Eidos/idea in Isocrates

For modern readers, the career and literary output of the Attic rhetorician Isocrates is uncomfortably situated at the boundary between what we conceive as technical rhetoric and professional philosophy. Much of this confusion may be due to Isocrates' famous description of his program as being a philosophia (Panegyricus 10, 47; Evagoras 8, 81; Panathenaicus 9; Against the Sophists 1, 11-18, 21; Antidosis 30, 42-50, 162, 176, 181-92).¹ Over the years, the issue has exercised a large number of scholars who have tried to specify what Isocrates meant by the term and what matters he considered to be within his purview.² Recently, the idea has been advanced that Isocrates and Plato consciously struggled over the use of the term (Nehamas 1990, 4; Timmerman 1998, 145). In Nehamas's very useful formulation, Isocrates thought philosophy to be "the ability to speak well, which in turn reflects and is the product of thinking well and shrewdly about practical affairs" (1990, 4). Timmerman's review of the relevant literature shows how Isocrates' conflation of philosophia and hê tôn logôn paideia has hurt his reputation among modern disciplinary philosophers: "This confusion and resultant devaluation of Isocrates' philosophy is predicated on a platonically colored view of what constitutes philosophy" (1998, 147). More recently, others have made efforts to recover Isocrates for philosophy by concentrating on those parts of his program that are of interest to philosophers of our era.³

As a result, there has been a long-standing critical misapprehension regarding how best to interpret his works. Simply put, a question arises as to whether we should interpret them as being, in broad feature, philosophical works delivered by means of rhetorical vehicles or whether we should imagine Isocrates' program as being more centrally concerned with matters of technical rhetoric, granting, of course, that philosophical, or at least ethical, subject matters appear often in his discourses.⁴

One register of this tendency can be found in the decisions recent translators have made in regards to the meaning of key terms of the Isocratean vocabulary. This can be most clearly seen in critical treatments of the word idea. Though it has long been understood that the word idea is an important term in the Isocratean rhetorical vocabulary, there remains widespread disagreement on its meaning. Systematic studies of the term have yielded greatly varying results.⁵ Some scholars have argued that the term is not a rhetorical reference, others that idea in the larger number of uses references the materia of speech rather than matters of composition (Schlatter 1972, Lidov 1983). I examine the nineteen uses of the word idea in Isocrates' discourses, as well as the four uses of its synonym eidos, in an attempt to determine more closely whether, and how, these terms might function in the Isocratên vocabulary.

We can begin with a bit about the words themselves. Hê idea and to eidos are, respectively, feminine and neuter nouns derived from different moods of the same verb, eidon, meaning "to see." So, both hê idea and to eidos express a range of concepts that can be gathered under the rubric of "things that can be perceived" or "the outward features of a thing." The meanings of these words are notoriously Protean. You will find translations of either term as "form," "shape," "figure," as well as metaphorical extensions such as, "type," "kind," "class," "species," and the like. And, of course, in Plato and later philosophical terminology, they are employed as the vocabulary by which the concept of 'form' is expressed.

Isocrates used both terms with a fair regularity throughout his career (Preuss 1963). Eidos is used four times in the corpus, twice in Antidosis, once in Against the Sophists, and once in Evagoras. Idea is used nineteen times; the word occurs four times in Helen and four times in Antidosis; twice in Panathenaicus, twice in To Nicocles, and twice in Nicocles; and once in Panegyricus, once in To Philip, once in Busiris, once in Against the Sophists, and once in The Letter to the Children of Jason. Every use in Isocrates conforms, as one would expect, to some...