Isocrates in Athens: Public philosophy and the rhetoric of display

My subject is the attempt of the writer and educator Isocrates to advance his vision of public philosophy in fourth-century Athens, a task which set him at odds with the egalitarianism of democrats as well as the elitism of his fellow intellectuals, especially Plato. To trace the fine line Isocrates walks between these two extremes, I pay particular attention to his use of the rhetoric of "display" or epideictic. Like philosophy, epideictic was marginal to Athenian public discourse and could be regarded as either essential or threatening to the fabric of society; accordingly it came in two broad varieties: "civic" epideictic, which addressed the city directly, and "sophistic" epideictic, which addressed a more exclusive audience of students and peers.;These two varieties of epideictic are juxtaposed in Isocrates' Panathenaicus, which begins with a panegyric of Athens and ends with a critical discussion, in which an interlocutor interprets the earlier speech as communicating secret meanings to those with the "philosophical" acuity to detect them. I argue in Chapter One that Isocrates' gentle dismissal of this interpretation signals the basic compatibility of his philosophy, irony and all, with the city's ethical discourse. In Chapter Two I contrast Isocrates' ethical moderation with the positions articulated in Plato's Gorgias . From Isocrates' perspective, Socrates' categorical rejection of "greed" (pleonexia) is as unhelpful as the rhetoricians' embrace of it, since both extremes preclude a forthright participation in politics.;I next interpret Isocrates' Antidosis as marking out the relation between two distinct but overlapping cultures of "philotimia (love of honor) for speaking well": a public one (Chapter Three), essential to sustaining civic discourse, and a more exclusive one (Chapter Four), centered around the philosopher's lessons. That Isocrates' written speeches, though associated with the latter, more "sophistic" setting, nevertheless retain the public as their imagined (and to some extent real) audience, signals the priority of "civic" philotimia for Isocrates. By contrast Plato's Phaedrus, whose Isocratean subtext I examine in Chapter Five, largely confines to the philosopher's circle the socially integrative effects associated with Isocrates' "civic" epideictic, and makes the search for knowledge through dialectic their essential source.