Isocrates was born in Athens in 436 BC and died in 338, just after the battle of Chaeronea, so his life ran across almost a whole century.1 He is counted among the ten Attic orators, the canon of the great speakers of Athens,2 and yet he hardly ever spoke in public: he was a writer of speeches meant to be read.1
A shy man with a weak voice
His father, Theodorus, owned slaves who made flutes, and earned enough from them to pay for a public chorus and to give his sons a good education. The Lives of the Ten Orators, which came down among Plutarch's works, says the boy heard the famous teachers of his day, among them Prodicus, Gorgias and Tisias.3 Modern scholars handle such stories with care, since the ancient lives of Isocrates are late compilations that mix gossip with fact.1 The family fortune was lost in the Peloponnesian War: Isocrates himself speaks of having lost in it “the patrimony which remained to me”.4
What kept him out of politics, he says, was his own nature. In the Panathenaicus, written in extreme old age, he complains that he was born more lacking than any other Athenian in «φωνῆς ἱκανῆς καὶ τόλμης», “a strong voice and ready assurance”, the two things with the greatest power in Athens.5 He told Philip of Macedon the same: “I was not given a strong enough voice nor sufficient assurance to enable me to deal with the mob”.6 The Lives adds that he used to say he charged ten minas for his teaching but would give ten thousand to anyone who could teach him self-confidence and a pleasant voice. Asked how he could make others good speakers when he was not one himself, he answered that “whetstones cannot themselves cut, but make iron fit to do so”.3
Speech-writer and teacher
He began by writing speeches for other men to deliver in the law courts, where every citizen had to plead his own case.1 Six of these court speeches survive, from the years between about 403 and 393 BC.7 Later he preferred to forget them. His adopted son Aphareus even claimed he had written nothing for the courts, while Aristotle, as Dionysius of Halicarnassus reports, said the booksellers carried round «δέσμας πάνυ πολλὰς δικανικῶν λόγων Ἰσοκρατείων», “very many bundles of court speeches by Isocrates” (our translation). Dionysius took the word of a pupil, Cephisodorus: there were some, but not many.8
About 392 BC, in his forties, he opened a school near the Lyceum.1,7 Debated among scholars The Lives reports that, as some said, he first taught on the island of Chios, with nine pupils;3 some scholars accept the Chios school, others think it very doubtful.1 The Athenian school made him famous and rich. His pupils, the Lives says, numbered about a hundred, among them the general Timotheus and the historians Theopompus and Ephorus;3 the orators Isaeus, Lycurgus and Hypereides are also named among them.1 Three centuries later Cicero wrote that out of his school, as out of the Trojan horse, came “nothing but leaders” (our translation).9
Debated among scholars Plato, who was seven years younger,3 ends his dialogue Phaedrus with a prophecy about him. Phaedrus asks about “the fair Isocrates”, and Socrates answers: «φύσει γάρ, ὦ φίλε, ἔνεστί τις φιλοσοφία τῇ τοῦ ἀνδρὸς διανοίᾳ», “for my friend, something of philosophy is inborn in his mind.”10 The conversation is imagined as taking place about 410 BC, when Isocrates was still young.7 Whether Plato meant the praise is argued: some scholars have read it as sarcasm.2
Philosophy, his way
Isocrates called what he taught φιλοσοφία, philosophy, but he did not mean Plato's search for exact knowledge. He meant a broad practical culture, learnt through writing and speaking well, for a life of public service.2,7 He set out his programme in Against the Sophists, written about 390 BC as his school opened.7 Talent comes first: ability “is found in those who are well endowed by nature and have been schooled by practical experience”, and teaching can only sharpen it.11 Late in life, in the Antidosis, he defined the wise man without claiming certainty. Since no one can know exactly what to do or say, “I hold that man to be wise who is able by his powers of conjecture to arrive generally at the best course”.12
One Greece against Persia
His great political cause was the union of the Greeks. In the Panegyricus, published in 380 BC,1,7 he comes forward «συμβουλεύσων περί τε τοῦ πολέμου τοῦ πρὸς τοὺς βαρβάρους καὶ τῆς ὁμονοίας τῆς πρὸς ἡμᾶς αὐτούς», “to give my counsels on the war against the barbarians and on concord among ourselves”.13 Its name comes from the festival gatherings of the Greeks: it was probably given to the public in copies circulated at the Olympic festival.7 The Lives says he spent ten years on it, or fifteen;3 Norlin thought this “no doubt merely an exaggeration” of the fact that he wrote slowly and with infinite pains.1 One sentence in it is still quoted: Athens, he says, has made «τὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ὄνομα πεποίηκε μηκέτι τοῦ γένους ἀλλὰ τῆς διανοίας δοκεῖν εἶναι», “the name Hellenes suggests no longer a race but an intelligence”.14
The cities would not unite, so he looked for one strong man to lead them, Archidamus of Sparta, perhaps Dionysius I of Syracuse (Norlin doubted that he ever asked Dionysius to lead the war), and at last, in To Philip (346 BC), Philip of Macedon.1,2,7 Nearer home, On the Peace and the Areopagiticus (both 355 BC) urged Athens to give up her empire at sea and to bring back the stricter ways of the old democracy.7
The old man at his desk
His old age was astonishingly busy. The Antidosis grew out of a real lawsuit: called on to pay for a warship, he was challenged to an “exchange of property” (antidosis), lost, and paid the cost.7,15 Then he imagined himself on trial and wrote a defence of his whole career, “a true image of my thought and of my whole life”, at the age, he says, of «ἔτη γεγονὼς δύο καὶ ὀγδοήκοντα», eighty-two;15 that is, in 354–353 BC.16
He began the Panathenaicus, in praise of Athens, at ninety-four.5,16 When it was half written he fell ill with a disease “which it is not decorous to name”, and fought it for three years. Friends begged him to finish, and he did, though he “lacked but three years of having lived a century”.5,17 It was published in 339 BC,16 or perhaps in 338, shortly before his death.22
The long sentence
Isocrates built his prose in long periodic sentences, sometimes a page long, in which clause is balanced against clause, and he took great care to avoid hiatus, a vowel at the end of one word meeting a vowel at the start of the next.1 In the Panathenaicus he describes the speeches of his younger days as rich in «ἀντιθέσεων καὶ παρισώσεων», “contrasted and balanced phrases”, devices he says he gave up in old age.5 Dionysius of Halicarnassus noticed how he avoided «φωνηέντων τὰς παραλλήλους θέσεις», “vowels set side by side”, and judged that his style is «ἀναγνώσεώς τε μᾶλλον οἰκειότερός ἐστιν ἢ χρήσεως», “better suited to reading than to real use” (our translation).18
Through Cicero his rhythmical sentence passed into Latin, and through Latin into the prose of modern Europe.1,7 In the Renaissance his advice to kings was popular: translations of To Nicocles were given to rulers, and Elizabeth I read Isocrates with her tutor Roger Ascham.2
How he died
Ancient tradition / legend The famous story is that Isocrates heard the news of Chaeronea in a wrestling school, recited the opening lines of three plays of Euripides, and starved himself to death, «οὐχ ὑπομείνας τετράκις ἰδεῖν τὴν Ἑλλάδα καταδουλουμένην», “for he could not endure the sight of Greece enslaved four times”. Some said he died on the fourth day, others on the ninth.3 Dionysius gives a different motive: he chose «ἅμα τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς τῆς πόλεως συγκαταλῦσαι τὸν ἑαυτοῦ βίον», “to end his own life together with the good fortunes of the city”, a few days after the battle and at ninety-eight, “while it was still unclear how Philip would use his fortune” (our translation).19 John Milton made the story famous in English: Chaeronea “Kil'd with report that Old man eloquent”.20
Debated among scholars Modern scholars doubt it. A letter to Philip under his name, written after the battle, urges him on to the war with Persia: once he has made the Great King obey, “then will naught be left for you except to become a god.”21 Norlin called the suicide a fable and the letter generally accepted as genuine; Jebb thought that the natural death of an invalid of ninety-eight could easily have bred the legend; and some scholars doubt the letter itself.1,2,7