Isocrates I

Introduction to Part Two

INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO The speeches contained in Part Two, Evagoras (9), To Nicocles (2), Nicocles (3), Areopagiticus (7), and Antidosis (15), are texts that characterize Isocrates as teacher. Together these five speeches show that ‘‘teacher’’ in classical Athens need not mean ‘‘sophist,’’ the figure caricatured in Aristophanes’ Clouds and in the dialogues of Plato as the unscrupulous charlatan who makes promises and then disappoints and charges enormous fees for his lectures and displays. Isocrates’ pedagogical identity demonstrates that rhetorical teaching—teaching that is articulated in rhetorical texts—may be an important mode of political activity, albeit one that is quite distinct from the contemporary political scene as conducted through litigation and sykophancy. Teaching is a responsible act, ensuring that rulers and ruled know their obligations to each other and to their community, that the community knows its origins and authority, and that it realizes the debt owed to the culture of speech and its practitioners. The first three are the corpus’ Cyprian speeches.1 They testify to Isocrates’ didactic project as one that concerns itself with teaching not 1 For this grouping of the three texts, see Forster 1912. Usher (1990: 6) suggests that Isocrates may have become acquainted with Evagoras through Timotheus,the son of Conon. It seems probable that when Evagoras and Conon became political allies (see 9.51–57), the former took on Isocrates as his son’s teacher. There is a fourth Cyprian speech,To Demonicus (1), included in the Isocratean corpus (translated in Part One, above). Its authenticity, however, has been doubted by scholars for the reason that it lacks originality, although the conventionality of its material might be understood as an appeal to traditional wisdom and knowledge; see Too 1995: 58 n. 53. just private citizens but also orators, generals, kings, and monarchs (from whom he received great wealth) to appreciate, protect, and further Greek, and particularly Athenian, interests (see 15.30). Evagoras and To Nicocles concern the instruction of a ruler; here Isocrates uses encomium and gnomic sayings in advising Nicocles on how to rule. In the third work,Nicocles, Isocrates treats the obligations of the ruler’s subjects; he assumes the speaking voice of the king, perhaps to make the point that the former pupil (see 15.40 –41, 67–72) has assimilated his teacher’s voice.2 Together the three Cyprian speeches suggest that ideally authority in the ancient Greek world is knowing both how to rule and how to be ruled (cf. Arist., Politics 1277a25–29).3 The two longer speeches, Areopagiticus and Antidosis, characterize their author specifically as the teacher of Athens. Both of these works place in the forefront Isocrates’ conservative ideology to a greater or lesser extent, offering Athens’ past as a corrective paradigm for a present that is morally and politically chaotic. Areopagiticus is a speech that offers a historical lesson in the virtues of Athens’ ancestral constitution and its institutions, above all the Areopagus Court. The institution ensured that young men were socialized in the responsibilities and values of a historical democratic community that are now sorely lacking in contemporary Athens, and the speech instructs in how the Court’s restoration might be to the city’s advantage. Isocrates’ longest speech, speech 15, also offers the author’s most extended lesson. TheAntidosis takes the form of a legal defense to offer its audience instruction in the value of philosophy, that is, the culture of discourse, for the community. Its teaching concerns the service provided by the culture of speech (logos), not rhetoric as currently practiced in the lawcourts and Assembly but as enacted by Athens’ great historical leaders, Solon, Pericles, Themistocles, and implicitly, their direct descendant, Isocrates himself. It is a speech that asks its Athenian audience to give the credit for who they are as a community to logos and to the responsible teachers of logos. 138 isocrates i 2 See Livingstone 1998: esp. 270 –280. 3 To Nicocles and Nicocles are especially significant texts in the history of education . In the Renaissance, they were translated into Latin, English, French, and German as paradigms for the genre known as the ‘‘instruction of princes.’’ See Highet 1949: 122–123 and also Tatum 1989: 5–6. ...