Rhetoric, Isocrates’

Complicating Factors for Researchers

The first complicating factor that a researcher must confront is that although Isocrates has, ever since the canon was established in Late Antiquity, been considered one of the ten Attic orators, he seems never to have given a speech in public. Isocrates himself says in several places (e.g., To Philip 81; Panathenaicus 10; Letter to Dionysius 9; Letter to the Rulers of the Mytilenaeans 7) that he lacked the powerful voice and the boldness of spirit that would have been necessary to speak directly to the Athenian polity. Most of his surviving discourses, however, use the generic features—such things as direct speech, formulae, and conventional speech parts—that we find in the texts of speeches delivered to a present audience. In addition to the discourses written in the form of speeches, Isocrates also composed letters and expository manifestoes intended to influence his polity. Whether they use the forms of speeches or not, it must always be remembered that Isocrates’ works are written works, carefully composed at leisure and intended for a literate audience of careful readers.

A second complication is the fact that although Isocrates is increasingly seen as a major contributor to the development of rhetorical theory, we have no unitary explication of his program, either in his own words or the testimonia of others. Though there is some evidence that Isocrates wrote a rhetorical treatise (e.g., Cicero, De Inventione 2.2.7; Anonymous Life 12; Philodemus, Rhetoric 2. 122), if it ever existed it has not survived. Therefore, what Isocratean rhetorical doctrine can be recovered can only be abstracted from discourses not intended to describe his technical theory but to advance other purposes. Furthermore, because Isocrates very vigorously attacked the sophistic technai of his era some interpreters argue that Isocrates represented an antitechnical approach to rhetoric. As a result, accounts of Isocratean theory sometimes come under a cloud of suspicion.

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