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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 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.

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 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 concerns the encomium of Helen of Troy by the fourth-century rhetorician and educator Isocrates. Isocrates gives Helen’s beauty a value that is symbolic and transcendent, in order to make her, via the Trojan War, both an emblem of Panhellenic masculine achievement and a totemic symbol of Greece itself. He also introduces Theseus, Helen’s first abductor, to provide a mythic foundation for the Athenian hegemony characterizing his particular brand of Panhellenism. In order to make Helen a worthy emblem of Hellenic manhood the heroes’ desire for her is de-eroticized, their passion transferred to glorious combat, thus saving them from emasculation. Treating Helen as a figure for beauty as such, rather than an erotically compelling woman, also allows Isocrates to draw on homoerotic paradigms of heroic male glory. These strategies result, however, in a lack of serious attention to Helen herself. She becomes an untainted symbol of heroic glory at the cost of trivialization.

The sixth chapter pursues the analysis of the contrast between public speech and letter writing in political and forensic contexts through a discussion of the mention of letters in the speeches of the Attic orators. Particular attention is given to the use made of letters in the political speeches of Demosthenes and Aeschines. Finally, after a survey of the letters and documents embedded in Isocrates’ speeches, the chapter discusses the ‘epistolary speeches’ of Isocrates, and more generally the first treatises in epistolary form, with an attempt at teasing out the reasons for the choice of this extraordinarily successful form, and its implications.

The anonymous traveller, a subtype of the anonymous focalizer, is a device used in modern fiction. His minimal form is the dative participle ('for someone sailing from the Propontis, there is on the left side’), but in Flaubert and Stendhal the anonymous ‘one’ focalizes extended descriptions. He is often, though not always, hypothetical ('someone who saw this would think’). Although the anonymous traveller resembles the hypothetical ‘you', he is formally distinct. The anonymous traveller first appears in Homer and is found in a variety of authors, including Isocrates and Plato, but does not seem to be a device of non-Western literature. It is helpful to think of the anonymous traveller as a literary meme, cultural units transmitted by imitation, without conscious borrowing.

This chapter revisits Jacques Derrida’s 1968 essay “Plato’s Pharmacy” on Plato’s critique of writing in order to ask about the values of life and living presence in Plato and in two rhetoricians/sophists with whom Plato seems to be in dialogue throughout the Phaedrus as well as the Statesman, Isocrates and Alcidamas. It is argued that what is at issue between Alcidamas and Isocrates, on the one hand, and Plato, on the other, is not only the question of speech and writing, and the related questions of memory and repetition, but, once again, the question of life and the value of life. What is waged in the gigantomachia between the rhetoricians or sophists and Plato is a battle over two different values for life, life as force and the power to persuade, on the one hand, and life as truth or as the force of truth, on the other. What we thus see in all three thinkers is at once a fear of the power of the written word and an absolute fascination with it, a fear of this new technology called writing and a fascination with the transformation in the values of life that it at once threatened and promised.

This chapter examines the connections between three influential philosophers – Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates – and tyranny. It considers the accuracy of accusations that philosophers were pro-tyrannical: that they courted the favour of existing tyrants and encouraged the wealthy young men whom they taught to aspire to tyranny themselves. The chapter discusses how all three philosophers and their ideas come together in the figure of Clearchus of Heracleia, who stands at the intersection between philosophy, personal ambition and civil strife.