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Following an analysis of the economic and ecological bases of society in the pre-Christian Mediterranean world, this chapter studies how and why the pre-Persian Greek pólis-world evolved — charting the rise of Athens, the rise of Persian Greek kingship, then the rise of Rome and the gradual absorption of the entire Mediterranean region into the Roman empire. It discusses what pre-Christian Greek and Roman authors — such as Plátôn (Plato), Aristotle, Isokrátês (Isocrates), Polýbios (Polybius), Sallust, Seneca, and Tacitus — had to say on the mutual relations of autonomous actors in the Mediterranean world. A special section is dedicated to an analysis of Thukydídês (Thucydides), showing that contrary to received wisdom he was far from an ancestor of Realist International Relations thought. In particular, he did not believe and never said that the ‘Peloponnesian War’ broke out because of a shift in the ‘balance of power’.

This chapter focuses on a different form of evidence for the creation of the Athenian past, namely its public oratory. Through the public speeches of Demosthenes, Aeschines, and Isocrates, as well as of fragmentary texts, it examines the parameters of plausibility within which the orator was free to construct history, both buying into a commonly shared past and moulding that past for his audience. It considers whether orators favoured particular exemplary moments in history and, if so, whether these were the same as those which were dominant in local historiography. The orator, like the historian or the dramatist, played a vital role in helping the polis to formulate a past which was relevant to the present through its inclusion both of exemplary figures and events and of characteristics, which remained constant across time.

The first fourth-century Persian attack on Egypt most likely took place in 390/89–388/7. Security arrangements, in place by 391/0, involved use of Athens’ new fleet to deter any Spartan initiative in the west and installation on Cyprus of a force under Hecatomnus, the native satrap of Caria, to secure Cyprus and safeguard staging areas in Phoenicia. Despite lengthy preparations and the presence of experienced Persian generals, there is no evidence of any significant Persian-Egyptian battles in Egypt. This is best explained by noting that the Egyptian king, Acoris, faced with a usurper who had gained control of Upper Egypt and Memphis, dared not lose troops in battle and avoided engagement. The Persians, in turn, aware of the debilitating political situation, simply waited in the expectation that internal Egyptian discord would allow them to regain control of Egypt without fighting.

This chapter examines the role of the Black Sea as a source of grain for the Aegean Greek world, and particularly for Athens, in the fifth and fourth centuries. It is argued that the beginning of Athens' reliance on the Black Sea as more than a lucrative and strategic asset, and ultimately as the systematic source of most of its imported grain, first began near the end of the Peloponnesian War, with the collapse of Athens' Aegean empire. For most of the fourth century Athens and the Bosporan (Spartocid) Kingdom were bound in a tight social and economic relationship largely designed and determined by the mutual interests of their elites. Archaeological evidence and the iconography of Graeco‐Scythian art illustrate this interdependence. The “school” of the Athenian rhetorician Isocrates is argued to have been the crucial network along which this elite relationship functioned culturally and politically.

This chapter provides apparatus criticus for this book. In this volume of Greek Orators, the Teubner text of Friedrich Blass (second edition, 1891) is printed unchanged, with the publisher's permission. The first Teubner edition, by Gustav Eduard Benseler (1851), is marred by the editor's free use of emendation. In his preface, Benseler refers to the fragments of Isocrates' alleged handbook, which prescribe the avoidance of hiatus, and to passages from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Isocrates which note as characteristics of his style the devices of clausal balance, periodic structure, and purity of language, its uniformity, and its effective arrangement. He then applies this 'Isocratean' usage to his text in defiance of the manuscript tradition, which may already have taken the opinions of ancient critics into account. Benseler published a more conservative edition in 1854. Blass published the first of his editions in 1878, and the last impression appeared in 1910–1913. After listing the types of erroneous emendation made by the medieval scribes, especially those of assimilation and omission, on turning to modern editors he curiously does not mention Benseler's earlier excesses, but complains only of his failure to distinguish between the better and the worse manuscripts.

This chapter addresses non-academic uses of philosophia in the fourth century BCE, which provides the background against which one can understand Heraclides' use of the term. It shows how philosophia became a discipline in Plato's Academy only by understanding how the term philosophia was being used elsewhere. The key context comes from the educators Alcidamas, Isocrates, and the author of the Dissoi Logoi. The chapter shows that there is less reason to say that these educators competed over “ownership” of the term philosophos (even if at times they may have) or its true and universal meaning than that they gave varying retrospective reconstructions of the term's usage, differing, for example, in the relative emphases they give to practical teaching over the defensibility of research outcomes. To the extent that the academic view of philosophia “won,” this is not because that view was truer or more convincing, but because the Academy instigated a continued discipline that called itself philosophia more than Alcidamas or Isocrates did, neither of whom appear to have had success or interest in developing the sort of well-populated discipline crucial for maintaining a name.

This chapter considers three prose-writers each of whom, in his own way, evaluates poetry in relation to prose. Gorgias' Helen, itself a kind of prose-poem, makes poetry fully part of a larger realm of discourse, logos. The capacity of logos in all its forms embraces both truth and deception; contrary to a prevailing line of interpretation, it is argued that Gorgias' conception of language does not collapse into a version of psychological relativism. Isocrates' more muted attitude to poetry, including his downgrading of its imaginative and emotional powers, is interpreted as a reflection of his own priorities of pragmatic utility. Finally, an analysis of the contentious views of Philodemus diagnoses in them an imperfectly realized desire to negotiate a path between moralism and formalism and also to separate the value of poetry definitively from that of prose.

This chapter reviews Isocrates's To Nicocles. Nicocles had been his pupil, and the purpose of this address is to offer advice on the immediate problems facing a king in his own country: how to sustain his authority and make his reign acceptable to his subjects and tolerable for himself. The style of To Nicocles conforms to its fragmentary structure. After introducing his subject by remarking on the paradox that rulers, in spite of their enjoyment of great material wealth, are at a disadvantage in the crucial matter of education, Isocrates begins a careful portrayal of a ruler who avoids all the vices of tyranny as they had come to be recognised and abhorred by his time. The tyrants of the past had turned to poets and wise men for counsel and moral guidance: Nicocles should do the same, but, unlike them, follow their advice. His success will depend on the rigour he applies to his self-improvement. Isocrates then describes the ruler's general attitude to his subjects before proceeding to more detailed measures.

The oldest and the most long-standing way to think about literary revision in classical antiquity was to see it as a teaching tool whose goal was to create what Pierre Bourdieu called a habitus, that is, a set of skills and expectations regulating social performance. In Isocrates, in Plato, and much later in Quintilian, the practice of revision created subjects capable of giving advice, pursuing philosophical dialogue, and engaging in oratorical debate. The primary aim of revision for these authors was to teach specific cognitive skills; these skills were like revision but occurred mentally. The practice of literary revision was thus a way of training thought or producing selves.

Post classical rhetoricians applied and adapted philosophical and scientific ideas about the nature of the human soul and the human community to describe the world as they saw it and wanted it to be. This chapter explores the tension between the desire to order experience into tidy dyads and the need to confront the multiplicity and variability of an ever-expanding and diversifying world. In doing so, this chapter turns from philosophy to rhetoric. While the Hellenistic and Roman Stoa turned away, for the most part, from the dyadic classification of the world into Greek and barbarian, post-classical public speech tended to preserve classical notions of “us” and “them.” The question is, what happens to mutually exclusive and all-encompassing divisions of the human community in the increasingly plural and fluid Mediterranean? It is true that peoples had been criss-crossing the Mediterranean for millennia prior to the fifth-century BCE and that cultural exchange had long defined Mediterranean as well as Near Eastern and North African history. What is of interest here is a moment at which certain intellectuals in Athens came to rethink the meaning of these movements in an effort to define lines between insiders and outsiders.

This chapter argues that Cicero accepted Isocrates' prescription of imitation as a necessary component in the orator's training. It is evidence of the development in thinking since the 4th century that what Isocrates assumed as part of the young orator's basic training has come to be a delayed but deliberate decision by or for the mature orator, who being mature has also the judgement to focus his choice where his natural talents lead him: with these modifications stylistic imitation should certainly be included in the account of the rhetorical training practised by Cicero's teachers and contemporaries at Rome.

This chapter continues the discussion of Cambiano's on A 1, since Aristotle's chapters A 1-2 are evidently a continuous introduction. The problem of what exactly it is an introduction to, i.e. the perennial question of the unity and diversity of Aristotle's metaphysical treatises, is considered here, although necessarily only in outline. It is also argued that, contrary to some scholarly opinions, this introduction should not be regarded as a protreptic to philosophy as such, i.e. as belonging to the genre of Aristotle's Protrepticus. Whereas that genre aims to promote the pursuit of sophia as a way of life, hence as ultimately an ethical choice or determination of the highest human good, the present text (it is argued) is meant to establish the nature of the highest or most paradigmatic form of cognition as such, leaving aside the question of ranking this in relation to other possible candidates for the highest good overall.

A book on Greek tyranny should not lack a chapter on Alexander of Pherae, a man who was remembered throughout antiquity as one of the most ferocious and wicked tyrants. The longest description of Alexander can be found in Plutarch's Life of Pelopidas, in which he was depicted as an incurably brutish man, full of savagery, strong sexual desire, and cruelty. Plutarch reports that the death Alexander suffered at the hands of his wife was the only or the first such case among the tyrants. This chapter re-examines the reputation of Alexander of Pherae among Greek authors as an archetypally wicked tyrant, showing that his military successes and the good opinion of Isocrates indicate that his support must have been wider than the histories suggest. Although opposition from within and outside Thessaly reduced his chances of building a popular tageia of the kind that Jason had, Alexander should still be credited with political vision and aims beyond personal power.

This chapter provides a background of political and ceremonial oratory before presenting an overview of the life and career of Isocrates. Barred from a career in public life because he lacked vocal powers and self-confidence, Isocrates was determined to become famous through writing and teaching. In his pamphlet Against the Sophists, he inveighed against the pretensions of other teachers and outlined a syllabus for his own school. The central programme of the school was the study and rhetorical formulation of political ideas. Isocrates undertook to teach the art of deliberative oratory to his pupils, and by publishing discourses of his own to influence public opinion on the most important issues. Long after his pupils had died and his political aims had ceased to matter, one enduring legacy above all kept the name of Isocrates alive and his influence strong. His style lived on, not only in his own writings and those of his pupils, but also in those of later generations of prose authors, both Greek and Latin. Both to the ancient critic and the modern reader, the characteristics peculiar to Isocratean prose are the extreme length and complexity of its sentences, or periods, and the smoothness of his arrangement of words.

This chapter discusses Isocrates's Panegyricus. It must have been difficult for Isocrates, in his discussions with his mainly Athenian pupils during the ten years over which the Panegyricus was written, to uphold his patriotic ideals, but they run strongly throughout the work. Panegyricus has been described as ‘a propaganda-document for the Second Athenian League’. The passages adduced in support of this view are those in which Sparta is criticised for her oppressive treatment of Greek states. Viewing Greek affairs in 380 B.C., Isocrates saw a state of perpetual, enfeebling strife with his beloved Athens having to accept second place behind Sparta. The remedy he proposed for this was not adopted, and Athenian leaders continued to respect Persian sovereignty. If Isocrates had hoped to influence them and other Greek leaders through the Panegyricus, he failed. But surely it was intended for a wider audience, for pupils and thinking men who looked to some future time when its aims could be realised. It should no more be placed in a strict historical context than its earlier models, but expresses a permanent Panhellenic ideal which transcends time, and affirms an Athenian leadership of Greece based on culture no less than on feats of arms.