The Genuine Teachers of This Art: Rhetorical Education in Antiquity

Three: On the Technê of Isocrates (II)

THREE | On the Technê of Isocrates (II) The student must learn the forms [eidê] of discourse and become practiced in their uses, while the teacher must explain them as thoroughly as possible, so as to leave out nothing that can be taught. Isocrates, Against the Sophists 17 What Would It Contain? This chapter is admittedly speculative, or, if you will, an exercise in probabilistic conjecture. I propose to consider what the Technê of Isocrates may have contained .The main sources of evidence are, on one hand, scattered testimonies by other writers and,on the other,the fragments and traces of preceptive technê that appear in Isocrates’ extant writings.The Rhetoric to Alexander, moreover, emerges as a fairly good index to the contents of the Isocratean technê, and indeed is probably based on it, as Pierre Chiron has recently suggested.1 I will proceed according to the division between “preliminary exercises” (progumnasmata) and declamation (meletê, “practice”) and the main divisions that Dionysius of Halicarnassus has attributed to the Isocratean technê: the pragmatikos topos and the lektikos topos. Prolegomenon: Philosophical Justifications and Definitions If a technê has a “foreword,” it is usually brief, and it is sometimes in the form of a letter to a supposed recipient. It typically provides some general definition of the art, extols its value, and lays out a few basic concepts.The “letter from Aristotle to Alexander” that now prefaces the Rhetoric to Alexander is generally considered a “forgery” (an ethopoiea) that was added to the text when it was assimilated into the Aristotelian corpus, probably in the second century c.e.2 But the “letter” easily could have incorporated material from the original prolegomenon , if there was one, while changing the speaker and addressee.There certainly isn’t much about it that seems especially Aristotelian. It begins with an encomium of logos, and of the art of politikos logos as “the mother-city itself of good deliberation” (tên mêtropolin autên tou kalôs bouleuesthai; 1420a–1421a), and 92 | The Genuine Teachers of This Art follows this, in language reminiscent of Isocrates, with an exhortation to “hold fast to the philosophy of logos”(tês tôn logôn antechesthai philosophias).It ends with an injunction to keep the technê private lest “the Parian sophists” plagiarize it (1421a) and a note on the technê’s sources in the teachings of “Nicanor,” the author’s earlier writeup forTheodectes,and the rhetoric of Corax (1421b).Such material, especially the encomium and the exhortation, reflects the sort of thing that might be said in a sophist’s opening lecture to his newly admitted students or in a preliminary interview. Perhaps the Technê of Isocrates would have been prefaced in some such way as well. I am not going to go deeply here into the “philosophy of rhetoric” that would have been broached in Isocrates’ prolegomenon, essentially because much has been said already, not only in the preceding chapter but also in the scholarship on Isocrates in general. Indeed, Isocrates’ notions of philosophia and logôn paideia, and his beliefs regarding practical wisdom, civic virtue, civic education ,politics,language,epistemology,and the role of eloquence in human culture ,have been the predominant concerns of much of the published scholarship, especially the more recent scholarship.3 Yet these matters of general philosophy would have been the concerns of only part of his prolegomenon, perhaps a few pages, and would have taken up little more than the first day or two in a threeto four-year course of study—although, of course, such matters would recur in the students’ exercises. Isocrates’ paideia was meant to cultivate the student’s capacities through repeated practical experiences (empeiria) over a period of years, not through the narration of a doctrine. The prolegomenon could well have begun with something like the oft-cited “encomium of logos” that appears in Nicocles (5–9, c. 370 b.c.e.) and is repeated verbatim in Antidosis (253–257, c. 354). It is conceivable that in both cases the passage has been lifted from Isocrates’ technê: they have the feel of something patched in from somewhere else, as a set commonplace. Possibly they represent an update of an earlier version that seems to be reflected in Panegyricus (47–50, c. 380). In both the Panegyricus version and the Nicocles/Antidosis version, logos is portrayed as the distinctive human endowment and “the cause of the greatest blessings” (pleistôn agathôn aition; Antidosis 253) because through...