Twenty-one Speeches or Discourses, and nine Letters, are extant under the name of Isokrates. All these are probably genuine. Nor is any lost work, except the ‘Art of Rhetoric,’ known from a definite citation. Suidas speaks of thirty-two discourses. In the Plutarchic Life, the number given is sixty,—of which only twenty-eight were allowed as genuine by Caecilius and only twenty-five by Dionysios. Photios knew only twenty-one. Dionysios, the strictest, may be taken as also the best canon. If it may be assumed that his collection included ours, we have all but four of those compositions which he thought genuine.

Text

The text of our collection is tolerably perfect. The only gaps of any importance are at the end of Oration xm (Against the Sophists); at the beginning of Oration xvi (‘De Bigis’); and probably at the end of Letters i, vi and ix.

Jerome Wolf's classification

The writings of Isokrates are arranged differently in different MSS. The order followed in most modern editions is not that of any one manuscript, but that which was adopted, for the sake of convenience, by Jerome Wolf. His arrangement aims at a fourfold distribution:—