eidos/idea in isocrates

Eidos/idea in IsocratesAuthor(s): Robert G. SullivanReviewed work(s):Source: Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2001), pp. 79-92Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40238081 .

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Eidos/idea in I soc rates

Robert G. Sullivan

For modern readers, the career and literary output of the Attic rhetorician Isocrates is uncomfortably situated at the boundary between what we conceive as technical rhetoric and professional philosophy. Much of this confusion may be due to Isocrates' famous description of his program as being a philosophia (Panegyricus 10, 47; Evagoras 8, 81; Panathenaicus 9; Against the Sophists 1, 11-18, 21; Antidosis 30, 42-50, 162, 176, 181-

92). x Over the years, the issue has exercised a large number of scholars who have tried to specify what Isocrates meant by the term and what matters he considered to be within his purview.2 Recently, the idea has been advanced that Isocrates and Plato consciously struggled over the use of the term (Nehamas 1990, 4; Timmerman 1998, 145). In Nehamas's very useful

formulation, Isocrates thought philosophy to be "the ability to speak well, which in turn reflects and is the product of thinking well and shrewdly about practical affairs" (1990, 4). Timmerman's review of the relevant literature shows how Isocrates' conflation of philosophia and he ton logon paideia has hurt his reputation among modern disciplinary philosophers: "This confusion and resultant devaluation of Isocrates' philosophy is predi- cated on a platonically colored view of what constitutes philosophy" (1998, 147). More recently, others have made efforts to recover Isocrates for philosophy by concentrating on those parts of his program that are of interest to philosophers of our era.3

As a result, there has been a long-standing critical misapprehension regarding how best to interpret his works. Simply put, a question arises as to whether we should interpret them as being, in broad feature, philosophical works delivered by means of rhetorical vehicles or whether we should

imagine Isocrates' program as being more centrally concerned with matters of technical rhetoric, granting, of course, that philosophical, or at least

ethical, subject matters appear often in his discourses.4

Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 34, No. 1, 2001. Copyright © 2001 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

79



80 ROBERT G. SULLIVAN

One register of this tendency can be found in the decisions recent translators have made in regards to the meaning of key terms of the Isocratean vocabulary. This can be most clearly seen in critical treatments of the word idea. Though it has long been understood that the word idea is an important term in the Isocratean rhetorical vocabulary, there remains

widespread disagreement on its meaning. Systematic studies of the term have yielded greatly varying results.5 Some scholars have argued that the term is not a rhetorical reference, others that idea in the larger number of uses references the materia of speech rather than matters of composition (Schlatter 1972, Lidov 1983). I examine the nineteen uses of the word idea in Isocrates' discourses, as well as the four uses of its synonym eidos, in an

attempt to determine more closely whether, and how, these terms might function in the Isocratean vocabulary.

We can begin with a bit about the words themselves. He idea and to eidos are, respectively, feminine and neuter nouns derived from different moods of the same verb, eidon, meaning "to see." So, both he idea and to eidos express a range of concepts that can be gathered under the rubric of

"things that can be perceived" or "the outward features of a thing." The

meanings of these words are notoriously Protean. You will find transla- tions of either term as "form," "shape," "figure," as well as metaphorical extensions such as, "type," "kind," "class," "species," and the like. And, of course, in Plato and later philosophical terminology, they are employed as the vocabulary by which the concept of 'form' is expressed.

Isocrates used both terms with a fair regularity throughout his career

(Preuss 1963). Eidos is used four times in the corpus, twice in Antidosis, once in Against the Sophists, and once in Evagoras. Idea is used nineteen times; the word occurs four times in Helen and four times in Antidosis; twice in Panathenaicus, twice in To Nicocles, and twice in Nicocles\ and once in Panegyricus, once in To Philip, once in Busiris, once in Against the Sophists, and once in The Letter to the Children of Jason. Every use in Isocrates conforms, as one would expect, to some sense of "form" or "idea," but such general renderings disguise the distinct variability that emerges out of the context in which the terms appear. I argue in this paper that six clusters of meaning can be discerned, four of which are technical terms in Isocrates' rhetorical vocabulary.

The poles of meaning suggested by this study include "category," in the sense of genre or kind of speech; "figure," in the sense of a schema or

figure of speech; "structure," in the sense of topical developments, or blocks of ideas; and a more indeterminate quantity, "elements," which may refer



EIDOS/IDEA IN ISOCRATES 8 1

either to stylistic figures or structural ideas or some combination of the two. There are also two sorts of meanings that I will not attend to in this

study, since they seem not to be technical terms: idea as "fashion" or manner (Nicocles 44) and as "trait" or characteristic (Helen 54, 58; To Nicocles 34; Nicocles 30).

It is important to understand that I am not arguing that these four

English words are the best terms by which to render Isocrates' Greek in

every case. I have my preferences, of course, but my main intent here is to

suggest interpretive frames that are more congruent with Isocrates' rhetorical doctrines. For instance, my suggestion that some of Isocrates' uses of idea should be placed within the pole of meaning that I call "category" does not mean that I think that a translator should use that English word for each of these cases. What it does mean is that Isocrates' uses of idea can differ rather dramatically according to context, and if we wish to gain a

greater purchase on Isocrates' rhetorical theory, we are going to have to

develop a more precise ear for his nuances.

1. Idea/eidos - "forms" as the categories of discourse

The first level of distinction that I intend to draw is between uses of idea that refer to "forms" of speeches, as opposed to the "forms" that rhetoricians draw upon when composing a speech. The use of idea or eidos as

"sort," "type," or "kind" of something is common enough in writers con-

temporary with Isocrates to make it uncontroversial. For instance,

Thucydides often uses the term to distinguish "kinds of wars" (3.81), "kinds of deaths" (1.109), and so on. These are informal distinctions that should not be confused with rigid taxonomies, such as genus or species in the modern sense. We see the same treatment of terms twice in Isocrates where there is no rhetorical theory at stake. In Panathenaicus, Isocrates describes "three kinds (ideas) of constitution" (132), and in Antidosis he makes rec- ommendations as to the use of "every kind (eidos) of proof

' (280). In both

of these cases, it is absolutely clear that these words refer to a type, or

kind, or sort of something, and in fact, it doesn't pressure the meaning overmuch to suggest category.

But we also see Isocrates using the term in a more secure sense as an element of his rhetorical vocabulary - and here "category" seems to do much the same work as our word genre. In Antidosis, for instance, he at-

tempts to distance his work from that of other Athenian intellectuals, and




by this to remove the stigma that is attached generally to the works of all

Sophists, saying to his readers, "you ought to know that there are no fewer sorts of prose (tropoi ton logon) than those composed to metre" (45). These

categories are such things as various as genealogies of the demigods, studies of the poets, historical accounts of wars, and dialogues. So numerous are they, Isocrates says, that "it would be no small task if one were to at-

tempt to enumerate all of the kinds (pasas tas ideas ton logon) of discourse" (46). Here the ideai ton logon are categories of discourse, directly equiva- lent to the usage tropoi ton logon discussed just above, genres of prose as dissimilar as histories, myths, literary criticism, and dialogues. Similarly, at Panathenaicus 1, tropoi or ideai is surely to be supplied in the phrase Neôteros men on proêroumên graphein ton logon, after which Isocrates

goes on to list the prose forms that he chose not to write, myths, histories of wars, and collections of forensic commonplaces.6

In other places, Isocrates uses idea in the singular to describe speeches as being of a type or kind in much the same way we understand the term

genre, as representing a discursive structure of a common type. In Busiris, for instance, Isocrates criticizes Polycrates' Encomium to Busiris as being utterly inept. He points out that Polycrates has employed ideas or themes more appropriate to a speech of reproach than to one of praise, and by doing so has "gone astray from the whole form (tes ideas holes) by which one ought to make a eulogy" (Busiris 33). Isocrates says that in encomia

"good things are said about one" while Polycrates has employed themes of better use to revilers. These materials, being inappropriate to the eulogy, ruin the "whole form" of the speech. The context here makes it clear that here idea can only mean "form" in the sense of genre. That "form" is a

particular thing, the form of the speech of praise, what we would call its

generic structure. In a similar spirit, in Panegyricus, Isocrates criticizes the other pan-

egyrists who have given patriotic harangues at the Olympic festival, de-

scribing Sophists who have "rushed to this subject" of Panhellenism (3). He, however, intends to surpass them both in ideas and in approach, choos-

ing the noblest of the sorts of discourse (toutous kallistous einai ton logon). He is sure that the time is still ripe for his effort and that his competitors have not exhausted the capacity of speech to express his ideas, for, as Isocrates has it, "if one were in no other ways able to expound these matters, than by means of a single 'form' (dia mias ideas)," then he would have nothing to contribute (7). But, of course, Isocrates can and does.

Now the temptation here is to treat mias ideas in the most general sense, that is, as "one way," or "single fashion." But what Isocrates is ar-



EIDOS/IDEA IN ISOCRATES 83

guing is that the Panhellenic theme has been treated in the same way by many Sophists and the form by which they have approached their work has been through the vague and impractical platitudes of a patriotic speech, a standard panegyric. Isocrates, however, famously used the Panegyricus to achieve an advisory, or symbouleutic, purpose, announcing hêkô sym- bouleusôn {Panegyricus 3; cf. 170-71). As his rivals have produced overly general harangues, their speeches are nothing more than epideixeis, or dis-

plays. In his speech, he will change the form of the panegyric so that it includes direct, concrete political counsel.

We find much the same sort of distinction made in Helen where he accuses his competitors of clichéd attachments to approaches to discourse: "For there is only a single approach (hodos) for compositions such as these, which is not difficult to discover, learn, or imitate; but speeches of common concern, and persuasive ones, and those that are similar to these, are invented and expressed by means of many forms (pollôn ideôn) and com-

plex contingencies, and their composition is therefore more difficult" (11). Again, the temptation would be to think of the ideai as "elements," or "materials" of speech, but I would argue that what is being contrasted is the

single manner or approach of Sophistic demonstrations, the mia hodos, with the greatly various Isocratean prose genres, the pollôn ideôn. So, here

again, idea seems to mean genre or category of speech. Finally, in Against the Sophists, there is a use of idea, the precise

meaning of which is, frankly, difficult to determine. In Against the Soph- ists, Isocrates once again distinguishes himself from his Sophistic com-

petitors (17). They, he says, teach useless wrangling and sterile rules of

composition and claim that they can teach the art to anyone. Isocrates ar-

gues that a student must have the correct aptitude in order to succeed and that the master must have control over the materials of the art: "For I say <that to grasp the knowledgo of the 'elements' (ton ideôn) from which we

compose and express all speeches is not difficult" if one places themselves in the hands of one who knows them (16). He then continues to specify the rhetorical activity as the judicious choice from among these "elements," their joining and arrangement, their being made consonant with the kairos, the use of appropriate enthymemes, and the embroidery of the whole speech with rhythmic and even musical phrasing. So, the ideai here are more than

figures certainly, they are all of the materials, or "elements," of speech, a

meaning of idea to which we will return later. But, Isocrates continues, the student must take pains and have a bold and inquisitive spirit. Not only must one have this nature, but also one must "learn the forms of discourse

(ta eidê ton logon) and be exercised in their uses" (Against the Sophists




17). The determination of meaning here is a bit tricky. Ta eidê could, for instance, simply continue the sense of tas ideas, from above, and mean such compositional devices as are referenced there, and this idea has some attraction. But, I believe, a stronger case is that it means "types," or "kinds," of speeches. The ideai from which discourses are made are clearly the "elements" or compositional devices of speech. But if these eidê are forms, they are forms "of speeches," "kinds of speeches." Clearly, the use of idea at Against the Sophists 16 has a technical value, in the term he is gathering the elements from which one constructs speeches; why then shift to eidos at 17? It seems that the two are being distinguished in some way, and so that eidos would not refer to stylistic devices but to something like "genre."

Isocrates does occasionally use other terms by which he makes reference to forms of discourse in a way similar to the uses of idea and eidos. Ho hodos has seven uses in Isocrates. Six of them are common usages of the term, either as it indicates a "road" {To Philip 66, 132), a "journey" (Panegyricus 148), or as the "way" or "course" of a person's life (Demonicus 5, 19; To Nicocles 35). In Helen, however, we get a metaphorical use in reference to composition. Criticizing the paradoxical encomia of the Soph- ists, he says, "For such compositions as these are of a single type (mia tis

hodos) which is not difficult to invent, learn, or imitate" (11). Here the

"way" is the whole approach, or treatment of speeches by the Sophists, which can be compared with the many forms and contingencies of the Isocratean logoL And, as noted above, in Antidosis, Isocrates has it that there the reader must know that there are no fewer tropoi ton logon than

species of verse (45).

2. Idea/eidos - "forms" as the materials from which discourses are made

Figures

A second set of meanings for idea or eidos refer to "forms" of a different sort. These are the stylistic "forms" exploited by a rhetorician in their com-

position of a speech. There seem to be three separate notions within this

pole of meaning. To begin with the most specific usage, we can turn to an

important passage in Panathenaicus, where, once again, Isocrates distin-



E/D0S//DE4 IN ISOCRATES 85

guishes his practice from his rivals on both substantial and stylistic grounds. He argues that he has counseled the city and the Greeks on pressing matters in a style "laden with enthymemes, no small number of antitheses and balanced clauses and the other 'forms' (ton allôn ideôn) which shine through in speeches and force the approval and roar of the audience" (2). In this

passage, the ideai are clearly particular elements of embellishment, enthymemes, antitheses, balanced clauses, forms that we would call the

figures of speech or thought, forms that give a speech brilliance and finish. The same sense is apparent in a passage from Antidosis, where he

speaks of those, including himself, who have chosen to write Hellenic, political, and panegyric discourses, instead of private disputes. All would

agree, he says, that these are more like poetry than speeches in court. Such discourses display their matter in a more ornamented and embellished style and seek to make use of weighty and original enthymemes; in addition, they make use, throughout the speech, of a great number of other more distinctive "forms" (tais allais ideais). Here, again, the ideai are "forms" that can be ordered into a speech in order to give the discourse a more or less distinguished character. They are stylistic features, not ideas, per se, but modes of auxesis. Here, again, "figure" seems right.

This same level of specificity seems appropriate to a use of eidos from Evagoras. Here he complains (an Isocratean character flaw, perhaps?) that the task of making an encomium in prose is more difficult than doing the same in poetry. The poet is said to have many advantages - they have

many "ornaments," or "embellishments" (polloi kosmoi) given to them

(Evagoras 9). These kosmoi include devices such as depicting the gods conversing with men or helping them in battle. Moreover, they can express these things not only by agreed upon, or "appointed," words (tetagmenois onomasin), but also by foreign words, unique coinages, metaphors, and otherwise "ornament their poem by every figure" (eidesu 9). Orators can, of course, use none of these devices. They must use only common terms, and ones relevant to a case; they may not use meter, and so on. So here, ta eidê seems synonymous with kosmoi, and "figure" seems the best sense of the word, as neologisms, metaphors, or exotic words, might be described as "figures" of thought or speech.

The devices specified as ideai in this sense are worth a moment's examination. Isocrates speaks of metaphors, antitheses, parison, "ornaments" generally, exotic words, neologisms, and especially of enthymemes as being ideai. Enthumêma has five uses in Isocrates, and in each enthymeme is associated with idea in its sense as "figure." As noted above, in Evagoras




Isocrates notes that orators are "strictly compelled to make use only of the words of the citizens (common Attic vocabulary) and enthymemes in reference to their actions" (10). Poets, in contrast, can "bewitch their listeners

by rhythms and harmonies, even though both their style and their

enthymemes might be deficient" (10). Similarly, in Against the Sophists, Isocrates describes the task of the orator "to choose the ideai as are appropriate for an issue and then to mix them together and arrange them cor-

rectly, and not to miss the opportunity but to both appropriately embroider the whole speech with enthymemes, and to speak it rhythmically and musi-

cally" (16). There are two uses in which enthymemes are identified spe- cifically as ideai, and in which a bit more meat is put into the definition. At Antidosis 47, Isocrates discusses those who write "political discourses," including, prominently, himself, whose writings are more akin to poetry than to speeches written for court. Such as these display material in a more ornamented style, seek to use weightier and more original enthymemes, and seek to distribute throughout the whole speech many other more dis-

tinguished ideai. And at Panathenaicus 2, he defends his career, saying that he advised the city and the Greeks with discourses "full of enthymemes, no small number of balanced clauses and antitheses, and the other figures (ton allôn ideôn) which add brilliance to speeches." Enthymemes, then, for Isocrates are stylistic quantities, materials that can be chosen, but not "words," per se, or the substantial issues or ideas at stake in a speech. It would seem that enthymemes are "thoughts," perhaps "maxims," or

"gnomai," stylistic devices in the same category as the Gorgianic figures of parison and antithesis.7

Structure

Idea in the uses mentioned above describes a particular quantity of style, figures of thought or speech, but Isocrates uses the same word to refer to

larger, structural, units of discourses, independent blocks of material that can be worked into a speech. The clearest example of such a usage will be found in Antidosis. In his prologue to that discourse, Isocrates complains of the difficulty of the task. "Now, to conceive of such a long speech, and to gather and harmonize together so many scattered "forms' (ideas), is not

easy" (11). We might keep in mind what these "forms" are that Isocrates

gathers and harmonizes in the Antidosis. They are large portions of his other speeches, forty-eight sections of the Panegyricus, forty-four sections




from two parts (both the proofs and conclusion) of On the Peace, twenty- five sections from To Nicocles, and four sections of Against the Sophists, which he has edited and compiled to act as his "witnesses" in his fictional

apologia, "For it would be foolish if I," he says, "seeing others make use of my (words), alone should refrain from using those things I said previ- ously in my (speeches), and especially now that I have chosen to use for

you not only small parts (mikrois meresin) but whole 'structures' (holois eidesih)" Here eidos cannot mean "sorts" of speeches, nor can it mean the more specific "figures" of speech, nor is it something as basic as an "idea" or theme, nor can it refer to the parts of a speech. The materials produced are big chunks of argument drawn from a variety of speech parts.

Isocrates uses idea to refer to large, independent, blocks of material in three other places. In To Philip, he argues to Philip's vanity, saying that if the Macedonian king wars against the barbarians, he will win great re- nown. Indeed, he says, eulogists will compare Philip's glory with that of the heroes of the mythic past. He gives a few hints of this and then stops with false modesty to say, "I have however chosen to avoid such a 'thing' (tes toiautês ideas)" Now, the "thing," the idea here, is a comparison, or

syncresis, of Philip and heroes from the past. As such, syncresis is an element of discourse, but a determinant one, a building block, not so much a

figure as a structure of discourse. Comparisons can be found in many of the Isocratean speeches. Some of the more memorable are that of Thesesus and Heracles in Helen (23-28), the long comparisons of Athens and Sparta that make up the greater parts of Panegyricus and Panathenaicus, those between the current and ancient polity in Areopagiticus and between the

imperium and Athens' past foreign policies in On The Peace. Aristotle

(Rhetoric 1.9.38) criticizes Isocrates for making comparisons in his forensic speeches where Aristotle sees them as irrelevant. These comparisons are often quite long and function not so much as striking figures of speech, but as independent themes of their own (Race 1978).

We get the same sense in a use in the Helen, where Isocrates criticizes the encomium that Gorgias has written for Helen as being a defense of her actions, rather than the praise of her that the encomia requires. Isocrates intends to correct Gorgias by producing an encomium composed of the materials appropriate to this form. Gorgias's speech cannot be an

encomium, he says, because "this speech is not of the same materials (ek ton autôn ideôn) nor concerning the same actions" (Helen 15). Here he is

speaking of a prose form, the encomium, which is composed out of a number of elements that aim at amplifying the praiseworthy acts and character-




istics of a person, for instance, praise of ancestry and military prowess and

comparisons with living and mythical figures.8 In the case of Isocrates' Helen, these encomiastic elements are specified in the prethesis as praises of Helen's beauty, birth, and repute (14).

The last use of idea in this sense is found in To Nicocles. There we find Isocrates railing against the bad taste of readers who prefer spectacu- lar tales to useful literature. The poets and tragedians have noted this, he

complains, and load their works with "battles and contests" (agônas kai hamillas, 48). Being astute observers of human nature, they have "made full use of both of these very devices (amphoterais tais ideais) in their

poems." The descriptions of "battles and contests" are particular ideai, structural units of composition that can be loaded into fiction to make it more

pleasurable for the readers. More than a figure, and not so much a thought or consideration, per se, this is a particular compositional device, and it conforms to a notion of what we would call a theme or structure.

It would be a mistake to think that these structures are utterly indeterminate, or that the usage here is overly general. In fact, the "structures" referred to in these uses are identifiable units of composition, particular things that can be composed into a speech, such as comparisons, protrepseis, and free-standing units of praise and blame. Isocrates seems to have used these ideai as building blocks of discourse. The units could almost be written independently of each other and placed in reserve. When composition began, the ideai were layered like brickwork and joined by the mortar of Isocrates' parenthetical narration.

Elements

The remainder of the rhetorical uses of idea and eidos also refer to the materials a rhetorician draws upon in composition, but either their nature is of a more general type or Isocrates' usage is looser and has less particular reference. In some passages, Isocrates uses the terms as if he could be

referring to either a "figure" or to a topical "structure" or perhaps even to the form of a speech, but there is no way of distinguishing the level of

particularity at which he is speaking. In these cases, it seems safest to fol- low what has become the standard usage and employ the translation of "elements" (Gaines 1990, 165 . 2).

The paradigm usage of idea in this sense is a very important passage on rhetorical composition found in Against the Sophists. The Sophists, Isocrates says, misunderstand the nature of rhetoric, believing that it can




be taught as if it were a settled art like that of "letters" (12-13). Who, he asks, except these Sophists, does not know that while "letters" always re- main the same and unchanging, and we order them in the same way every time we use them, the opposite is true of discourses? A speech must be

appropriately framed to meet the demands of the occasion:

For I say that to grasp the knowledge of the "elements" {ton ideôn) from which we synthesize and express all discourses is not terribly difficult - as long as one does not go to those who make light promises, but to those with some knowledge of these things; but to choose among these and mix them and ar-

range them properly, yet not to miss the occasion, but to embroider the whole of the speech with appropriate enthymemes and to speak with rhythmic and musical words; these take great discipline and are the work of a manly and

imaginative mind. (16)

There are a couple of things to note here. The ideai in this passage seem to be the atomic structure of speech, enthymemes, elements by which a speech is embroidered, what we would call figures, and its molecular

level, its structure. They are not "figures" alone, but everything from which discourse is made, the material from which all speeches are both composed and given verbal expression. One can have a true knowledge of these and, if one goes to the right teacher, it can be gotten rather easily. It is the judicious and appropriate choice, synthesis, and composition of the elements, and their rhythmic and musical expression, that marks the artist.

There is a similar, and similarly important, use of idea in The Letter to the Children of Jason. In this passage, Isocrates prepares his readers for the fact that some of what they will hear will be familiar to them. He says that he would be a fool indeed if he alone were to abstain from using his

words, as competitors kept poaching his best thoughts He says that they must be prepared because the very first "offering" has become a common-

place. "I am accustomed," he claims, "to say to my students of philosophy, that first it is necessary to ask this - what is to be accomplished by the

speech and the parts of the speech - and then when we have discovered and determined these things precisely, I say it is necessary to seek out the 'elements' {tas ideas) by means of which the exact thing we set upon is worked out and accomplished" {Ep. 6 8). By way of explanation, this procedure of speech composition is then made analogous with practices in life

generally. Setting goals becomes the strategy to which tactics are applied. Speeches, and their parts, the larger generic features of discourse, are stra-

tegic and respond to the inquiry into what is to be accomplished while the ideai are the tactics by which the goals are accomplished.




Now, we do know that, in this passage, the ideai are smaller units than the speech genres or the parts of a speech. But we have no way of

clearly distinguishing whether Isocrates is discussing "structures" or "figures." It could be either, or it could be both. The idea that a speech is ca-

pable of being elaborated or worked out to perfection might hint at figure, but the accomplishment of the goal of a speech seems to point to a more

general matter of composition. "General elements" here is safest, though it

surely points to features that are teachable and knowable, and within the art. The procedure of composition is to determine, first, what a speech and its parts are to accomplish and, then, the application of various elements

by which this goal is to be met. The inquiry into the question of what is to be accomplished yields the goal, and then various elements are applied to its achievement.

A final use of this sort of idea is found in Antidosis. There, Isocrates

famously posits a parallel between the components of human nature, the mind and the body. Both can be augmented by art, gymnastic for the body and philosophy for the mind. Masters of the art can train the mind to be more intelligent and the body to be more serviceable by the use of similar courses of instruction, exercise, and discipline: "When they take their students, the teachers of gymnastic teach the students the postures (schem- tfta=gestures, stances) which have been devised for combat, while the

'philosophers' work through for their students all of the 'forms' (tas ideas

hapasas) by which speech is made" (Antidosis 183). The exact meaning of idea is indeterminate here; it could refer to any of the elements of the art that could be taught by Isocrates, genre, figures, or thematic development. Later in the speech, Isocrates extends the metaphor and points out that the forms of both the gymnast and the rhetorician must be brought to bear on

particular circumstances in a coordinated and appropriate fashion. There- fore, gymnastics and rhetoric depend not on science, but on theories, doxeis, that must be realized in practice. The master, however, does have a store of

knowledge, epistêmê, and these are the ideai. It would seem that these "forms" could also be the more global sort of rhetorical "forms," such things as the types of discourses. I suspect that a reading of "elements" as that in The Letter to the Children of Jason is the safer choice, and there is no reason why we cannot take it to include all of the meanings we have suggested, even those with the sense of category, figure, and structure.

In conclusion, in virtually every use in the corpus, when Isocrates uses the terms idea or eidos, he is making reference to quantities of speech compo-



EIDOS/IDEA IN ISOCRATES 9 1

sition, either to generic indicators or to units of composition, and not to such things as "ideas" or the topical matters of discourse, or to some vari- ant of philosophical form. For Isocrates, these terms are surely key terms of technical rhetorical doctrine, not what we might think of as a properly philosophical vocabulary.

Department of Speech Communication Ithaca College

Notes 1. References to the Isocratean texts are drawn from Mathieu and Bremond's Isocrate.

Discours (1956-62). 2. The basic bibliography would include Wilcox's "Criticisms of Isocrates and his

" (1943a) and "Isocrates' Fellow Rhetoricians" (1943b), Jaeger's Paidea (1943), Morrison's "The Origin of Plato's Philosopher-Statesman" (1958), and Wersdörfer's "Die des Isokrates im Spiegel ihrer Terminologie, Untersuchungen zur fruattischen Rhetorik und Stullehre" (1945).

3. Too's The Rhetoric of Identity in Isocrates (1995), Takis Poulakos's Speaking for the Polis (1997), and the treatment in John Poulakos's Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece (1995) are only three of the more recent books to examine the position of Isocrates in the Sophistic milieu. See also Cahn's "Reading Rhetoric Rhetorically" (1989) and Goggin and Lang's "A Tincture of Philosophy, a Tincture of Hope" (1993).

4. The use of the term rhetoric is provisional and a matter of convenience. Schiappa's point is well taken here (Schiappa 1992). Isocrates did not use the term rhêtorikê, nor did he describe himself as a "rhetorician." His term for his theory was, as noted above, philosophia or he ton logon paideia, and he described his discourses as being a species of logos politikos. This philosophia was, however, as Nehamas (1990) points out, overwhelmingly concerned with the cultivation and use of discourse in the political world. We also have much evidence that Isocrates was an innovator in and theorist of prose composition put to these political purposes. For no other reason than to avoid overuse of the cumbersome, and equally anach- ronistic, formulae of "composition theorist," or "theory of discourse," I will employ rhetorician and rhetorical theory.

5. The bibliography on this term is not inconsiderable. The fundamental work remains Taylor's "The Words EÎÔoç/Iôea in Pre-Socratic Literature" (1911). A more focused study will be found in Lidov's "The Meaning of in Isocrates" (1983). Lidov's treatment of the term is strongly colored by his belief that Isocrates' great project as a rhetorical educator was to collapse the distinction between subject and treatment, what the Roman rhetoricians would later call res and verba. Under this condition, lôéa is handled by Lidov almost exclu- sively as "idea," that is, the materia of discourse itself. Much the same position is pursued by Schlatter (1972). The word has also been examined by scholars with a greater sensitivity to Isocrates' technical vocabulary, for which see Gaines's "Isocrates, £p.6\8" (1990).

6. On this passage, see Wilcox's "Isocrates Genera of Prose" (1943c). 7. Conley (1984, 172) points out how completely the Isocratean conception of the

enthymeme diverges from that of Aristotle. 8. On the material development of the Isocratean encomium, and its relationship to the

poetic tradition, see Race's "Pindaric Encomium and Isokrates' Evagoras" (1987).

Works cited Aristotle. The Art of Rhetoric. Ed. John Henry Freese. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1939. Cahn, Michael. 1989. "Reading Rhetoric Rhetorically: Isocrates and the Marketing of In-

sight." Rhetorica 7: 121-44.




Conley, Thomas M. 1984. "The Enthymeme in Perspective." Quarterly Journal of Speech 71: 168-87.

Gaines, Robert N. 1990. "Isocrates, £p.6.8." Hermes 118: 165-70. Goggin, Maureen D., and Elenore Lang. 1993. "A Tincture of Philosophy, a Tincture of

Hope: The Portrayal of Isocrates in Plato's 'PhaedrusY' Rhetoric Review 11: 301-25. Isocrates. Isocrate. Discourse. Ed. and trans. Georges Mathieu and Emile Bemond. 4 vols.

Paris: Société D'Edition "Les Belles Lettres," 1956-62. . Isocrates. Ed. and trans. George Norlin and LaRue Van Hook. 3 vols. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard UP, 1945. Jaeger, Werner. 1943. Paidea: The Ideals of Greek Culture. 2d ed. 3 vols. Trans. Gilbert

Highet. New York: Oxford UP. Lidov, Joel B. 1983. "The Meaning of in Isocrates." Parola del Passato 38: 273-87. Morrison, J. S. 1958. "The Origin of Plato's Philosopher-Statesman." Classical Quarterly

52:216-18. Nehamas, Alexander. 1990. "Eristic, Antilogie, Sophistic, Dialectic: Plato's Demarcation of

Philosophy from Sophistry." History of Philosophy Quarterly 7: 3-16. Poulakos, John. 1995. Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece. Columbia, SC: U of South

Carolina P. Poulakos, Takis. 1997. Speaking for the Polis: Isocrates' Rhetorical Education. Columbia,

SC: U of South Carolina P. Preuss, Sigmund. [1904] 1963. Index Isocrateus. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlags-

buchhandlung. Race, William. 1978. "Panathenaicus 74-90: The Rhetoric of Isocrates7 Digression on

Agamemnon." Transactions of the American Philological Association 108: 175-85. . 1987. "Pindaric Encomium and Isokrates Evagoras. Transactions of the American

Philological Association 117: 131-55. Schiappa, Edward. 1992. "Rhêtorikê: What's in a Name? Toward a Revised History ot barly

Greek Rhetorical Theory." Quarterly Journal of Speech 78: 1-15. Schlauer, Friedric W. 1972. "Isocrates, Against the Sophists, lo. American Journal oj rni-

lology 93: 591-97. Taylor, A. E. 1911. "The Words , in Pre-Socratic Literature, vana socratica.

Oxford: James Baker. Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Trans. <J. horster smitn. 4 vois, ramonage,

MA: Harvard UP, 1928. Timmerman, David. 1998. "Isocrates' Competing Conceptualization of Philosophy. Phi-

losophy and Rhetoric 31: 145-59. Too, Yun Lee. 1995. The Rhetoric of Identity in Isocrates: Text, Power, Pedagogy. Cam-

bridge, UK: Cambridge UP. Wersdörfer, Hans. 1945. "Die des Isokrates im Spiegel ihrer Terminologie,

Untersuchungen zur fruattischen Rhetorik und stullehre." Ph.D. Diss. Bonn.

Wilcox, Stanley. 1943a. "Criticisms of Isocrates and his ." Transactions and

Proceedings of the American Philological Association 74: 113-33. . 1943b. "Isocrates' Fellow Rhetoricians. American Journal of Philology ôô: 17 1-80. . 1943c. "Isocrates Genera of Prose. American Journal of Philology t>4: 42 /-ji.



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