Isocrates and the Epicureans

Abstract

Any study of ancient rhetoric has sooner or later to take account of Isocrates and the influence exerted by him, not only on the technical study of rhetoric, but also on the style of much of later Greek literature. This influence is most noticeable in the first century before our era in the revival of Atticism. The theorists of that period were not content to study the style of Isocrates in the attempt to restore the classic purity to the debased Greek tongue, but found in him a model teacher of rhetoric, one who combined with instruction in the technicalities of speaking a study of the social and political relations of man, the whole being infused with a breadth of view and seriousness of purpose which made it not unworthy the name philosophy. Thus the principles of education expressed by Isocrates became a natural rallying-point for those who were dissatisfied with both the philosophical sects and the rhetorical schools. To a restatement of this Isocratean ideal in education, long obscured by the predominance of the philosophical sects, Cicero addressed himself in the De Oratore. Briefly stated, the idea which he unfolds is that before the time of Socrates the philosopher and orator were united in one person to form the perfect statesman; that Socrates and all his successors had made an unnatural division between philosophy and rhetoric, and that the time had come to reunite the two disciplines, with philosophy serving as the handmaid of rhetoric in the training of the ideal statesman. That Cicero was closely following the ideas of Isocrates in formulating his doctrine is proved, not only by the general similarity of their educational systems, but also by the large number of passages in the De Oratore which so closely parallel passages in Isocrates as to preclude the possibility of their being mere coincidences. Cicero was followed a generation later by Dionysius with his treatise on the Attic orators. The ideal of the movement is well summed up in the introduction; it is to restore X apXata Kal X6t Oos --ropLO4, which had fallen into disuse after the death of Alexander and which was being revived under the