Isocrates and Civic Education

4. Logos and Power in Sophistical and Isocratean Rhetoric

JOHN POULAKOS has stressed the historical and situational discontinuity between sophistical and Isocratean visions of rhetoric. As he has pointed out, the difference between Gorgias’ and Isocrates’ terms for logos —dunastēs versus hēgemōn—indicates radically divergent perspectives on the relationship between rhetoric and power. Gorgias exposes logos in its untamed arbitrariness that is akin to a tyrant’s lack of accountability and direction in dealing out favors and punishments (Helen 8). By construing logos as hegemonic, Isocrates, in contrast, creates an image of a civilized force, at once a principle of social unification and a mechanism through which this unification is achieved (Antidosis 253–257, Nicocles 5–9). According to Professor Poulakos, Gorgias’ metaphor of dunastēs designates a constant agonistic struggle of discourses to topple each other—a situation Poulakos ascribes to the Athenian democracy during the blossoming of the sophistic movement. Isocrates’ preoccupation with panhellenism and his distinct vision of hegemonic rhetoric are responses to the strife and cultural disintegration in the wake of the Peloponnesian War and the peace treaties of the fourth century b.c. Professor Poulakos declines, however, to choose between the Sophists1 and Isocrates. I take this strategic indecision as an invitation to join a debate about the legacy of sophistical and Isocratean rhetorical education. In recent years, an impressive group of scholars has attempted to reread the Sophists in order to find a more pluralistic conception of discourse and power than the one yielded by traditional histories of rhetoric.2 By contrast, the bulk of interpretations of the Isocratean corpus gives us a portrait of rhetoric that is monologic and elitist at best, intolerant and reactionary at worst.3 The Sophists now appear as nomadic intellectuals, eternally playful and irrever84 4 ekater ina haskins Logos and Power in Sophistical and Isocratean Rhetoric ent towards any social order. Isocrates emerges as a pedantic political strategist , forever disdainful of social change. Sophistical logos, as now conceived, tends toward decentralization of cultural and political power, while Isocratean logos tends towards its consolidation. As John Poulakos summarizes in his contribution to the symposium, “Sophistical rhetoric was centrifugal, the rhetoric of Isocrates centripetal.” In what follows, I hope to complicate this dialectic by demonstrating the ambivalent social potential of both sophistical and Isocratean rhetoric. I contend that Gorgias, as a representative of the first generation of Sophists, and Isocrates, as a self-proclaimed opponent of fourth-century Sophists, offer us two distinct—but not antithetical—ways of dealing with our own cultural and political situation: playful iconoclasm versus political responsibility. I show how these attitudes emerge not only in response to situational exigencies , as Professor Poulakos has described, but as strategic appropriations of the mythopoetic tradition: the common discursive fabric of the Greek culture. In the final section I speculate on how Isocrates’ use of the past, both historical and mythical, might be reinterpreted in the context of today’s problems of humanistic education and democratic politics. Between Alētheia and Doxa: Gorgias’ Playful Criticism of Myth Before I turn to Gorgias and Isocrates, let me clarify the terms “centrifugal” and “centripetal” with respect to their application to linguistic practices in the fifth- and fourth-century Greek culture. These terms were used originally by Mikhail Bakhtin in reference to two forces—centralizing and decentralizing —within any living language that has achieved a certain degree of national identity, such as European languages in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Centripetal and centrifugal forces produce linguistic stratification , or heteroglossia. Heteroglossia’s “official” literary genres—poetry, epic, discourse of the church—occupy the top of the socioideological ladder, while the unofficial languages—street songs, folk sayings, anecdotes— swirl at the bottom and ridicule the “high” discourses of monks, poets, and scholars (Bakhtin 1981: 272–273). “High” discourses are practiced by literate elites, while the “low” genres belong to the oral culture of the marketplace with its “stages of local fairs and . . . buffoon spectacles” (273). Given the nomadic character of sophistical education on the one hand and its ties to the oral culture and the literate and institutional nature of Logos and Power in Sophistical and Isocratean Rhetoric 85 Isocrates’ practice on the other, it is tempting to apply the logic of Bakhtin’s analysis of the cultures of medieval Europe to linguistic practices in classical Greece. Yet the same contrast between unofficial oral genres and established literary forms is not...