Isocrates II

INTRODUCTION TO ISOCRATES, VOLUME II

G&S Typesetters PDF proof INTRODUCTION TO ISOCRATES, VOLUME II 1 See Too in Mirhady and Too 2000: 137. 2 For the seminal statement of the concept of the “rhetorical situation,” see Bitzer 1968; cf. Papillon 1998b: 2–3, 113–116. This volume contains the six discourses of Isocrates not treated in Isocrates I of this series, and all the letters. If the second section of Isocrates I shows Isocrates as a teacher,1 then we could say that the discourses in this volume demonstrate how Isocrates uses his ideas on education and public discourse to address situations affecting the city or polis. Thus, they might be called Isocrates’ political works. All of them—and we can include the letters in this—demonstrate his ability to present ideas called forth by a given political and rhetorical situation .2 Three discourses, Panathenaicus, On the Peace, and the most famous, Panegyricus, focus on Isocrates’ home city of Athens; other discourses focus on other cities: Archidamus is in the voice of the Spartan prince to his assembly; Plataicus is in the voice of a citizen of Plataea asking Athens for aid; the discourse To Philip is Isocrates, in propria persona, calling on Philip of Macedon to lead a unified Greece against Persia. Two speeches,Panathenaicus andPanegyricus, represent what Greek rhetorical theory called epideictic or display oratory, where the speaker addresses a public gathering to offer praise, in these instances praise of the city. The other four, To Philip, Archidamus, On the Peace, and Plataicus , represent deliberative rhetoric, the rhetoric of the Assembly considering issues of interest to the city and its future. In fact, how00 -T2896-INT 3/31/04 2:09 PM Page 15 G&S Typesetters PDF proof 16 isocrates ii ever, Isocrates did not deliver any of these in public; all were pamphlets written and circulated to interested parties. We do not even know if they actually addressed the specific situation . To take one example, we do not know if the discourse To Philip was ever actually sent to Philip. It may have been sent to him at the dramatic date of the discourse, 346, or it may have been written at that time or later as a sample speech for Isocrates’ students. This is generally true of all the discourses included in this volume: we do not know if they were written at the time claimed and if they were sent to the party interested (or written for the person speaking, as in the case of Archidamus or Plataicus). But even if they are fictionalized presentations , Isocrates carefully set these discourses into the appropriate time to address the given situation, and thus they can tell us much about the political realities of the periods represented as well as Isocrates’ notion of what it means to be an active citizen. The dramatic date of each discourse is thus quite important because each speech reacts to a specific situation. Panegyricus represents Isocrates’ celebration of the greatness of Athens at a time, 380, when Greek politics was complicated by competition between cities and the intervention of the Great King of Persia. Isocrates presents one of his main ideas in this speech, and one of the central ideas of his career: the need for Greece to unite in a panhellenic campaign against Persia. The speech celebrates Athens at a public gathering, but it must also recognize that Sparta led Greece at the time. Isocrates thus celebrates the past of Athens and argues for a joint leadership for Greece between Athens and Sparta. This is perhaps Isocrates’ most famous and most carefully constructed speech, dealing effectively with the political and rhetorical realities of the period while lifting up the greatness of Athens and its culture. Panathenaicus is similar—it too celebrates the greatness of Athens in a public assembly—but it is among the last of Isocrates’ works, completed when he was 98, and shows signs of lack of care and weakness even while it presents the glory of Athens at the very end of Greek freedom in 338. Yet it has its own points of interest, such as the discussion he reports with a former pupil about compositional technique. In both Plataicus and Archidamus, Isocrates writes in the voice of another. It is common enough in Greek oratory for a speechwriter, 00-T2896-INT 3/31/04 2:09 PM Page 16 G&S Typesetters PDF proof introduction to volume ii 17 3 So...