Isocrates

436-338 BCE · Greek (Athenian) · Rhetorical Education, Panhellenism, Epideictic Oratory, Political Discourse

The power to speak well is the surest index of a sound understanding.

Isocrates ran the most successful school in Athens for something like fifty years, taught much of the next generation's political class, and never once delivered a speech in public. His voice was too weak and his nerve, by his own account, worse. So he wrote — orations composed to be read, pamphlets in the shape of speeches, and in doing so he invented the discursive essay as a form of political argument.

Topics Isocrates addresses

• philosophia as practical wisdom
• doxa against episteme
• logos as the ground of civilization
• the written oration
• Panhellenism
• homonoia
• the war against Persia
• the ancestral constitution
• the Areopagus
• advice to princes
• paideia
• against the sophists
• the eristics
• the Antidosis
• the periodic style
• the avoidance of hiatus
• the discursive essay
• moral formation through subject matter
• kairos
• the Athenian empire and its critics
• the Panegyricus
• To Philip
• education as the work of a lifetime
• imitation of models

Converse with Isocrates on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Isocrates's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.