The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (42 page)

Isocrates, son of a prosperous flute manufacturer who lost his fortune during the war, early acquired a passion for the idea of a unified, outreaching Greece. He vainly hoped that problems of poverty at home could be solved by resettling needy Greeks in a conquered Persian empire. Wanting
a profession, Isocrates became a Sophist, paid to teach the arts of successful living. This did not commit him to any school of philosophy but only to a practical approach to all problems—in conspicuous contrast to Plato and others at his Academy who hoped to discover the True and the Good. Isocrates lacked the voice and the physique to be an effective speaker himself, but for fifty-five years he taught oratory. He began by writing law-court speeches for others to deliver. The law of Athens required that every litigant, plaintiff or defendant, in court had to speak for himself. And there was no prosecuting attorney. But nothing prevented a citizen from hiring an expert speech writer (a “logographer”). Greeks, being like Americans a litigious lot, needed both teachers of oratory and writers of law-court speeches. But speakers in the courtroom like modern politicians were not eager to acknowledge their ghostwriters. Legal speech-writing was well paid and engaged the best oratorical talent, including Demosthenes himself.

After ten years as a speech writer, about 393
B.C.
Isocrates opened his own school of rhetoric. He would have preferred to call it a school for statesmen. Some biographers see his new career as a kind of conversion, based on Isocrates’ belief that rhetoric, the art of oratory, was the best preparation for statesmen. In 353 he summed up his philosophy of rhetoric:

While Isocrates’ school, unlike Plato’s Academy, was not an elite sect, it was open only to those who could pay in advance the fee of a thousand drachmas for the three- or four-year course. Finally his school had taught almost a hundred pupils, but not more than nine at a time. From these fees and from the gifts of wealthy and successful pupils, Isocrates became one of the twelve hundred richest men in Athens. He was called on to perform a “liturgy,” a public service of the wealthiest citizens, who were to provide a chorus for one of the dramatic contests, to recruit and train one of the ten teams for the torch race, to underwrite one of the embassies to one of the Panhellenic festivals, or to host a banquet at one of the festivals. An extraordinary liturgy in wartime required the citizen to equip a warship.
But a wealthy citizen might try to escape this burden by an ingenious institution called
antidosis
(exchange of property). He would challenge a citizen who he thought was wealthier than himself either to undertake the liturgy service or to exchange properties with him. When the liturgy assigned to Isocrates required him to fit out a warship at his own expense, he challenged it with an antidosis lawsuit. When he lost, he seized the occasion to demonstrate his rhetorical skills. He cast himself as a misunderstood Socrates on imaginary charges, and expounded the personal philosophy that we have quoted.

Isocrates’ school produced Athens’s generals, statesmen, and men of letters. And his models survive in the main forms of rhetoric: judicial (law-court speeches), deliberative (political speeches), and epideictic (ceremonial speeches praising or blaming: funeral or festive orations). He polished these tirelessly for publication in written form. One of his best-known speeches, his
Panegyric
, was said to have taken him nearly fifteen years to compose. Even when the occasion for his speech is fictitious, he adds dramatic detail by referring to the running out of water in the water clock, as if the oration really were being spoken. Rhetoric, “the artificer of persuasion,” had become self-conscious. “In good style it is necessary for vowels not to fall in adjacent positions,” his handbook advised, “for this would create a halting effect, nor is it right to end one word and begin the next with the same syllable.… Let the flow of words not be entirely prosaic, which would be dry, but mixed with every rhythm.” And for prose he established his own iambic and trochaic rhythms.

With the new artifices of rhetoric and the arts of literary prose Isocrates defined a Greek humanism, a culture of language, of the spoken and written word. “The people we call Greeks,” he said, “are those who have the same culture as ours, not the same blood.” That culture was mainly the achievement of Athens, which he, like Thucydides, saw as “the school of Greece.” It was the Greek word cast in its new art of prose that had a new power to enforce Hellenic unity. “True words, words in conformity with law and justice, are images of a good and trustworthy soul,” and would create a still wider community. Western culture, the education that civilized the West, would be based on this faith in the immortal word.

Before the end of Isocrates’ long life, there appeared two monumental champions of the arts of prose who would far overshadow the pioneers. The first was Aristotle (384–322
B.C.
), unexcelled organizer, classifier, and codifier of knowledge, “Nature’s Secretary,” Aristotle’s rhetoric, the product of years of reflection and revision, would have a domineering influence for centuries. What Vitruvius would do for classical architecture Aristotle did for the classical “modes of persuasion.” Surveying the numerous textbooks,
he regretted that the subject had been narrowed by too much attention to law-court rhetoric and too little to political rhetoric, where larger issues were debated, and to the arts of persuasion in daily life. Rhetoric, he said, was not a science, for it had no special subject matter. But the arts of persuasion, he insisted, were needed by everybody. In our time they go by the names of Public Relations and Advertising.

The arts of persuasion by prose had been elaborated in Athens within a single century. Aristotle himself was convincing evidence of the overweening power of the spoken word in classical Athens. And of the Athenian powers of creative self-consciousness. Prose was now a distinctive art, and Aristotle describes its powers with his usual common sense. While the sciences aimed at the certainty of Truth, rhetoric aimed only at the probable, to which men could be persuaded. Aristotle notes the three main forces of persuasion—the character of the speaker, the emotions of the audience, and the powers of logic (real or apparent). Like Isocrates he classifies the forms of oratory (political, forensic, and epideictic) according to when they were used, and he describes the best prose style for each.

Aristotle’s readable treatise on rhetoric reminds us that success as prose stylists rescued Plato and Aristotle and philosophy itself for Western humanistic education. The great philosophers from Heraclitus to William James and Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead were masters of prose. Their prose styles are almost as recognizable as their philosophic message. So they encompassed philosophy into the arts, making it everyone’s delight. Aristotle covered all literature in two works. His
Poetics
dealt with poetry in all its forms: tragedy, epic poetry, and comedy. His
Rhetoric
dealt with prose and “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” Both shaped Western thinking for fifteen hundred years.

To Aristotle’s theories, Demosthenes (382–322
B.C.
) provided real-life models for every form of public persuasion. What for Isocrates had been an art sharpening moral sensibilities became for Demosthenes a political weapon. The word “Philippic,” which we inherit from Demosthenes’ diatribes against King Philip of Macedon, expressed the dominant spirit of his oratory—the posture of attack. Son of a wealthy sword maker who died leaving a large inheritance when Demosthenes was only seven, he was put in the charge of guardians who embezzled his estate. When he was old enough to know what had been done to him, he spent years suing his guardians. He sought instruction in public speaking and might have taken Isocrates’ course if it had not been too expensive.

During this fruitless personal litigation Demosthenes made a living writing courtroom speeches for others. Legends clustered around his physical
weaknesses. It was said that he was not strong enough to join in the usual Greek course of gymnastic education, and that a speech defect (making him unable to pronounce the letter
p
) forced him into practicing for endless hours. It was said that he tried to remedy his defect by speaking with pebbles in his mouth or by running and then reciting verses while he was breathless. An eloquent champion of Athenian independence, he relentlessly opposed Philip of Macedon in his series of
Philippics
. But his masterpiece, revered by rhetoricians as perhaps “the greatest speech of the greatest orator of antiquity,” had a curious history. After the defeat of the Athenians at Chaeronea (338
B.C.
), his friend Ctesiphon persuaded the Council to pass a resolution honoring Demosthenes with a golden crown for his steadfast independence and patriotism. His lifelong enemy Aeschines countered with a personal attack on Ctesiphon, charging that the resolution was illegal and that Demosthenes himself and his intransigence were the real cause of Athens’s misfortunes.

In 330, when the case finally came to trial, Demosthenes defended himself against charges of indecision, bribe taking, and cowardice. His confrontation with Aeschines was the Great Rhetorical Exhibit of antiquity—judged by a public jury of at least five hundred citizens, with a large audience of idlers and curiosity seekers. In this, his most famous speech, “On the Crown,” Demosthenes defended the foreign policy he had unsuccessfully espoused for twenty years. Demosthenes won the jury’s vote by a vast majority, which forced the disgraced Aeschines into exile. And his speech became
the
rhetorical classic. Cicero wrote a prologue to it, and translated it into Latin, to be memorized by Roman schoolboys. Queen Elizabeth I, herself a master of the spoken word, took lessons from Demosthenes set by her teacher Roger Ascham.

But this champion of Athenian democracy was destined to die as the victim of the fickle populace. The fugitive treasurer of Alexander the Great, seeking asylum in Athens, brought a huge sum to bribe the Athenians to rebel against Alexander. When deposited in the Acropolis, half of it mysteriously disappeared. Demosthenes, one of the commissioners in charge, was accused, and was tried at his own request. Convicted, he was condemned to pay fifty talents. He retired into exile but was soon recalled. After the defeat of the Athenians near Crannon, in Thessaly, in 322
B.C.
he left the city again. He was condemned to death. Pursued by the Macedonian king Antipater, he took sanctuary in the temple of Neptune in Calauria. There, as Plutarch relates, he dreamed that he was acting in a tragedy. On awaking, he enacted the end of the tragedy by taking poison. The people of Athens erected his statue in brass, inscribed on the base:

Statesman and orator would be one as education became the culture of the immortal word.