context, we should bear in mind two considerations: first, there was no fixed philosophical discipline at the time he was writing and the concept of philosophy itself was widely contested. As a result, we should read Isocrates’ engagements with philosophy and rhetoric with an open mind and realize that the philosophical context in which he was writing and teaching was more fluid and dynamic than what we are used to today.Footnote ¹¹

The following discussion in this chapter is divided into three larger subsections: the first part will focus on Isocrates’ take on wisdom literature and looks at the way he fashions his own discourse as a response to contemporary educational needs for reform: to replace the poetic tradition with his own discourses. The second section investigates Isocrates’ discussion of prose writing, the training of writing skills as constituting a wider formative principle of education, and the political goals of such writing practices. The third section thematizes Isocrates’ approach to philosophy: how and under which terms could he be reasonably regarded as belonging to the philosophical tradition? These three strands – the poetic, prosaic-political and philosophical – are to my mind essential for appreciating the way in which Isocrates himself paves the way for his subsequent reception as an Attic writer, educator and a crucial backbone to the rhetorical tradition. My investigation shows in later chapters, surely as a surprise to some readers, that Plato and most later critics take over rather uncritically and endorse Isocrates’ self-presentation and so accept his central position in the history of rhetoric. Yet, despite the fact that Isocrates himself is in full control over his image and reception, he remains an exceptional – if not even marginal – case, hard to pin down and force into generic categories of ancient texts that we have gotten used to since. Hence we notice this recurring insecurity about Isocrates, whether he ought to be regarded an Attic orator or philosopher.Footnote ¹² Even though Plato’s Phaedrus has already shown a direction, in its characteristically suggestive way, for how to appreciate Isocrates’ role in the rhetorical tradition, it will take another four centuries until Isocrates’ position in the rhetorical tradition is reiterated with greater detail and fixed by Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ clear expression of him as the pioneer of ‘true philosophy’ for rhetoric.

3.1 Challenging the Poetic Tradition

When discussing poetic discourse, Isocrates appears mainly interested in the function of poetry in society, that is to say the role of Homer and Hesiod as teachers and educators, creators of the image of a virtuous (Hellenic) man, and the way their works have been received and interpreted as providing useful advice for ‘the everyday’ or for the ‘monumental moments’ in life.Footnote ¹³ In other words, his aim is not so much to develop an account of poetics, but rather to focus on those aspects of the role of poetry in society that merit mention and discussion in the context of education.Footnote ¹⁴ Isocrates’ polished style, which aims to provide an example of the writing of a cultured and virtuous citizen, is a testament to his program of using poetic texts as (moral) examples in educational settings. Similarly to poetic works that would be quoted and discussed in classrooms as providing guidelines for different situations, Isocrates draws on the notion of mimêsis (μίμησις, imitation) as a paradigm for using his own works.Footnote ¹⁵ Isocrates is not looking to question or puzzle his readers or students as Gorgias might have done with his writings, or as Plato makes his students ‘wonder’ by means of aporiai. Instead, Isocrates seems to devise his speeches as works that function as models for imitation for his students and readers, and would thus give concrete practical examples of written compositions. Thinking through the tradition of poetry seems therefore to be an essential stage in the process of setting up the science of speech and thought.

In his writings, Isocrates also exhibits a polemical attitude to poetry that suggests a more competitive attitude to the role of poetry in society. In some passages he indicates that his work is set in (a constructive) dialogue with poetic practices; in others, he overtly opposes his work to that of the poets. This ambivalence is crucial to Isocrates’ argument, for he needs to show the benefit of those aspects of poetry that he will be associating with his own genre, and draw attention to the shortcomings that make poetry an inadequate or outdated carrier of these virtues and benefits that Isocrates’ discourses promise to deliver. Examples of the first, positive, attitude can be found, for instance, in his Antidosis (46–7), where he compares his prose writing to poetry, contrasting his particular (poetic) way of writing explicitly to other kinds of prose, mostly courtroom speeches.Footnote ¹⁶ There, Isocrates appeals to the authoritative position of poetry that he expects will soon be occupied by his own works. Examples of the critical attitude to the poetic tradition can be found in his Evagoras and To Nicocles, speeches which are closely associated with the poetic and particularly with the gnomic tradition.Footnote ¹⁷

Isocrates criticizes two types of poetic works in particular – the praise encomium and gnomic poetry. These are also the two that are arguably closest to his own philosophical project,Footnote ¹⁸ and his comments on these two kinds of poetic production serve to map the boundaries of his own discourse. In the Evagoras, where Isocrates elaborates the idea of the prose encomium, he claims that while poetry is charming and pleasurable to listen to (10), the words and ideas used are misleading, invented and/or wrong (11, 36).Footnote ¹⁹ Poets have escaped these accusations because they use verse, which enchants and draws attention from content to the form of poems. The underlying implication seems to be, however, that poets are no longer fulfilling their function in society as educators, for by telling lies they are not providing the best models of behavior and are thus not able to serve society as genuine teachers of virtue. Prose writings cannot hide their faults or lack of depth in the way poetry can with the help of meter. Excellent prose writers must be, therefore, more coherent and to the point than their poetic counterparts. This produces – so Isocrates argues – overall better content, and as such ought to be preferred in educational contexts to traditional poetry.

Isocrates offers also another explanation for the need to go beyond existing poetic works. In multiple passages of To Nicocles he discusses gnomic poetry and argues that the education available for the rulers ought to be different from that of the general public. According to him, poets have focused primarily on the needs of the majority and do not provide useful advice tailored specifically for rulers, showing thus another instance where poetry might have an impact on society, but pointing out that this impact is limited and needs to be supplemented by Isocrates’ own contributions. The advice given to rulers and their subjects is, according to Isocrates, necessarily different and this is evident from the behavior of the masses who, despite knowing the best course of action or what would make them better men, do not act accordingly and instead ‘in every way take pleasures in things that are contrary to their best interests’ (45). As a consequence, the masses are not interested in those most profitable discourses (48: ὠφελιμώτατος) that are much appreciated by the rulers, but instead follow those recommendations that abound in fictions (48: μυθωδέστατος).Footnote ²⁰ Isocrates’ political prose promises to fill this gap and provide useful advice for the educated elite alone. In other words, the prose that Isocrates has to offer his students is vastly different from the simplicity and wit that seemed to have made Lysias’ work so popular. The two writers, then, represent opposites in the educational elite context in Athens. For Isocrates, contrasting his work with these two kinds of poetic works has helped him, first, specify the particular contributions his discourse aims to make and, second, narrow down the audience for whom he envisions his advice to be particularly relevant. In sum, Isocrates challenges the aims and means of the poetic tradition and by moving beyond it he demonstrates how his own discourses meet the expectations of society more adequately. In particular, he claims to provide an education that is defined by its usefulness and that prepares its students for the practicalities of life and politics.

3.2 Isocrates on Prose

Isocrates is one of our most thorough ancient advocates of written prose. Having established his difference from poetic discourse, Isocrates dedicates substantial effort to drawing further distinctions between his own works – collectively referred to as politikoi logoi (πολιτικοὶ λόγοι, political speeches) – and those of other prose writers by promoting the uniqueness of his ideas and emphasizing his contributions to philosophy. Given that prose had just started to become an established mode of philosophical and rhetorical writing,Footnote ²¹ and given his educational program which prioritized the ability to express oneself in written form, Isocrates had to provide an innovative approach to philosophical prose in order to stand out and legitimize his school. When discussing other prose authors or works, Isocrates mainly uses two approaches: he either corrects the methods and/or aims of their works, as they have failed to fulfil what they set out to do (or what the generic expectations demand they do), or he provides lists of various kinds of prose writings as established and well-known genres in the order of importance, where his own works always rank as superior to others.

The first approach is best exemplified in his Helen and Busiris. The method of analysis in both speeches is similar: Isocrates examines either a previous speech (Busiris) or a topic that has been subject to multiple interpretations (Helen), comments where others have gone wrong and gives his own version or solution.Footnote ²² In both of these works, other – either previous or contemporary – authors seem to have misunderstood the particularities of the genre they were writing in and ended up promoting, because of their ignorance, the opposite to what they set out to do: Gorgias’ Helen, supposed to be an encomium, turned out to focus mainly on the faults of Helen,Footnote ²³ Polycrates’ Busiris, aimed to be a defense turned out to be an accusation,Footnote ²⁴ and Polycrates’ other work, the accusation of Socrates, would have been received by Socrates more as an encomium than an accusation.Footnote ²⁵ By drawing attention to the mismatch between the generic expectations and the actual content of their discourses, Isocrates paves the way for his own supposedly coherent expositions on the topic.Footnote ²⁶

Helen in particular has a programmatic aspect to the work. The first part of the discourse gives us Isocrates’ critical assessment of the current educational scene and the prose encomium that follows cannot be read in isolation from what precedes it. The potential of prose writings to tackle serious and fundamental topics had not been, at least according to Isocrates, properly exploited thus far. Hence, Isocrates’ treatment of Gorgias and Polycrates entails not only, or not simply, criticisms of their generic misunderstandings of what encomia should do. More than that, Isocrates seems to suggest that they have failed to understand the true function and opportunities for serious learning that could be imparted through prose. Isocrates demonstrates instead how someone with his training and education would be able to spot inconsistencies, not be persuaded by misleading arguments, and capable of composing in the very genre better than those who had done so previously.Footnote ²⁷ Furthermore, by evoking philosophers and rhetoricians (like Polycrates), Isocrates makes a pointed gesture towards a context within which he expects his work to appear and be of relevance. In other words, he is targeting the potential students of philosophers and rhetoricians by demonstrating the failures of both of these groups as helpful educational role models. By contrast, his own teaching and writings do not deceive the recipient, they follow closely the clearly expressed aims of his discourse and, because of this coherence of purpose, his works will be more useful and beneficial for anyone interested. In other words, through his criticisms of Gorgias and Polycrates, Isocrates shapes an image of his work as serious, morally coherent and demanding.

Another way Isocrates discusses prose literature, and his own position within it, is by way of constructing lists of ‘kinds of prose’. He does so in prominent positions of his Antidosis and Panathenaicus, works that qualify as perhaps Isocrates’ most extensive expressions of his educational and philosophical program. The lists of prose genres given in both works differ slightly, and this might be explained by the caveat provided at the beginning of the first list, where Isocrates claims that ‘there are no fewer modes of prose (τρόποι τῶν λόγων) than of verse’ (Antidosis 45), thus implying that these lists are quite arbitrary and could easily look different. In Antidosis (45) he outlines six prose genres,Footnote ²⁸ emphasizing in particular his own panhellenic political speeches (λόγος Ἐλληνικὸς καὶ πολιτικὸς καὶ πανηγυρικός), which are described as encompassing all the compositional techniques one needs to know for creating a piece of work in any other genre. In Panathenaicus (1–2) Isocrates lists five prose genres,Footnote ²⁹ once again saving his own panhellenic discourse to last.Footnote ³⁰ In both lists, Isocrates sets up a particularly explicit opposition between his own work and that of courtroom writers. In the Antidosis, the latter are singled out as a natural point of comparison to Isocrates’ writing and teaching program (47–50).Footnote ³¹ This comparison comes at a crucial section in the discourse and is referred back to in the following passage as having given ‘the whole truth about my power, philosophy or profession, however you want to call it’ (50: περὶ μὲν οὖν τῆς ἐμῆς εἴτε βούλεσθε καλεῖν δυνάμεως εἴτε φιλοσοφίας εἴτε διατριβῆς, ἀκηκόατε πᾶσαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν). In other words, courtroom writers are depicted as among the most significant opponents of Isocrates’ work.

In the Panathenaicus, Isocrates’ criticism appears more generally directed towards the so-called sophists, a group who will be shown below to encompass in Isocrates’ view a wide array of intellectuals, including philosophers. However, when reflecting on his youth and career, he once again compares his decision to dedicate himself to the study and writing of panhellenic matters to those who deal with private contracts and courtroom matters (11). In the opening section of the work, Isocrates gives some clarification about the characteristics of their writing. These are works that ‘give the impression of having been composed in a plain and simple manner and having no embellishments, which those who are clever at law-suits urge our young men to cultivate’.Footnote ³² Should we not think here of Lysias, or at least those who are influenced by the style and writings of Lysias?Footnote ³³ Walberer has argued that Lysias, who might have just finished his composition of the Olympiacus (which Walberer regards as authentic), is the opponent Isocrates reacts against in the Panegyricus (11–12).Footnote ³⁴ There, Isocrates discusses men who expect most elaborate writing to have to meet the standards of courtroom pleas, which essentially means in this passage the use of simple style.Footnote ³⁵ In fact, it seems that we can connect most references to the kind of rhetoric which Isocrates disapproves of to the plain style of Lysias or his followers. Isocrates’ fierce criticism of this type of writing might suggest its widespread popularity and, therefore, could be taken as an additional confirmation of the statement made in the beginning of Plato’s Phaedrus, which referred to Lysias as one of the most successful and popular (228a, δεινότατος τῶν νῦν) writers of the time. Without wishing to push this point too hard, it does seem that the kind of writing and style that Lysias had come to embody by the fourth century bce represented a major point of reference and criticism for Isocrates’ own educational and philosophical program.

Going back to the two lists provided in the Antidosis and Panathenaicus, the slight differences should not come as a surprise after Isocrates’ own emphasis on the arbitrariness of providing them, but what is perhaps more striking is the fact that in neither of the lists does Isocrates mention philosophical writings as a separate category. Pfister has drawn attention to this absence in his article, suggesting that Isocrates might have neglected philosophical literature as a separate genre in order to avoid associating it with the Academy.Footnote ³⁶ His discussion provoked the response of Wilcox who has attempted to explain away this surprising absence by suggesting that both the Antidosis and the Panathenaicus actually do make reference to philosophical genres; in the former it is mentioned as ‘questions and answers, which they call disputations (ἀντιλογικοί)’ (45) and in the latter under the wider term ‘logoi about marvelous or fictitious themes’.Footnote ³⁷ Wilcox’s discussion is persuasive in so far as he aims to establish that Isocrates refers in both works to a kind of philosophical writing, namely the Socratic dialogues, but we need not assume that this would capture a readily understandable and fixed generic category of philosophical writing. Moreover, in her commentary on the Antidosis, Too suggests that what Wilcox was keen to regard as a reference to a philosophical category is more likely to characterize sophistic works and, perhaps, those of Protagoras and his followers in particular.Footnote ³⁸ But perhaps there is a third way to explain the absence of philosophical works from the list. What if Isocrates never conceived of philosophy as a specific genre, as something that should be written down? What if philosophy was a term that Isocrates used first and foremost to refer to the (primarily oral?) practice of teaching, thinking and deliberating? It is a well-known and often stated fact that the concept of philosophy was unfixed and widely used to denote a range of different intellectual activities at the time. Yet, as this debate shows, there still lingers an expectation among scholars of finding it conceptualized in similar terms as we have since come to know it from the philosophical tradition, as a separate and self-standing written genre that Isocrates could not have been able to avoid mentioning in his work. In order to further investigate the possibility that philosophy was not conceived as a written practice or fixed written genre by Isocrates,Footnote ³⁹ let us take a closer look at Isocrates’ use of philosophia in his works.

3.3 On What Is and What Is Not Philosophy

Aside from describing his discourse through comparisons with other genres, Isocrates also makes explicit claims about how he views his work and its effect on Athenian society. These remarks are often made jointly with his references to philosophy, a term with which he often characterizes his intellectual output. Even though Bons has argued that Isocrates’ use of (rhetorical) terminology is not as technical and specific as it is among subsequent writers,Footnote ⁴⁰ the following analysis of Isocrates’ use of the three terms – sophist (σοφιστής), rhêtôr/rhetoric (ῥήτωρ/ῥητορική) and philosophy (φιλοσοφία) – clearly suggests that Isocrates formed distinctive interpretations of these notions and that he frequently uses them to refer either to himself in relation to other intellectuals or to contemporary professionals and rivals.

Let us start with the concept of the ‘sophist’. There are a few passages where σοφιστής is used in a wider sense to refer to a ‘wise man’,Footnote ⁴¹ but in these sections either the context or the qualifying words make it clear that Isocrates has in mind the figure of the sage. In most cases, the term σοφιστής and its cognates occur in Isocrates’ works in a negative sense.Footnote ⁴² While Isocrates frequently uses this notion to distance his own writings from those he calls the ‘sophists’,Footnote ⁴³ it remains somewhat vague throughout his works whom he considers a sophist in the first place. There are, of course, the usual suspects such as Gorgias, Protagoras and other itinerant teachers, who are included in this category.Footnote ⁴⁴ But we also see those listed among sophists who are now in contemporary scholarship often grouped together under the controversial label of Presocratic philosophers (Antidosis 285). There are two kinds of criticisms that Isocrates brings against the sophists most often. First, he reproaches sophists for their teaching practices and he seems to be particularly offended by the low pay that these ‘sophists’ ask from their students (see especially Against the Sophists 3–4). And even if some of the sophists were famous for charging large sums for their teaching, Isocrates argues that their wealth has brought no good to Athens or to themselves. For example, in the Antidosis (155–7) Isocrates invites a comparison between himself and Gorgias, whom he regards as the most successful and wealthy sophist (of all time), but who never contributed to the city’s wellbeing and at the time of his death did not leave behind a large inheritance. Contrary to the itinerant sophists, whom he describes as parasites with no home or serious commitments, Isocrates claims to have contributed to the ‘common cause’ and this should be welcomed by his fellow citizens (Antidosis 158).Footnote ⁴⁵ His criticism of their political uselessness is closely connected to their intellectual faults. In his educational manifesto and protreptic Against the Sophists, Isocrates maps out the contemporary educational scene and reserves the term sophists for the previous generation of intellectuals, who had ‘set themselves up as being teachers of meddlesomeness (πολυπραγμοσύνη) and greed (πλεονεξία)’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The distinguishing characteristic mentioned there is their narrow-mindedness: these sophists had been focusing on specific vocabulary and trying to teach their students success in law courts through this nit-picking activity.Footnote ⁴⁷ The second major criticism is the futility of their practice. Indeed, criticisms of the sophists are frequently associated with their lack of seriousness. In the Antidosis (268) and Helen (2–6), sophists are those who have pushed theoretical speculation to the extreme, to the extent of appearing ridiculous and bringing no profit whatsoever to their students. Depicted as unprincipled, unskilled and unable to manage their affairs (both in a financial and intellectual sense), they might even appear as relatively harmless.Footnote ⁴⁸

Yet, Isocrates also shows how damaging such individuals can really be. A very common reference to the sophists in Isocrates is reserved for those who are slandering his person and have thus a devastating impact not only on his general reputation, but on the Athenian educational scene more generally. This is stated at the beginning of the Antidosis, where he claims to have been long aware of the damage that the sophists have been trying to inflict on his person by associating him with law court writings (2: ἐγὼ γὰρ εἰδὼς ἐνίους τῶν σοφιστῶν βλασφημοῦντας περὶ τῆς ἐμῆς διατριβῆς) and thus belittling the topics and approach he had taken in his discourses.Footnote ⁴⁹ In general, under the broad notion ‘sophists’ Isocrates refers both to those whom Plato and the subsequent tradition would call ‘sophists’ and to those later labeled as philosophers (and Presocratic philosophers in particular) whom he seems to fashion as homogeneous representatives of a tradition of philosophical thought that strongly differs from Isocrates’ understanding of the notion ‘philosophy’.

The terms ῥήτωρ/ῥητορική and their cognates are used by Isocrates mainly in the sense of ‘public speakers’ or orators who perform speeches and take an active part in politics. Isocrates suggests that this is the category in which some of his pupils can be counted, thus clearly implying that rhetoric occupies a significant role in his teaching.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet, at the same time, Isocrates does not refer to himself as a rhetorician and in one passage in particular emphasizes that he should not be identified with a ῥήτωρ.Footnote ⁵¹ In To Philip, Isocrates addresses Philip and asks the latter not to be surprised if Isocrates, ‘being neither a military commander nor an orator (ῥήτωρ) nor any other person of authority’ (81), has expressed himself more boldly than others. Isocrates then goes on to explain why he had decided not to pursue the career of a public orator and, in contrast to the quarrelsome qualities he describes one as having to develop in an oratorical context, he emphasizes his abilities in sound thinking and education (82: φρονεῖν εὖ καὶ πεπαιδεῦσθαι καλῶς) that are paramount to his being able to advise Athenians, Hellenes and the most distinguished of men (τῇ πόλει καὶ τοῖς Ἕλλησι καὶ τῶν ἀνδρῶν τοῖς ἐνδοξοτάτοις). Isocrates seems to say that instead of devoting himself solely to public performances as an active public orator (i.e. politician), he has instead laid more emphasis on training his thought and cultivating general intellectual abilities that are manifested now in his ability to use written discourses to advise men who are confronted with difficult decisions. It seems that this distinction is closely related to the contrast between oral and written discourses, the ῥήτορες being representatives of the oral and Isocrates’ work representative of the written discourse.Footnote ⁵² But this is perhaps the result of a more fundamental difference between Isocrates’ teaching and the orators: compared to the orators, whose principal area is public speech,Footnote ⁵³ Isocrates’ teaching has a far wider scope,Footnote ⁵⁴ and this is why his students can become professionals in a variety of areas (e.g. historians, generals and, indeed, orators).

In contrast to both previous terms, φιλοσοφία is a notion that Isocrates associates closely with his own discourses, the concept and its cognates being used far more frequently throughout Isocrates’ corpus than the cognates of either ῥήτωρ/ῥητορική or σοφιστής.Footnote ⁵⁵ As has been noticed before, Isocrates uses a wide range of meanings for φιλοσοφία. In particular, the following five thematic clusters seem to be especially strongly represented in his use of the term:Footnote ⁵⁶ (1) philosophy as a serious study, (2) philosophy and practice, (3) philosophy and false philosophy, (4) philosophy and teaching, (5) philosophy as a broad intellectual discipline. All of these categories are essential to Isocrates’ conception of philosophia and they all contribute to a general understanding of philosophia as a practice or activity that is primarily undertaken in an educational environment for a practical purpose (e.g. preparation for public life), rather than a kind of solitary act of thinking done for its own sake that could translate into a piece of written work.Footnote ⁵⁷

The verb φιλοσοφεῖν and the noun φιλοσοφία, when accompanied either by another verb (e.g. πονεῖν, μελετᾶν, ζητεῖν κτλ.) or noun (e.g. πόνος, λογισμός κτλ.), occur often in the sense of serious study that is crucial for understanding the important problems at stake.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, Isocrates also makes it clear that the mere contemplation of and search for theoretical solutions is not enough and in some passages he introduces a contrast between philosophy and actual practice, both being crucial to good practice. This contrast is most explicitly expressed in To Nicocles, where Isocrates argues that in order to get a thorough understanding of things under examination, one should approach these things by experience as well as by study (35: ἐμπειρίᾳ μέτιθι καὶ φιλοσοφίᾳ): ‘for study will show you the way, but training yourself in the actual doing of things will give you power to deal with affairs’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Isocrates’ advice to the king clearly suggests that a good understanding is reached through theoretical study (philosophy) and practice or habituation. Elsewhere, however, Isocrates debates the attribution of the notion of ‘philosophy’ to describe those only engaged in theoretical pursuits, and reclaims the notion for his own all-encompassing practices that are beneficial in practical ways to society at large. In the Antidosis, for example, Isocrates explains how his teaching helps cultivate φρόνησις (271–87) and one of the crucial requirements for this goal, he maintains, is to understand the advantage of his approach.Footnote ⁶⁰ In this section (285) Isocrates expresses his particular annoyance with the following people:

There are many interesting aspects to Isocrates’ statements here: most obviously, Isocrates claims that there is general confusion about who should be counted a philosopher and who should not.Footnote ⁶¹ It is generally acknowledged that in the fifth and fourth centuries bce the term ‘philosophy’ and its cognates were far more fluid terms than by the end of the fourth and the early third century bce when philosophical schools had started to dominate and define research.Footnote ⁶² To what extent this fluidity of tradition lies behind Isocrates’ comments here is difficult to tell. It certainly seems from this passage, however, that an interpretation of philosophy as a solely theoretical pursuit had started to gain more prominence as the dominant (technical) use of the term ‘philosophy’, and that Isocrates’ notion of philosophical activity would appear in this context too broad and unspecific. In a section preceding this one (Antidosis 284), Isocrates argues that this confusion has arisen from a fundamental misconception about the notion of ‘benefit’ or ‘advantage’ in philosophy, and has thus influenced the way in which philosophy’s position in society is understood and exploited. Finally, despite Isocrates’ language in this passage, those ‘ancient sophists’ who make a profession out of ‘mental juggling’ (or marvel-mongering, τερατολογία) should probably be understood as referring to (what we would now call) Presocratic philosophers, who had been associated with this strictly theoretical interpretation of philosophy (see also above). Contrary to the sophists, whose teaching was the result of an essentially pragmatic need for law court practices and who could thus not be rejected on the grounds of being detached from the actual pragmatic needs of society, Isocrates has elsewhere referred to Presocratic philosophers in a similar way to his description of the ‘ancient sophists’ here.Footnote ⁶³ It seems, then, that Isocrates is consciously labeling proponents of a tradition of philosophy, which focuses primarily on theoretical speculation, as sophists, while at the same time inculcating a complete revision of the term to fit his own educational and philosophical paradigm. Isocrates argues that these sophists who call themselves (theoretical) philosophers have misled people about the true aims and use of philosophy, thus creating a misconception about philosophy as a superfluous practice unable to benefit society. It is, according to him, high time to reclaim the notion of philosophy from these sophists who thrive in paradoxical and unhelpful thoughts, and are negatively contrasted to Isocrates’ pragmatic interpretation of proper philosophy.Footnote ⁶⁴

Isocrates’ positive definition and exposition of philosophy is most clearly expressed in his Antidosis. Even though he has explained his understanding of the term in various previous passages of the work, by evoking parallels from physical training or talking about the different professions of his pupils to give an idea of his encompassing treatment of the subject, he comes to give a definition of philosophy in section 271 that is worth quoting in full:

In this one compressed sentence, Isocrates explains the fundamentals of his interpretation of philosophy in a way that is intelligible to different audiences, from the theoretical sophist to an active politician or layman. Isocrates argues that knowledge is unattainable for humans and thus that every kind of theoretical activity that aims to produce infallible and systematic knowledge is futile and unproductive. Even though he does not bring further evidence to bear in this passage, elsewhere in the work Isocrates invokes sophists (a group which also includes those called philosophers today,Footnote ⁶⁵ possibly also the Socratics) as a proof for this sentiment. According to Isocrates, sophists claim to work towards formulating fixed principles and arguments that would result in systematic knowledge, but end up proposing solutions that are unacceptable and also in disagreement with each other: οἱ μὲν γὰρ παρακαλοῦσιν ἐπὶ τὴν ἀρετὴν καὶ τὴν φρόνησιν τὴν ὑπὸ τῶν ἄλλων μὲν ἀγνοουμένην, ὑπ᾽ αὐτῶν δὲ τούτων ἀντιλεγομένην (Antidosis 84). Isocrates maintains in another passage of the work that it is not appropriate to ‘call philosophy something that does not profit us in the present, either for (improving) our speaking or our actions’ (266). Instead, he would call ‘this kind of exercise gymnastics of the soul and a preparation for philosophy (παρασκευὴ φιλοσοφίας)’. This preparation might be useful, as anything learned at school (266–7), to sharpen the minds and train the learning of students (265), but it should not become the sole object of their attention and students’ minds should not ‘be stranded on the speculations of the ancient sophists’ (268), who make different claims about the ontological status of the world. The examples mentioned – Empedocles, Ion, Alcmaeon, Parmenides, Melissus and Gorgias – are all from (what we now call) Presocratic philosophy and Isocrates describes them as a group that tried to render observations in the physical world to a select number of substances,Footnote ⁶⁶ and eventually engage in speculations about their interrelations through theoretical arguments. Isocrates rejects this tradition wholesale with his claim that this kind of knowledge is not accessible to human beings. Having made this statement and rejected the concept of philosophy as a strictly theoretical study relying on proofs, Isocrates automatically frees himself not only from the demands of this philosophical tradition, but also from any further necessity to provide more detailed or systematic argumentation to support his claims.

Instead, Isocrates argues that a true philosopher is someone who, having understood the limits of human mind, will turn his energies to studying good practice and widespread opinions that have been verified over the course of human (Greek) history.Footnote ⁶⁷ Philosophers, as Isocrates claims in the passage quoted above, are those who are most experienced in this kind of study and are able to determine the best possible practice most frequently and quickly. How is this achieved without relying on theoretical arguments and sound methodologies?Footnote ⁶⁸ Isocrates gives three main methods that can be used: striving towards speaking well, persuading others, and a desire to seize the advantage (275: πρός τε τὸ λέγειν εὖ φιλοτίμως διατεθεῖεν, καὶ τοῦ πείθειν δύνασθαι τοὺς ἀκούοντας ἐρασθεῖεν, καὶ πρὸς τούτοις τῆς πλεονεξίας ἐπιθυμήσαιεν). Or in other words, tradition that leads to forming a good moral character, which, in turn, works towards benefiting society. Isocrates explains all three aspects in detail. With regard to the first point, he argues that whenever someone has set their mind to speaking or writing honorable discourses these will be devoted ‘to the welfare of man and our common good’ (276). In this case, one will select actions and deeds of remarkable men and, by preparing the discourse, will thus profit oneself by becoming familiar with praiseworthy thoughts and actions (277). Isocrates argues that through this kind of training the man who is closely familiarized with his outstanding ancestors ‘will feel their influence not only in the speech he has at hand, but also in other actions of his life’ (277). Speaking well means, then, that by using models that have been proven by tradition to be valuable (no need to engage in theoretical discussion about these time-tested models) one tries to reach the level of these models through imitation. In other words, history and proven deeds will be used as criteria for preparing a discourse that meets the expectations of Isocratean philosophy: it will cultivate one’s mind and, at the same time, provide role models for active emulation throughout one’s life.Footnote ⁶⁹

The second point, persuasion, is discussed in relation to character. In an almost anti-Aristotelian fashion,Footnote ⁷⁰ Isocrates claims that ‘only those fixed on philosophy have failed to recognize the power of goodwill (τῆς εὐνοίας δύναμις)’ (279) that can be achieved through presenting a trustworthy and appealing character.Footnote ⁷¹ Therefore, Isocrates concludes, ‘the stronger a man’s desire to persuade his hearers, the more zealously will he strive to be honorable (καλὸς κἀγαθὸς εἶναι) and well regarded by his fellow citizens’ (278). The general pressure to have a good reputation which helps, when necessary, justify one’s conduct, will provide the motivation needed to cultivate an overall honorable image of oneself. Furthermore, while all the theoretical elements of argumentation – probabilities, proofs and other kinds of persuasive devices (τὰ μὲν εἰκότα καὶ τὰ τεκμήρια καὶ πᾶν τὸ τῶν πίστεων εἶδος) – only contribute to this one specific part of the case, appearing to be καλὸς κἀγαθός lends credibility to one’s deeds as much as to one’s words (280). In this way Isocrates draws attention once again to his claim that training in successful self-presentation involves a training of character and intellectual abilities in such a way that will, eventually, lead to developing a virtuous character. In fact, elsewhere Isocrates also refers to his teaching as a broad training of the soul,Footnote ⁷² or as an art of the mind, conceived as parallel to gymnastics, the instruction of one’s body.Footnote ⁷³ Philosophy in this Isocratean sense seems to encompass a variety of other areas, and Isocrates explains how good training in astronomy, mathematics and geometry, to name but a few, might enhance the students’ potential when they arrive at philosophy as the final goal of their educational training (Antidosis 261).Footnote ⁷⁴ Note that Isocrates is always careful to evoke philosophy in educational settings and as an intellectual activity that serves a wider purpose of cultivating a ‘proper’ citizen. Philosophy is not really a goal in itself.Footnote ⁷⁵

The breadth of Isocrates’ philosophia is also on display when he talks about his teaching methods. Isocrates suggests that his students might have multiple areas of specialization depending on their natural endowments and that in his school everyone can freely pursue different career paths and get proper support from the teacher who is going to enhance their knowledge and abilities in these different fields (Antidosis 186–8).Footnote ⁷⁶ In other words, contrary to a specialized philosophical school which concentrates on developing theoretical arguments about, say, the ontological status of the world, Isocrates’ school trains the students in a wide variety of specializations, thus cultivating their minds and abilities more generally, as well as giving a concrete focus on their chosen field of study. Furthermore, it seems that Isocrates not only endorses multiple specializations for students, but regards philosophy as giving rise to multiple cultural and political institutions. This is stated in his Panegyricus, where Isocrates discusses various festivals of Greece and argues that philosophy is really the source for Athenian cultural supremacy: φιλοσοφίαν τοίνυν, ἣ πάντα ταῦτα συνεξεῦρε καὶ συγκατεσκεύασε καὶ πρός τε τὰς πράξεις ἡμᾶς ἐπαίδευσε καὶ πρὸς ἀλλήλους ἐπράϋνε […] ἡ πόλις ἡμῶν κατέδειξεν (47). On the one hand, this appears to be a polemical claim, suggesting that previous traditions of philosophy (the Presocratics and/or earlier sophists) do not amount to proper philosophy. On the other hand, Isocrates is in this passage once more reinforcing the image of his philosophical project as the first comprehensive and all-encompassing training of the mind, one that must be seen in close relation to contributions made to the polis more generally. To push this thought further, it might be argued that Isocrates’ philosophy remains deliberately a rather loose and undefined concept, and Isocrates shows no willingness to develop strict logical structures of thought or methodology that would compel all students to come to the same kind of results or state of mind.

Perhaps Isocrates’ rejection of the rhetorical handbook tradition could be regarded as another side to the same argument about the pitfalls of applying fixed structures and/or rules of thought to a creative process such as learning. Given the previous discussion of Isocrates’ philosophy, which is best conceived as a broad intellectual practice that makes a virtue out of the relative vagueness of the concept, it is easy to see why Isocrates would disapprove of the practice of writing and using technical handbooks for educational purposes.Footnote ⁷⁷ Isocrates makes this clear in his programmatic work Against the Sophists, where he criticizes teachers ‘who have themselves failed to notice that they are bringing a fixed art as an example for creative process (ποιητικὸν πρᾶγμα)’ (12). Isocrates compares the art of using letters to the art of discourse (logoi): the first is a fixed and unchangeable process where ‘we continually and invariably use the same letters for the same purposes’, whereas in discourses ‘what has been said by one speaker is not equally useful for the speaker who comes after him’ (12). Furthermore, Isocrates expresses strong reservations about the ability to teach virtue or, more generally, to simply turn any willing student to virtue and philosophy. According to him, there is no such art (technê, τέχνη) that can create a development towards virtue and justice in ‘depraved natures’ (21: τοῖς κακῶς πεφυκόσι). In other words, technical handbooks that depict teaching and learning as a straightforward matter, where the student will improve simply by memorizing and following the rules provided in these books, are misleading and can hardly deliver what they boast to be able to do: to create experts or educated men from all their students. There are multiple references to Isocrates’ aversion to the handbook tradition in his works, even though they are less explicit than his statements in Against the Sophists and Antidosis.Footnote ⁷⁸

Ancient scholarship did, however, attribute a τέχνη to Isocrates and, despite the relatively widely held view among modern scholars that Isocrates did not participate in the handbook tradition, this position has been recently challenged.Footnote ⁷⁹ It is true that Barwick, who argued against the Isocratean τέχνη, was forced, rather uncomfortably, to admit several stages of misunderstanding among ancient theorists (including Cicero and Quintilian) in order to maintain his point and at the same time give a plausible rationale for the existence of ancient accounts of Isocrates’ τέχνη.Footnote ⁸⁰ The main thrust of his argument is based on the fact that τέχνη in the fourth century bce could mean both a ‘handbook’ and a ‘polished speech’, and that the later understanding of τέχνη in a strictly technical sense created a confusion among rhetoricians, who misread a passage from Aristotle’s Συναγωγὴ τεχνῶν (which has not survived) and assumed that Isocrates also wrote a τέχνη (even though no actual work survives). Papillon challenged this view and proposed viewing Isocrates as the inventor of ‘hypodeictic discourse’ that he explains as ‘joining narration with argument through praise by comparison’, and Isocrates’ τέχνη as innovatively consisting of longer examples and a technical commentary.Footnote ⁸¹ The most recent ‘reconstruction’ of an Isocratean τέχνη has been put forward by Walker.Footnote ⁸² Walker’s admittedly speculative work argues, among other things, that Isocrates’ τέχνη was very similar to the Rhetoric to Alexander and that it also became a sort of ‘Ur-handbook’ for all future sophistic or rhetorical τέχναι. In other words, not only did Isocrates write a τέχνη, this work also became foundational for the subsequent rhetorical handbook tradition.Footnote ⁸³ Against Walker’s extremely speculative account, I would like to make two points. Firstly, if Isocrates were indeed the founding father of the rhetorical handbook tradition, we would surely expect to hear more about that from our ancient sources. In fact, authorities in the field seem to question this attribution (e.g. Quintilian Inst. 2.15.4: si tamen re vera ars quae circumfertur eius est). Hence, it could not have occupied such a central position in the rhetorical handbook tradition that Walker envisions if nothing at all was known about this work from relatively early on in the reception history. Secondly, contrary to what Walker suggests, one of the main characteristics of Isocrates that emerges is his uniqueness and dissimilarity from other (contemporary) teachers. This sense of difference is already articulated in the Phaedrus, where Socrates suggests that Isocrates is different from Lysias and the like, who could perhaps be grouped together with those writing handbooks and showing cleverness in little speeches like those that Phaedrus delivers in the dialogue. Indeed, in the handbook passage of the dialogue (266d–7d), Isocrates is not mentioned, whereas several others are mentioned as explicitly having written technai. Looking at the evidence we have about Isocrates’ τέχνη, it seems fairly clear that his contemporaries do not associate him with a rhetorical handbook tradition, and that this is something that becomes more prominent in later stages of his reception.Footnote ⁸⁴

The third argument about how to achieve Isocratean philosophy (Antidosis 275, quoted above) concerns the notion of advantage or gain (πλεονεξία). Isocrates considers this notion to be the most difficult of the points raised, because he has to argue against the widespread opinion according to which advantage is something achieved at the expense of others, either by robbing them or by doing other evil things (281).Footnote ⁸⁵ According to Isocrates, however, advantage in its true sense is applicable only to men ‘who are the most righteous and most faithful in their devotions’. These men are also rewarded with advantage by their excellent associates and fellows. Why is it, all of a sudden, that common knowledge is actually not trustworthy and that there is a need to redefine the notion ‘advantage’? Indeed, Isocrates’ entire methodology seems to depend on the general trust in public opinion and widely held views. Isocrates realizes this problem and argues that there is a general misconception in Athens with regard to language and terminology used to denote certain activities and people. Meanings are turned upside-down, Isocrates claims, and buffoons capable of mocking and mimicking rather than men of excellence are called ‘gifted’ (εὐφυεῖς, 285). Tracing these changes back to the so-called ancient sophists enables Isocrates to suggest that in reality he does not disagree with the general public, but with those ‘philosophers’ who have unhelpfully discredited the idea of ‘advantage’, which used to function as a positive term in the context of any intellectual activity.Footnote ⁸⁶

We arrive here at what appears to be an explicit confrontation with Socrates and his teaching. It is a central characteristic of Socratic teaching to closely scrutinize one’s reliance on, and appreciation of, external characteristics such as wealth and reputation regarded as goals in themselves (e.g. Apology 30b2–3). In the course of examining the true meanings of these characteristics, Socrates often ended up rethinking these terms in such a way that they acquired a meaning contrary to their original and literal sense: reputation (δόξα) becomes mere appearance, the maxim ‘help friends and hurt enemies’ is turned upside-down, and so on.Footnote ⁸⁷ Isocrates takes issue with this approach and aims to return to the original or traditional meanings of these concepts and claims that his teaching will get the youth into the habit of striving towards advantage in relation to themselves and the country as a whole, and to do so in very concrete and practical terms. The challenge of the fundamental principles of Socratic teaching is not of secondary importance for Isocrates. In fact, rather than criticizing his contemporary intellectuals individually (Antisthenes, Plato, Aristotle, etc.) it could be argued instead that Isocrates treats them rather as a derivative or second-order group of Socratics, thus suggesting that Isocrates’ most profound opponent, and one Isocrates is most committed to challenging in his works, is Socrates – the Athenian philosopher-teacher par excellence.

While the biographical tradition associates Isocrates’ intellectual formation most frequently with Gorgias, Prodicus and Theramenes, there is also another, much later and more dubious, tradition that connects Isocrates to Socrates. Despite the confident claim in the Anonymous Life of Isocrates, which states that Isocrates μαθητὴς δ᾽ἐγένετο φιλοσόφου μὲν Σωκράτους (‘became the student of Socrates the philosopher’),Footnote ¹ and a couple of anecdotes, describing Isocrates utterly distressed about the death of Socrates to the extent of wearing mourning clothes for a year, the association between Socrates and Isocrates is of late origin and of little plausibility.Footnote ² However, the suggestion that there was some sort of intellectual association between the two men seems to carry irresistible attraction and it has never ceased to have prominent supporters.Footnote ³

Their association surely owes much to the reading of Isocrates’ Antidosis together with Plato’s Phaedrus and to noticing Isocrates’ only mention of Socrates in his Busiris. Whether or not the two actually met is a wild speculation and in itself not a very relevant question for this inquiry. It is surely true, however, that Socrates’ trial and execution had a long-lasting impact on Athens and it is highly probable that devising a career in education and laying claims to philosophy just immediately after such a watershed moment must have forced Isocrates to think hard about the role of teachers and intellectuals in Athenian society. Although it was held among many (if not most) contemporaries that Socrates’ death was unfair and undeserved – and therefore it was (and perhaps still is) probably unwise to criticize Socrates for an educated audience – Socrates’ behavior at the trial and his (lack of?) ability to defend himself have nevertheless been a subject of debate and interpretation.Footnote ⁴ I believe that we should look at Isocrates, though clearly a non-Socratic thinker, also in this particular context. While most scholars regard Isocrates as a staunch rival of Plato, Aristotle and other Socratics,Footnote ⁵ it is productive to regard Isocrates together with his contemporaries as trying to negotiate the Socratic legacy while developing his own unique approach to education and philosophy.Footnote ⁶ This perspective will show that Isocrates’ reflection of Socrates was more combative and critical than what has thus far been proposed.

Before Isocrates opens his school in early fourth-century Athens, we hear from another philosophy school in Athens that is active in 423 bce – Socrates’ ‘Thinkery’ (or Phrontistêrion) from Aristophanes’ Clouds. Granted that this is a comedy and not an actual school (nor actual Socrates) that is portrayed in the play, this idea of Socrates as school master and student magnet seems to have resonated well after his death.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, it is curious that of all the philosophical schools in Athens that we know emerged from the early fourth century onwards, Isocrates’ was the only one not tracing its origins back to Socrates.Footnote ⁸ This tells us two things: first, Socrates’ influence on his followers seems to have been such that it inspired later schools to be founded with a focus specifically on professionalization of philosophy, politics and education.Footnote ⁹ Second, as far as we can tell, Isocrates was the only advocate for professional schools who shows us another way of conceiving higher education in Athens. It is plausible, then, that when Isocrates discusses/critiques philosophers and the philosophical tradition, Socrates (rather than any individual Socratic) is the overwhelming and underlying ‘martyr’ of philosophy and education that he needs to grapple with. Why indeed did he not, unlike all other heads of philosophy schools, become a Socratic?

It is an understatement to say that Isocrates disagreed with Socrates and with Socrates-inspired philosophical schools. The tradition itself was in development and Isocrates proposed, as discussed above, a fundamentally different kind of concept for a philosophical school. This school was predicated upon the principles of sophisticated rhetoric, persuasion and advantage (discussed above). The urgency with which Isocrates attacks Socratic philosophers and the courage he had to challenge Socrates as the fountainhead of what had started to become a standard conception of philosophy schools are best understood as political. While Isocrates promoted in his work public life and preparation for political participation in the city’s governance, often specifically drawing attention to students who had excelled in relevant fields, Socratic dialogues underscore the importance of self-knowledge and promote a private study of true virtues in life. Isocrates’ Antidosis is a good test case for their relationship.

It has been occasionally noted that Isocrates’ Antidosis is much indebted to Plato’s Apology.Footnote ¹⁰ A careful reader will quickly notice, however, that in this work Isocrates subtly constructs an image of himself as an educator who is more effective and useful for Athens than Socrates had been. In one section, Isocrates discusses the role of education in shaping successful newer-generation politicians and orators in Athens and subtly draws attention to the work he himself is doing at his school. When he warns the jurors to not make a wrong decision of convicting him, he says that he has surpassed everyone else in providing Athens an education in intellect (φρόνησις) and speech (λόγος) – the two important cornerstones in the Athenian way of life that have brought the city its international renown and success (Ant. 291–5). In other words, Isocrates’ hard work in his school has enabled Athens to stand out internationally as the teacher of the rest of the world.Footnote ¹¹

While Socrates of the Socratic dialogues revealed the underlying ignorance and complacency of his fellow Athenians – that they actually do not know what they profess to know – Isocrates takes a different path and praises his fellow Athenians for already having outdone other Greeks in education. Athenians are the leaders of the world in education and this is due to the work teachers in Athens have been doing so successfully. There could not be a starker contrast. The Socratics and Plato in particular tell a story of Socrates’ encounters with the polis as one of attempts and failures, some more, some less ridiculous, but altogether it seems fair to say that Socrates’ interlocutors (at least in our extant Socratic dialogues) are shown to be full of confidence, even though deeper conversations reveal them to be ignorant and incapable of dealing with criticism. Socrates keeps throughout the dialogues a distance from his interlocutors and thus a distance from Athens and its institutions.Footnote ¹² This distance is predicated on freedom that Socrates seems to enjoy, a freedom to scrutinize and criticize institutions and people who do not live up to their own convictions. We are not allowed to forget, however, that it was also this city that ended up executing Socrates.

Isocrates paints a rather different image of his fellow Athenians. Even though there are problems in the jurisprudential system that Isocrates addresses in the first pages of his Antidosis, Athenians are generally cast as wiser than the rest of Greece, better educated and with appreciation for culture and education. There are some malicious characters who have brought the charges against Isocrates (‘some sophists’, Lysimachus Antidosis 2, 14), but rather than being pervasive in Athenian society these are the outliers. There is of course a hidden suggestion behind this portrayal of Athens, namely that Isocrates himself had an important role in shaping this superior Athens, that his school had in no small way contributed to the outstanding success of Athens. Furthermore, Isocrates seems to assimilate his own image as a successful teacher and a head of school with the international reputation of Athens as a teacher (διδάσκαλος) of the Greek world. Isocrates and Athens have started to look alike – Isocrates has become Athens.

Another point of difference between Isocrates and Socrates is, obviously, philosophy itself and how one ought to practice it. In what counts perhaps as the most programmatic passage in the Isocratean corpus, Antidosis 261–9 argues that astronomy, geometry and eristic dialogues are in themselves not harmful and as such benefit students as any training of the mind would (266), but they should not be called philosophy and they are useless as a preparation for real life. Therefore, these disciplines should not be practised too long nor be taken too seriously. This argument resembles another similar claim made by Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias,Footnote ¹³ except that Isocrates seems far less concerned with the personal fates of individuals than with the future of Athens more generally.Footnote ¹⁴ According to Isocrates, the Socratic quest for knowledge turns the youth from acting towards the wellbeing of the city towards prioritizing individual contemplation of personal virtues and happiness, thus depriving the city of educated and bright leaders. Isocrates’ concern for the usefulness of philosophy to Athens constitutes one of the pervading themes of Antidosis and this theme will also be, as shown below, his primary departure from Socrates and his followers.

Isocrates talks about success and worldly rewards of his profession in the Antidosis (281–5) where he lists advantage or gain (πλεονεξία) as one of the cornerstones of his philosophy. Isocrates argues that there is a general misconception in Athens with regard to language and terminology used to denote certain activities and people. Meanings have been turned upside-down, Isocrates claims, and buffoons capable of mocking and mimicking rather than men of excellence are called ‘gifted’ (εὐφυεῖς, 285). Tracing these changes back to the so-called ancient sophists enables Isocrates to suggest that it is not really the general public, but rather the so-called ‘philosophers’ who have unhelpfully discredited the idea of advantage, which used to function as a positive term in the context of any intellectual activity. Most importantly, Isocrates is upset that wealth has recently, among his contemporaries, fallen into disrepute (Antidosis 159–60), and unfairly so.

I believe we arrive here at what appears to be an explicit confrontation with Socrates and his image as a teacher and philosopher. It is a central characteristic of Socratic teaching to closely scrutinize one’s reliance on, and appreciation of, external characteristics such as wealth and reputation and challenge these as goals in themselves.Footnote ¹⁵ Socrates’ search for definitions often challenged the original or common meaning of a notion and aimed to demonstrate that things (or hopes, beliefs, desires) are not always what they appear on the surface or what the tradition handed down to us has had us believe. Through his critical lens on the political and social structures at place in Athens, Socrates has built a distance between the observer and the object so as to better contemplate matters at hand and reach a more objective and timeless decision.Footnote ¹⁶ The move is away from the moment and political context towards contemplating important questions of ethics in a timeless space.Footnote ¹⁷ The philosopher who is capable of following this quest ought to be independent and free from pressures from society in order to live that kind of critical life prescribed by Socrates. This intellectual freedom is an important reason why Socrates never charged fees.Footnote ¹⁸ As Blank notices, the distinction between sophists and philosophers tended to be made on the basis of whether or not they charged fees for their activity.Footnote ¹⁹ Otherwise, Socrates argues, he would have to talk to those who pay him and would therefore not be free to pursue his path of questioning as he chooses to.Footnote ²⁰

Isocrates sees things differently.Footnote ²¹ According to him, everyone does everything for the sake of either pleasure, gain or honor.Footnote ²² This, he says, is a fact and teachers who are preparing students to become leaders in the city or to simply manage their affairs cannot and should not downplay the importance of these three motivations. In other words, Isocrates seems to regard these three as legitimate and justified goals for one’s actions. He himself talks often about his reputation, thus giving the idea that to be well regarded by one’s fellow Athenians is of great importance to him and thus also a valid concern for any Athenian. Unlike Socrates, who discourages his interlocutors from following the so-called external motivations, urging them to continuously search for truth and happiness, Isocrates acknowledges the relevance of pleasure, gain and honor in the existing political and economic system and is determined to highlight the potential of higher education as a direct path to achieving these goals. Coming after Socrates and reflecting on his provocative views of education, Isocrates might appear as a conservative advocating for traditional societal norms.Footnote ²³ As such, he may not seem to bring much new to the ongoing discussion. As someone, however, trying to introduce (for the first time) institutionalized professional higher education to the intellectual and political landscape of Athens, his emphasis on demands for schools to cultivate the political elite of the city makes Isocrates’ position stand out from the rest. By making financial demands, Isocrates reminds his students that his school participates in the economy of the city, that it is not an autonomous self-absorbed entity somewhere in the outskirts of Athens,Footnote ²⁴ but rather an integral part of the city’s ongoing development.

Given the potential costs of running a professionalized institution of higher education, managing such an enterprise must require fees higher than what we hear were asked by the itinerant sophists. It is no surprise, then, that Isocrates comes back to the issue of money again and again throughout his writings.Footnote ²⁵ One of the most direct engagements with this topic is in his Antidosis, where after discussing the wealth (or lack thereof) of Gorgias, Isocrates turns to discussing the changing intellectual climate when it comes to charging fees for one’s professional activity (159–60). Isocrates explains that when he started out his business he was full of hope to recover the lost fortunes of his heritage and gain prominence through his hard work and education. Now, however, he finds himself surprisingly in a position where his foreign students who have brought him much financial support are continuously holding him in high honor, whereas Athenians on whom Isocrates has spent his resources are the ones to bring him on trial on the charge of being (too) wealthy.Footnote ²⁶ These references to the financial side of the ‘education business’ (and there are many more scattered around his works) are certainly indicative of Isocrates’ vision of the field: money and fame matter, they reveal the place one occupies in the real economy of the city and it would be at the peril of dooming education and philosophy to irrelevance to deny that. Holding such a position sets Isocrates in direct conflict with Socrates and his followers, and thus the entire mainstream of philosophical schools that trace themselves back to Socrates.

Despite his explicitly critical reception of Socrates, Isocrates never explicitly confronts Socrates, though he does mention him once. In the Busiris Isocrates criticizes the work of Polycrates who had written two paradoxical discourses: a praise of Busiris and an accusation speech against Socrates. Even though Isocrates then goes on to rewrite the praise for Busiris,Footnote ²⁷ he argues against Polycrates not because one ought not to accuse Socrates, but rather because his accusation speech looked more like praise.

Niall Livingstone has argued that Polycrates wrote the accusation speech against Socrates primarily because he regarded Socrates as a hero of his profession and therefore someone very hard for any educator to attack.Footnote ²⁸ Given that in this work Isocrates clearly conveys a very negative opinion of Polycrates, it might look obvious to assume that Isocrates is defending Socrates and, thus, that his relationship to him is one of admiration.Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, he chooses to offer a proper praise of Busiris rather than a ‘correct’ accusation of Socrates! However, it is also plausible that attacks such as those leveled against Socrates by Anytus, Meletus and Polycrates (even though all on different levels and probably with different motivations) were in Isocrates’ view so serious attacks against the position of intellectuals and teachers in Athens that regardless of the individual differences and disagreements, it was a matter of urgency that they be refuted tout court.Footnote ³⁰ But more specifically, it is striking that Isocrates’ criticism of Polycrates revolved around the figure of Alcibiades: Isocrates claims that Polycrates has falsely given the ever-talented Alcibiades to be a student of Socrates. Most Socratic philosophers thought long and hard about how to distance Alcibiades from Socrates and how best to address the claim that Socrates was responsible for the damage that Alcibiades inflicted on Athens. Isocrates instead embraces the excellence of Alcibiades and claims that Socrates was never his teacher in the first place, thus effectively belittling the influence Socrates as a teacher had on Athenian politics.Footnote ³¹ Isocrates’ claim might be best understood as a twist on the paradoxical subject itself,Footnote ³² but either way it is hardly supportive of Socrates as a venerated teacher and role model.

As suggested before, Socrates’ trial plays a fundamental role for our understanding of Isocrates’ Antidosis, which is arguably one of the most multilayered fourth-century engagements with Socrates’ trial that we have. This work is clearly set in competitive dialogue with many other contemporary literary-philosophical works that reflect on this watershed moment, but more than anything else, it seems that the Antidosis is imbued with a competitive attitude towards Socrates and his philosophical/educational heritage.Footnote ³³ Isocrates had also participated in a court trial that he – similarly to Socrates – lost.Footnote ³⁴ As Socrates in Plato’s Apology, Isocrates imagines the real reason behind his failure at the trial to lie in fundamental misunderstandings that have arisen around his school and his personality. Yet, it would be dangerous for Isocrates to sound too much like Socrates, to suggest that his influence in the city has been primarily negative, that he has not made any political impact and – above all – that engaging in higher education inevitably means taking distance from the political life of the city. The pervading ideas of the Antidosis are, therefore, inspired by the desire to demonstrate the relevance of his school and philosophy to Athens and, thereby, implicitly criticize the core of what Socrates – the head of school – was standing for. Thus we see Isocrates who is hopeful that the jury will eventually recognize the truth about him (28, 169–70), confirm his importance to the cultural milieu of Athens and pay their due respect.Footnote ³⁵ It is curious that Isocrates had explicitly decided to side with his audience and listeners, being confident that his words will make a difference. This is yet another instance where Isocrates consciously adopts an opposite view to Socrates, envisioning himself to be an effective teacher and educator in Athens in contrast to Socrates. Indeed, Socrates may have been a teacher of sorts in Athens, but he was not a teacher of Athenians nor useful for the city. Isocrates, instead, aims to be both.

Finally, there may also have been some urgency in Isocrates’ perceived need for a new vision for higher education and its role in the city. As some studies point out, there were hesitant attitudes towards wealthy aristocratic Athenians after the Peloponnesian war that seem to have resulted in the continuous decrease of active political elite running the city.Footnote ³⁶ By the end of the fourth century bce, Aristotle’s Politics and the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians both describe contemporary Athens as the most radical form of democracy, arguing that citizens and decrees rather than laws rule the city.Footnote ³⁷ Further, Claire Taylor has drawn attention to comparative evidence from the fifth and fourth centuries that suggests that the participation and influence of wealthy elite in Athens had significantly declined in the fourth century bce.Footnote ³⁸ In this context, we might look at Isocrates’ political discourses as aiming at popularizing his school among the upper-middle- and high-class Athenian citizens and, no less importantly, as attempts to cultivate their preparation for a political career.

If indeed there was a perception that the political elite had lost its influence and importance in Athenian politics, Isocrates’ discourses seem to suggest two things: first, by challenging Socrates as the fountainhead of contemporary philosophical schools that promote the pursuit of knowledge and truth in isolation from active day-to-day life in the city, Isocrates is drawing attention to the increased danger that this kind of philosophical education will turn Athenian leadership even more apathetic to contemporary politics and thus further reduce the influence of the elite and educated leadership in Athens. In other words, Athenian educated elite should look to Isocrates rather than Socrates for a proper guidance in reaching a truly accomplished civic life.Footnote ³⁹ Secondly, Athens in her complex political context of the fourth century bce cannot really afford to lose the voice of the educated (upper-class) Athenian and therefore other philosophical schools should be held to the task of preparing and advocating political careers for the educated (and wealthy) Athenians.Footnote ⁴⁰ Therefore, Isocrates’ challenge of Socrates as the paragon citizen and exemplary teacher of Athenians might not have been motivated simply by hopes for personal glory (though that should not be ruled out in the case of Isocrates), but was also – or even primarily – seen as a result of contemporary political necessity for anyone who cared for the future of the stability of the Athenian polis.

Other than bare (and rare) name droppings, Isocrates is not explicitly mentioned or discussed by his contemporary writers and philosophers. This is not unusual for fourth-century bce literary culture and does not mean that writer-philosophers were engaged in serious discussions only with the famous sophists and philosophers from the past. Quite the contrary, references in the works of fifth/fourth-century authors to their (mostly anonymous) critics and readers suggest an intense literary landscape and display a wide repertoire of solutions that are offered to shared concerns about the newest changes in politics, philosophy and education. It is plausible that suppressing the names of one’s rivals was a standard way to play down their importance and increase one’s own standing. Thus, in order to better understand Isocrates’ sentiments regarding the intellectual climate of fourth-century bce Athens, and the way his self-fashioned image resonated within this context, it is worthwhile to look at writers close to his time, with whom he might have been in dialogue and who make references to his work.

5.1 Alcidamas

An important figure for our understanding of fourth-century bce conceptions of written and spoken speech, and relationships between rhetoric, sophistry and philosophy, Alcidamas and his Against Those Who Write Written Speeches, or Against Sophists (henceforth Sophists) is an important source for understanding the wider intellectual environment of Isocrates.Footnote ¹

There is a strong ancient tradition according to which both Alcidamas and Isocrates were treated as pupils of Gorgias.Footnote ² Despite the fact that Isocrates only has critical comments to make about Gorgias,Footnote ³ modern scholarship too is sometimes overly fascinated with establishing continuity of thought among ancient thinkers.Footnote ⁴ Too has rightly questioned this uncritical approach to Isocratean apprenticeship with Gorgias.Footnote ⁵ Given our lack of any direct evidence about it, we should rely on what Isocrates himself has to say about Gorgias and the latter’s importance to his work. Hence, it seems very strange indeed to think that Isocrates singled out Gorgias from other sophists and saw him as his teacher in any meaningful sense. It is surely true, however, that Gorgias was an important (even inspirational) figure for thinking about higher education in Athens, and insofar as both Alcidamas and Isocrates are part of that tradition, it is no wonder that we’ll find similarities and differences in their positions.Footnote ⁶

Other than the superficial connection through Gorgias, the majority of scholars interested in the links between Isocrates and Alcidamas have focused on the chronological relationship of Alcidamas’ work to Isocrates’ Against the Sophists. It has been suggested that Alcidamas’ Sophists is a direct attack against Isocrates (his programmatic Against the Sophists in particular) and his school.Footnote ⁷ Whatever the chronology, these texts indicate that Isocrates and Alcidamas advocated opposing views on what a proper rhetorical or philosophical education should consist of, and this disagreement touches the very core of their respective educational practices. Alcidamas enters the debate by defining it in terms of written versus spoken discourse, and advocates the latter as an appropriate aim for any student of rhetorical τέχνη (Sophists 1, 33). Isocrates distinguishes between a polished/good and an ignorant/bad composition, and seems to allow both written and spoken discourses to qualify for either category (i.e. of good or bad composition).Footnote ⁸ Yet Isocrates also argues that a hallmark of good and wide learning is the ability to excel in written discourses, for they are, due to the high expectations of precision and argument, more difficult to compose satisfactorily (e.g. Panegyricus 11–12, Antidosis 49). Isocrates and Alcidamas agree, however, that both written and spoken discourse are, generally speaking, part of a wider paideia; they disagree over what role each should play in education and in rhetoric more widely.

We have, admittedly, a rather minimal idea of Alcidamas’ educational practice, but his Sophists suggests that according to him the whole art of rhetoric is best studied by way of learning to speak ex tempore (1). This seems to mean memorizing the few crucial points one aims to make in a speech and otherwise improvising the rest. It is not entirely clear how this technique is put to practice in a schoolroom, but such shortcomings in detailed information might also stem from the narrow scope of his treatise: Alcidamas’ accusation speech (κατηγορία) seems primarily intended to attack his rivals rather than to provide details about his own school. It is clear throughout the text that Alcidamas is solely concerned with rhetoric and he identifies this as an art of public speaking (τὸ λέγειν). All six occurrences of the root *ρη in Sophists refer to either the practice or practitioner of rhetoric as either speaking or speaker.Footnote ⁹ Alcidamas seems to understand this art as separate from philosophy, even though the distinction between the two is not explicit in this work.Footnote ¹⁰ Based on our previous discussion about Isocrates’ terminology, Alcidamas is very similar to Isocrates. Contrary to the latter, however, Alcidamas does not explicitly proclaim to teach philosophy.

Isocrates’ rejection of spoken discourse as the primary basis for education becomes one of the definitive hallmarks of his work, and his advocacy of written discourses as providing the best foundation in education makes him stand out in the fourth-century bce intellectual scene. It is indicative in this context that one of the few actual descriptions of a teaching situation in Isocrates, his Panathenaicus (264–6), shows Isocrates especially uncomfortable about public performance. In this passage, Isocrates argues that he has produced highly eloquent speakers in his school (despite his emphasis on writing skills), but also indicates that a spoken debate is too confrontational, emotional, and perhaps too similar to eristics, to be constructive. Stylistic differences between Alcidamas and Isocrates might indeed reflect their respective views on rhetoric and on its way of functioning.Footnote ¹¹ Isocrates’ meticulously polished ‘written’ style is perhaps intentionally lacking in the ability to stir emotions and manipulate the audience, something that is promoted by Alcidamas – and rightly so – as the key to success in public performances. In other words, we might be justified in regarding Isocrates’ turning away from the performative qualities of speech, which were highly advocated by the sophists (and Alcidamas), towards the less spontaneous and meticulous prose as a response to the debates about the moral quality of rhetoric. Isocrates’ written style aimed to be the result of scrupulous training and deeper learning, which would elevate the level of discussion and prevent his students from scoring ‘cheap points’ by appealing to the irrational and/or emotional expectations of the audience.Footnote ¹² After all, it is undisputed that Isocrates was deeply concerned with the moral status of rhetorical teaching, and this might explain his appropriation of ‘philosophy’ as an all-encompassing παιδεία that strives to help its practitioners towards ‘reasonableness’ (ἐπιείκεια; Against the Sophists 21). In that sense, whether Alcidamas intended to oppose Isocrates specifically or not (and it is more likely that he intended to encompass in his criticism everyone who promotes education through writing, including Isocrates), they do end up occupying opposing positions and, as such, offer valuable perspectives on each others’ arguments. Isocrates emerges from Alcidamas’ criticisms as a teacher who fails to prepare students for success in the courts, whose writing lacks in emotions and who, as a consequence, is not able to move his audience.

5.2 Plato’s Isocrates

Plato’s engagement with Isocrates is complex and has been the subject of substantial scholarly controversy. There are two explicit references to Isocrates in the corpus Platonicum: there is Socrates’ famous prophecy concerning Isocrates in the Phaedrus (278e–9b), and a passing reference in the Thirteenth Letter to some of Isocrates’ students (360c).Footnote ¹³ In addition, there are passages in Plato’s dialogues, in Euthydemus (304d–6d) and Theaetetus (172c–7b), where Isocrates’ name is not mentioned but which have been interpreted either as responses to Isocrates or at least as criticisms of intellectual practices that greatly resemble those of Isocrates.Footnote ¹⁴ Finally, there is an entire dialogue of Plato, the Gorgias, which focuses on politics and rhetoric and where views rather similar to that of Isocrates are subjected to substantial criticism. Let us take a closer look at Plato’s references to Isocrates and examine the extent to which this engagement played an important role in shaping Isocrates’ subsequent reception.

The most explicit reference to Isocrates in Plato’s corpus comes at the end of the Phaedrus, where – almost as an afterthought – Phaedrus reminds Socrates of his friend (ἑταῖρος, 278e4) who should be informed about the outcomes of their discussion on rhetoric. Even though Socrates’ response ‘which one?’ (τίνα τοῦτον) suggests that the association between himself and Isocrates comes to him as a surprise, the fact that he does not refute this connection nevertheless sets a positive tone to the relationship as portrayed in the passage. Generally, Plato uses ἑταῖρος to refer either to immediate interlocutors of, or simply to people close to, Socrates.Footnote ¹⁵ In fact, later in the tradition ἑταῖρος was also understood as a byword for Socrates’ students, and this particular passage is clearly the source for later claims that Isocrates was Socrates’ pupil.Footnote ¹⁶ Regardless of the neutral or even borderline-encouraging connotation of the word here, Socrates’ account of Isocrates has been taken by most interpreters to be ironic in its intent, thus encouraging scholars to look for further evidence of the differences between Plato and Isocrates that might demonstrate more clearly that Plato’s arguments on rhetoric and false philosophy are explicitly targeted at Isocrates. Isocrates’ works appear just too dissimilar to Plato’s conception of philosophy – and Plato is often read as a fundamentally non-compromising author on philosophical method – to accept any kind of positive interpretation of their relationship through this passage.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, it is quite difficult to read this passage of the Phaedrus without at least considering an ironical attitude: the two important thinkers were contemporaries and opened philosophical schools in Athens around the same time, schools that offered completely different understandings of higher education and philosophical excellence. Perhaps philosophically most significant is their different treatment of knowledge and opinion. Howland offers a compelling discussion on the difference and rivalry between Plato and Isocrates by comparing specific passages from the Phaedrus and Isocrates’ Helen. In Phaedrus 262c, Socrates argues that the orator has to use definitions to arrive at knowledge of the topic and that it is not enough to work with opinions, for without systematic understanding of the matter at hand it is impossible to produce the expected result consistently. In his Helen (5), however, Isocrates argues that pupils should be instructed in practical affairs, ‘bearing in mind that likely conjecture about useful things (περὶ τῶν χρησίμων ἐπιεικῶς δοξάζειν) is far preferable to exact knowledge of the useless (περὶ τῶν ἀχρήστων ἀκριβῶς ἐπίστασθαι), and that to be a little superior in important things is of greater worth than to be pre-eminent in petty things that are without value for living’. Isocrates claims that in some matters it is possible to reach a state of knowledge, but that these areas are so remote from human life and interests that it is actually not worthwhile to dedicate one’s life to studying them. It is possible to achieve a level of confidence, however, in areas which do pertain to human interests, but this is attained primarily through experience (ἐμπειρία) rather than theoretical discussion. This experience will not result in absolute knowledge and the ability to predict the right course of action in every possible circumstance, but it does boost one’s skills in coping with unexpected situations in the best possible way in most cases. They both use the language of knowledge versus opinion, thus clearly indicating that they are participating in the same debate though advocating opposing positions. It seems straightforward to then conclude that the two must have been each others’ fiercest rivals. And yet, why would Plato suggest such ambivalence about Isocrates at the end of the Phaedrus if indeed they were in every possible way each other’s worst enemies?

Another, and in my view more plausible, reading of Plato’s mention of Isocrates in the Phaedrus emerges once we take seriously the sheer number of references to education and to rhetorical teachers in particular in the dialogue. Leaving aside the poets (Homer, Stesichorus, Sappho, Anacreon, Sophocles), whose frequent mention in the dialogue is interesting in its own right, Socrates brings up Lysias, ‘wise men’ offering rationalizing accounts of myths (229c4), Simmias the Theban (242b3), Gorgias, Thrasymachus, Theodorus (261c2; Thrasymachus also 271a4), a representative Laconian critic (260e5), Zeno (261d5), Theodorus, Evenus, Gorgias, Tisias, Prodicus, Hippias, Polus, Licymnius, Protagoras (266d4–7e5; Tisias longer discussed also 273a5–4a4), Adrastus (269a4), Pericles and Anaxagoras (269e2–70a6), and finally Isocrates (278e4). With the possible exception of Pericles/Anaxagoras and Isocrates, all other references to (rhetorical) teachers are overtly disparaging, and Lysias, treated here as speechwriter and teacher, seems to have become by the end of the dialogue the byword for the kind of rhetoric that ought to be rejected, explicitly, without hesitation. By contrast, Phaedrus evokes Isocrates at the end as a curious case (‘what shall we say he is?’), though introducing him as ‘beautiful’ (καλός) already puts us in a positive mindset. Socrates fulfils Phaedrus’ cautious questioning about Isocrates when he confirms that the latter is not indeed to be classified together with all the rest represented by Lysias, prophesying that he will be important and that there is ‘some’ philosophy in this young man. Finally, Socrates suggests that he himself will deliver the content of this current conversation to his ‘favorite’ (παιδικοῖς, 279b2), much as Phaedrus should inform his favorite Lysias. Rhetorical education is divided, in this last section of the Phaedrus, into two: there are those many who operate like Lysias, and then there is Isocrates, who stands out from the rest by offering ‘some philosophy’ and growth to his students. Socrates unashamedly sides rather with Isocrates though this is not to say that he agrees with the latter. Isocrates still needs to hear the content of this conversation, about the tools and goals of rhetoric and its relationship to philosophy. Significant differences between Socrates/Plato and Isocrates ought not to be downplayed, sure, though setting this passage in the broader context of rhetorical teaching available in Athens both at the time and during Plato’s time, strongly suggests that Isocrates is sincerely, if relatively to the particular context,Footnote ¹⁸ praised for the (somewhat philosophical) kind of education that he promotes in Athens.Footnote ¹⁹ As Socrates says, Isocrates is naturally capable beyond the speeches of Lysias, but also has a nobler êthos, character or ethics (279a4–5). This êthos and Isocrates’ attention to sound moral education in Athens are precisely what elevate and distinguish him from politicians like Callicles and sophists like Thrasymachus, whose positions are in some respects not very far from those of Isocrates.

A somewhat comparable image of Isocrates emerges from the concluding section of Plato’s Euthydemus (304d–6d) with an important difference that Isocrates is not mentioned by name.Footnote ²⁰ Even if some inconsistencies remain in the ‘caricature’ of Isocrates,Footnote ²¹ Plato introduces in this section a critique of a particular type of intellectual that is in a broad sense compatible with Isocrates: this is a man who partakes in political life to some extent but does not participate in court proceedings (305c), who considers himself most wise (304d5: ἀνὴρ οἰόμενος πάνυ εἶναι σοφός), who has some (superficial) familiarity with politics and philosophy, but does not know any of these subjects thoroughly (305c7: μεθόρια φιλοσόφου τε ἀνδρὸς καὶ πολιτικοῦ; 305d8: μετρίως μὲν γὰρ φιλοσοφίας ἔχειν, μετρίως δὲ πολιτικῶν). This man, although considering himself most wise, is unable to confront sophists like Euthydemus and Dionysodorus in public debates (305d5–7), and is not honest about his publicly visible inability. Even if this passage is not meant to criticize Isocrates exclusively, it does seem to map rather well onto the previous analysis of Isocrates in the Phaedrus and is in agreement with many characteristics that Isocrates himself uses to introduce his philosophia and to criticize his rivals. Most striking in this description is the use of the word philosophia (φιλοσοφία), and this might add additional weight to the suggestion that it is Isocrates and his appropriation of the term ‘philosophy’ that are the explicit object of discussion here.Footnote ²²

Crito describes the discussion he had with a person who witnessed Socrates’ exchange with Euthydemus and Dionysodorus. Despite initially seeming to praise the show (304e), the stranger, when asked what he himself learned from them, retorts and says that there was nothing to learn, but (presumably) simply to enjoy the debate: they showed ‘merely the sort of stuff that you may hear such people babbling about at any time – making an inconsequent ado about matters of no consequence’ (τί δὲ ἄλλο […] ἢ οἷάπερ ἀεὶ ἄν τις τῶν τοιούτων ἀκούσαι ληρούντων καὶ περὶ οὐδενὸς ἀξίων ἀναξίαν σπουδὴν ποιουμένων). It seems, then, that the stranger is upset about the fact that in this debate unimportant matters were treated as if they had serious and relevant consequences. Crito’s reply is itself problematic and highly provocative: ‘but surely … philosophy is a charming thing’ (ἀλλὰ μέντοι […] χαρίεν γέ τι πρᾶγμά ἐστιν ἡ φιλοσοφία). Crito is the first to define the exchange between Socrates and the brothers as philosophy and, furthermore, to declare it to be charming regardless of the potential dangers that the stranger had highlighted. The stranger reiterates that (whatever Crito means by) philosophy is of no worth whatsoever (305a1: οὐδενὸς μὲν οὖν ἄξιον), and to demonstrate this he mentions how Socrates, who agreed to take part in such a debate, made a laughing-stock out of himself, for ‘the business itself and the people who follow it are worthless and utterly ridiculous (φαῦλοί εἰσιν καὶ καταγέλαστοι)’. The anxiety about appearing ridiculous and the energetic attempts to associate oneself with serious and important things certainly evoke the image of Isocrates as the candidate for the stranger in this passage.

After having heard Crito’s summary of their exchange, Socrates offers an analysis of an intellectual type: Prodicus had allegedly called such people somewhere in-between philosophy and politics (305c7: μεθόρια φιλοσόφου τε ἀνδρὸς καὶ πολιτικοῦ). Socrates argues that even though these kinds of people are only ‘moderately versed in philosophy and moderately too in politics’ (305d8), and cannot thus claim to know the subjects in the depth necessary, still one ‘ought to recognize their ambition (συγγιγνώσκειν τῆς ἐπιθυμίας) and not feel annoyed with them’, for one should applaud ‘anyone who says anything that verges on good sense (ἐχόμενον φρονήσεως πρᾶγμα), and labors steadily and manfully in its pursuit’ (306c6–d1). Without any further elaboration, Socrates suggests here that while these people are not fully entitled to φιλοσοφία and are lacking in the depth of their knowledge, there is nevertheless something valuable in their pursuits in that they have good intuitions and ideally cultivate some of this also in their students or followers.

Coming as it does at the end of the dialogue, one cannot help but draw parallels to the Phaedrus, which suggested – in a rather comparable way – that there is ‘some (kind of) philosophy’ (τὶς φιλοσοφία) in Isocrates and predicted he would grow beyond his current rhetorical studies towards philosophy proper. Surely there were other practitioners of philosophy or proponents of education in contemporary Athens who could have been included in this characterization. However, the position of this observation at the end of the dialogue and the language used to describe the stranger (calling himself most wise, advocating against too deep engagement with philosophy, etc.) do seem to fit perfectly with Isocrates in particular. Isocrates seems to have been exemplary during his time and has certainly remained a unique case study of philosophy and rhetoric for contemporary readers. Hence, it does seem reasonable to consider Isocrates as an intended recipient of this evaluation and to be applauded over some of their other contemporary rivals.Footnote ²³ This almost benign rejection of Isocrates as a second-rate (or third-rate in this passage) thinker might have had a less devastating effect on the reception of Isocrates than, for example, Socrates’ portrayal of the ‘immoral sophists’, such as Callicles and Thrasymachus. Sketching out a more or less acceptable alternative to his own philosophical project, Plato seems to become an influential source for subsequent attempts to conceptualize and revive Isocratean philosophy. While the Phaedrus was surely a prominent place for Isocrates’ rehabilitation as a student of Socrates and a positive role model for philosophical rhetoric, an attitude that seems particularly prominent in the works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus of the first century bce, the Euthydemus further confirms this image of Isocrates but also indicates briefly the shortcomings of Isocratean philosophy.

This explicit mention of Isocrates at the end of the Phaedrus and potential references to Isocrates in the Euthydemus have inspired critics to launch into a wider examination of other dialogues by Plato in order to find support for their interpretation of Isocrates as one of the main rivals of Plato. Some scholars have regarded, for example, the digression about the philosopher in Plato’s Theaetetus (172c–7b) as a critique of Isocrates. Eucken argues that the digression in Theaetetus is to be regarded as Plato’s critique of the ‘rhetorical man’ (rhetorischer Mensch) more generally and should be regarded not as an ad hominem attack on Isocrates, but as an attack on an image of the intellectual that, however, encompasses the essential features of Isocratean philosophy/education.Footnote ²⁴ Even though Socrates draws a marked dichotomy between forensic speakers and philosophers, and Isocrates can be regarded among the former group only at a significant stretch,Footnote ²⁵ some of the fundamental characteristics of the two types of men as portrayed by Socrates – it has been argued – do map out the central disagreements between Isocrates and Plato. While Isocrates focuses on the ‘here and now’, Socrates emphasizes the triviality of sense perceptions and of life embedded in political or oratorical activity. For Socrates’ leading philosophers (κορυφαῖοι [φιλοσοφῶν], 173c7), true knowledge and wisdom lie in contemplation of the eternal and in aiming to be united with the divine as soon as possible (176a8–b1). Isocrates, as demonstrated above, does not believe in the human capacity to achieve systematic and abstract knowledge of things worth knowing about, thus acknowledging beliefs (δόξαι) as the closest one can get to (practical) wisdom. These beliefs will inevitably depend on all kinds of stimuli coming from the world around us and thus are fundamentally rooted in our environment and context.

Next to the epistemological disagreements,Footnote ²⁶ another important divergence between Plato and Isocrates, or the respective images of philosophers that they would advocate, goes back to the notion of ‘ridiculousness’. In fact, Socrates’ digression in Theaetetus 172c4–6 is inspired by the recognition that philosophers appear ‘laughable’ (γελοῖος) to others around them: ‘how natural it is that those who have spent a long time in the study of philosophy appear ridiculous (γελοῖοι φαίνονται) when they enter the courts of law as speakers (ῥήτορες)’. Socrates describes this ridiculous appearance as a necessary characteristic of a philosopher who spends all her time contemplating things that lie beyond her physical experience of the world.Footnote ²⁷ Isocrates, quite to the contrary, is keen to establish authority, a sense of seriousness and relevance to his educational methods. According to him, philosophy is what can be considered useful, and anyone who appears ridiculous in pragmatic affairs will have misunderstood the ultimate goals of philosophy (e.g. Helen 4–6). In his Antidosis, for example, Isocrates has his associate explain the difference between himself and the ‘showing-off sophists’. The latter are sometimes ridiculed (καταγελᾶν) and sometimes praised by the auditors, whereas Isocrates is not (147–8). Sophists are associated multiple times with the most ridiculous situations (ὃ δὲ πάντων καταγελαστότατον), be that for distrusting their students (Against the Sophists 5), or for trying to convince with implausible arguments (and not by deeds) that they have relevant things to say about political knowledge (Helen 9). Isocrates is also concerned for Athens appearing ridiculous if his views on logoi and education are neglected (Antidosis 297).Footnote ²⁸ Finally, in a passage of the Archidamus, Isocrates demonstrates perhaps his strongest stance on ridicule: he states that ‘it is preferable to suffer annihilation rather than derision at the hands of our foes’ (89: αἱρετώτερον ἡμῖν ἐστιν ἀναστάτοις γενέσθαι μᾶλλον ἢ καταγελάστοις ὑπὸ τῶν ἐχθρῶν).Footnote ²⁹ In sum, Isocrates agrees with Plato that hypothetical theorizing as described in this digression will inevitably lead to the ‘ridiculous state’ of the philosopher, but while this is something Plato accepts as a side-effect, Isocrates views it as an ultimate failure of the profession.

Epistemologically and emotionally, therefore, the views put forth in this digression seem to position Socrates/Plato and Isocrates on opposing axes and in direct and fierce antagonism. However, the drama of the dialogue is more complicated than that. The fact that all quests for knowledge end in aporiai,Footnote ³⁰ that there is no mention of the forms and recollection, and the presence of the digression in the middle of the dialogue which seems to have little to do with other themes of the dialogue,Footnote ³¹ have kept commentators on their toes. Indeed, as has been noticed before, next to expressing a rather exaggerated view of orators or law court officials, this passage of the Theaetetus also provides a caricatured depiction of philosophers to the effect that it is highly dubious that Socrates actually endorses this way of life any more than that of the orators. Indeed, the philosophers are described as oblivious to life happening around them, unaware of politics, of customs and laws, of feasts and trials, and most importantly, the philosopher ‘doesn’t even know that he doesn’t know all these things’ (173e1). This can hardly be a positive characterization of philosophers. In the end, it is Socrates rather than the idealized leaders of philosophy (κορυφαῖοι) who is occupying the position of a truly desirable middle measure, having a grasp – as much as striving towards achieving knowledge – of the things in the world.Footnote ³² Hence, if we are to locate Isocrates somewhere in this digression, it seems that he resembles the position of Socrates more than he does that of the orators. Even if he did have an early career as speechwriter, he has made a name for himself and gathered reputation rather as a teacher and head of a philosophy school. Isocrates is very negative about orators and other writers of political speeches (except for himself, of course) and recognizes the place for theoretical knowledge, even though he strongly advocates using theoretical philosophy as a tool for intelligent participation in the city’s politics. In other words, within the crude distinction between orators and philosophers, Socrates and Isocrates seem closer to each other than they seem to either of the extremes. Hence, this passage can hardly be taken as a criticism of Isocrates, and even less so as an explicit critique of the Isocratean school. If anything, it seems to recognize the importance of a school like that of Isocrates, which is trying to find a middle way between the two highly problematic extremes.

Finally, there is Plato’s Gorgias. Some see this dialogue as Plato’s school-founding manifesto, written as a response to Isocrates’ Against the Sophists, which has in turn been taken to be a manifesto for Isocrates’ newly opened school.Footnote ³³ One of the chief reasons for this position is the discussion over tuition fees, for which Socrates (Plato) criticizes the sophists and, implicitly, Isocrates. Eucken maintains that this debate shows most clearly the way schooling was regarded by Plato and, being critically opposed to the views of Isocrates, he argues – mistakenly in my view – that ‘Die Akademie wird so gesehen gegen Isocrates gegründet’.Footnote ³⁴ While we know that Isocrates charged tuition fees, like the sophists, it does not necessarily follow that Plato’s dialogue was directed solely against Isocrates and his practice. Be that as it may, stronger arguments of anti-Isocratean sentiments can perhaps be found in the knowledge versus belief discussion. This is developed in the first part of the dialogue in the exchange between Socrates and Gorgias. By having introduced a distinction between knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) and belief (πίστις), Gorgias is eventually forced to agree with the following definition of rhetoric (454e9–5a2): ἡ ῥητορικὴ ἄρα, ὡς ἔοικεν, πειθοῦς δημιουργός ἐστιν πιστευτικῆς ἀλλ᾽ οὐ διδασκαλικῆς περὶ τὸ δίκαιόν τε καὶ ἄδικον. Socrates, developing this line of thought further, demonstrates that Gorgias’ conception of rhetoric might end up having serious and contradictory moral implications. Gorgias, who advocated at the beginning of the dialogue a neutral concept of rhetoric (456c–7c), is forced to accept by the end of the discussion that ‘it is impossible for the rhetorician to use his rhetoric unjustly or wish to do wrong’ (461a5–7), thus admitting a contradiction to his views on rhetoric. What is relevant for the Isocratean context is the way in which Socrates develops the argument from the distinction between knowledge and belief into a question about the moral foundations of rhetoric.Footnote ³⁵ Isocrates would, however, insist that he would not be able to teach morally depraved students in the first place. Overall, his insistence on the moral aspects of his logoi seems strong enough to make us suspect that as much as the image of Gorgias might have been associated with that of Isocrates (through a potential teacher–student link), Isocrates could hardly have been conceived as the object of criticisms expressed in this passage.

Perhaps more than in previous passages, Isocrates has sometimes been associated with the views of Callicles at the later stages of the dialogue, where the latter argues that philosophy should be pursued only as a training of the young, but that grown men should abandon this and get involved with ‘real’ politics.Footnote ³⁶ There are some textual markers that indicate that reference is made indeed to a position rather close to the one advocated in the Euthydemus and having similarities with the way Isocrates fashions himself and is portrayed by his contemporaries.Footnote ³⁷ Callicles introduces the argument from nature and claims that laws are made in favor of the weak and for their protection against the strong (483b4–c2). Socrates would be able to understand this position if he would only abandon philosophy and pass to greater things (484c4–5). For ‘philosophy is a charming thing (χαρίεν) if a man has to do with it moderately (μετρίως) in his younger days; but if he continues to spend his time on it too long, it is ruin to any man’ (484c5–8). There are many verbal references here to the last part of the Euthydemus and therefore the connection to Isocrates – if indeed he is to be identified among the recipients of Socrates’ ‘mediocre thinker’ in that passage – springs immediately to mind. The description that follows this claim closely approximates the characterization of true philosophers in the Theaetetus section analyzed above, where Socrates mentioned elements that positively define the philosopher (ignorance of ‘worldly matters’, ridiculousness in private and public gatherings), but in this passage Callicles intends these features to be anything but complimentary to the profession. According to him, philosophizing in excess makes one ‘ignorant (ἄπειρον) of everything that ought to be familiar (ἔμπειρον)’ to a καλὸς κἀγαθός (484c9–d2): they are ignorant of the laws of their city, of the terms of negotiation in private and public affairs, of human pleasures and desires. As a consequence, this business of philosophy itself becomes ridiculous (καταγέλαστον, 485a7) and those practising it seem to Callicles most similar to those grown men who lisp and play tricks (ψελλιζόμενοι καὶ παίζοντες) like children (485b1–2). Both activities, philosophizing and playing, are acceptable as a stage in one’s educational training, but not appropriate in advanced age with increased responsibility and experience. Comparing philosophy to frivolous tricks also resembles the way in which Isocrates rejected theoretical philosophy as irrelevant and useless activity for example in his Helen (4–6). There is indeed a sense of anxiety about appearing ridiculous and useless that informs both Callicles’ and Isocrates’ views on what true philosophy ought to be about.

First off, however, Callicles is characterized as an aspiring as well as promising politician and not as a teacher or even a sophist proper.Footnote ³⁸ This is an important difference, for if indeed Plato intended his readers to recognize Isocrates in the figure of Callicles, the portrayal of Callicles as an active and vocal politician in this dialogue would make any such explicit link impossible.Footnote ³⁹ If anything, we might wonder whether Callicles could stand for a potential student of Isocrates rather than Isocrates himself.Footnote ⁴⁰ This is a tempting avenue for two reasons: first because of the overt similarity of some ideas presented by Callicles in the dialogue, and secondly because of the sympathy and respectful treatment Callicles receives from Socrates despite supporting positions completely opposed to him. Despite the emotional turmoil portrayed in the dialogue it is worth noting that Socrates maintains throughout a respectful tone to Callicles and considers him the best conversational partner due to his sufficient education, frankness and goodwill towards Socrates (487a–8b1). At the end of the dialogue, Socrates laments that they both have fallen far back in education (doing philosophy moderately evidently has important drawbacks). He then invites Callicles to abandon his previous guide to life and instead to join in with Socrates in the quest for proper understanding of justice and excellence in life and death (527e). Much as Socrates had shown goodwill and understanding towards Isocrates in the Phaedrus and, arguably also, in the Euthydemus, Callicles is depicted as a promising young person with potential to embark on the right path. Socrates’ criticism, among other matters, seems to be directed at the superficiality of his education and thought and, as such, we could read from their encounter an implicit criticism of any school that leaves education incomplete while giving its students an impression of having reached some level of maturity of thought. In other words, in comparison with his peers, Callicles stands out in a positive way as a somewhat educated and passionate conversation partner. However, his schooling has not been thorough enough to render him capable of following and fully participating in a philosophical discussion.

This may be a more general criticism of some philosophical schools at the time, though based on our knowledge of the various authors and educational institutions the only real candidate for this kind of criticism is the Isocratean school. Such a review that emphasizes both the positive and negative traits of an Isocratean education is in line with the way Plato’s Phaedrus and the Euthydemus engage with Isocrates and his influence in Athens. Unlike many commentators, therefore, I regard the portrayal of Isocrates in Plato to be rather positive though with important caveats. While Isocrates is to be applauded for turning young men to philosophy in a broad sense, for cultivating youth who would appreciate notions like virtue and tradition, justice and excellence, he is also to be criticized for the incomplete philosophical program offered in his school. In the end, despite some central disagreements between Plato and Isocrates on philosophical education, they probably share more in terms of their views of intellectual life than either of them does with some of the more radical sophists.

5.3 Isocrates and Aristotle

We can say frustratingly little with confidence about the relationship between Isocrates and Aristotle, despite the increasing scholarly interest in their interaction.Footnote ⁴¹ Isocrates himself makes no reference to Aristotle, but there are two works by Aristotle that seem to engage with Isocrates: the Protrepticus and the Rhetoric.Footnote ⁴² Looking at the portrayal of Isocrates in the latter is straightforward and requires no explanation, for Isocrates is mentioned there by name and is the most frequently quoted contemporary in the whole work. Seeing an Isocratean connection in the Protrepticus is more speculative and requires further comment. I will start with the Protrepticus as much as it has been taken to be the earlier of the two.