Isocrates and Civic Education

6. The Education of Athens: Politics and Rhetoric in Isocrates and Plato

Introduction AS THE new millennium opens, Isocrates seems primed to become an intellectual hero and promoter of a specifically democratic rhetoric and education .1 A recent commentator notes that “It is quite possible to see Isocrates ’ mild skepticism as an important humanist voice, a persistence of that liberal, nondogmatic strain of sophistry that conceived of study as being directed ‘not at art but at education.’” The same critic writes of Isocrates’ “resistance to theory” and his attempt to distance himself from dialectic and “overly regulated speech.”2 A model educator indeed. It seems that we are asked to place Isocrates and democracy on one end of a pendulum swing and Plato and the idealists on the other. The first goal of the present paper is to assert that this is an oversimplification. Rather than trapping ourselves into binary oppositions, I suggest a more nuanced approach wherein Isocrates occupies a middle ground between Athenian populist education and the rigors and exclusions of Plato. He attempts to construct a practice of education and politics that valorizes democratic deliberative practice (although democracy is conceived in a particularly Isocratean way) while remaining intellectually “respectable.” Isocrates uses a panhellenic perspective as a tool for imposing his own version of educational culture. In order to understand Isocrates’ vision we have to understand the culture out of which it arises and the rivals it seeks to dethrone. Only by examining the tense play between competing educational models will we fathom the peculiarities, incoherencies, and achievements of the Isocratean model. Isocrates’ civic/political education is a rhetorical education. Isocrates constructs his model by identifying political and rhetorical excellence. He wants to elevate his Athenian audience to the level of philosophoi by making them apply, in particular, a prin125 6 kathryn morgan The Education of Athens: Politics and Rhetoric in Isocrates and Plato ciple of intellectual consistency to their lives. Although Isocrates resists strict rhetorical theory, then, his works do not lack a guiding intellectual principle. Consistency begins within the soul, where it monitors individual behavior . In the civic arena, the same principle must ensure a coherent polity, and ultimately, at the panhellenic level, it should govern the entire Greek community. Isocratean philosophia therefore rejects the Platonic model wherein a democracy is incapable of rationality and orderly deliberation. Yet his intellectual model also turns its back on current Athenian political practice, which he considers inconsistent and self-centered. Athens’ neglect of broader panhellenic issues threatens to undermine Athenian achievements and preeminence in the larger Greek community. Isocrates thus sees himself and his civic education as mediating between empty intellectualism and hedonistic ochlocracy, mob rule. Since Isocrates implies that there should be a seamless continuum between psychic, civic, and panhellenic behavior, his model for civic and rhetorical education is also a model for life. It is a totalizing educational approach to the life of the citizen within the polis and is therefore a powerful intellectual tool. One might well elevate such an approach as a model for democratic deliberation. Nevertheless, this Isocratean project ultimately runs aground on its own intellectual standards. Isocrates’ works exhibit rhetorical and intellectual diffusion and inconsistency. In what follows, I shall argue that to make this assertion is not to take part in a long tradition of Isocrates-bashing (since I think that Isocrates’ sophistication is often underestimated ) but to uncover an endemic tension in democratic education and rhetoric. Isocrates’ orations are both individual arguments set in a historical context and rhetorical models meant to be emulated by his students. Pedagogy demands that a variety of approaches and possibilities be canvassed in a paradigmatic text. Argument requires focus and consistency. Also crucial is the very nature of Athenian rhetorical culture, which emphasizes and rewards opportunism. Isocrates desires to reform the democracy and attempts to do so by using all the refinements of Athenian rhetoric, but he underestimates the extent to which his tools influence his content. The genius and strength of the democracy and of democratic rhetoric are their opportunism and consequent possibility for inconsistency. Like any system, this one has the defects of its virtues.3 If Isocrates wants the democracy to be less capricious and opportunistic, his means for achieving this end are unfortunate. kathryn morgan 126 The body of this paper has three parts. In the first, I examine the competing traditions of civic paideia in fourth-century Athens. We shall see that Isocrates constructs for the...