Isocrates and Civic Education

1. I, Socrates . . . The Performative Audacity of Isocrates’ Antidosis

ATHENS, in the fourth century b.c., was an interesting place for any number of reasons, and not least because of the fierce political debates among some of its most highly educated and highly articulate residents. Some of these debates were carried out in public and drew large audiences: the policy battles in the Ecclesia and the forensic contests in the people’s courts were treated by Athenian audiences of assemblymen, jurors, and spectators as at once important, enlightening, and amusing. What’s at Stake? The stakes in each major public confrontation between politicians of the likes of Demosthenes and Aeschines were high—most obviously, because of the weightiness of the decision that was being urged: war or peace, the disposition of public finance, the guilt or innocence of citizens accused of capital crimes, the disposition of public and private property. The stakes were raised even higher in that every major public confrontation was a chance for a public speaker to establish or elaborate upon his own reputation , and to undermine the reputation of his political opponents. Demosthenes seems to have made his name as a successful litigant and logographer before becoming known as a speaker in the assembly. The stakes were high, finally, because major speeches to large audiences were occasions for public deliberation on the core values that underpinned the democratic polity and the relationship of those values to practices, public and private: how individual Athenians acted and behaved in institutional contexts and in their everyday lives. 21 1 josiah ober I, Socrates . . . The Performative Audacity of Isocrates’ Antidosis Each major public address by an Athenian rhetor had at least three intertwined aspects: each was simultaneously about “decision” (what should we decide to do in the current case?), about “reputation” (what should you think about me and my opponents, now and in the future?), and about “civic norms” (how should we be conducting our public and private lives if we are to be true to our core values?). In posing these three questions, I have allowed the assumption that the “we” in question was well understood. Yet arguably there was a fourth aspect underlying these public discussions, the question of “our” identity. Who are “we,” really? And if “we” are not (yet) formed, how might “we” go about becoming our “true” selves? The problem of identity did not necessarily arise every day for each and every Athenian , but it was certainly a matter of intense concern for the members of Athens’ intellectual community. The intellectual debates that characterized fourth-century Athens were not limited to contests in the assembly and law courts fought by renowned public orators. Parallel to those public speech-contests and, in a sense yet to be determined, underpinning them, were debates among philosophers, by whom I mean all those who claimed the title philosophia for their own intellectual enterprises. As I have argued elsewhere,1 the Athenian “intellectual community” was diverse, fiercely competitive, and motivated by a common critical agenda. The big problems for Athenian intellectuals in the decades after 404 b.c. included: What and how to think in response to the evident success of democracy? How to express dissenting ideas? And how (or indeed whether) to move from critical speech to political action? The range of proposed answers to these hard questions was wide but not in- finitely so, and by mid-century the terms of the discussion and the competitive ground were pretty well established. Isocrates’ Antidosis speech is an especially skillful and complex intervention into the intellectual debates that flourished in mid-fourth-century Athens. The audacity of the speech, to which my title refers, emerges both in its ambition and its strategy. Isocrates’ ambition is a unification of contexts , a conflation of a public (in this case forensic) speech with its mass audience of ordinary citizens, and then with the conventions of the private, philosophical discourse associated within a closed elite, intellectual milieu. Isocrates sought to reconcile the aims of personal betterment of the superior individual (what we might call “soul-saving”) and the public good (or “polis-saving”). He sought to conjoin the ends of the just polis with the integral soul and thereby allow for a politics that was at once personal and josiah ober 22 public, leadership that was at once beneficial and legitimate. The presumed desirability and profound difficulty of that equation between self and state had provided much...