THE RHETORS--ISOCRATES.
§ 57. It is argued by many scholars, who believe all that Plato says
literally, and who think that the dark pictures of Thucydides apply
only to his own day, and not to previous generations, that the Greeks
were so degraded and debauched by this sophistic tampering with
religion and morals, by this scepticism in philosophy, and by the
rise of radicalism in politics, as to present from this time onward
(430 B.C.) the symptoms of a decaying race. The Athenian State, in
particular, is supposed to have lost its splendor and its seriousness,
and to be now a mere mob-rule, far removed from the democracy, tempered
with despotism, which made it so great under Pericles. This view, which
is strongly urged, for example, in Curtius’s “History of Greece,” is
based altogether on the complaints of Plato and Aristophanes, and the
impression produced by the history of the aristocratic Thucydides,
by Xenophon, and by the plays of Euripides. This is not the place to
refute the theory generally, as has been done by Grote, who shows
that never was the Athenian democracy so enlightened and moderate in
policy as in the period after the close of the great war (403 B.C.).
But in the particular department before us, that of education, we have
already seen that this period after the Peloponnesian war is exactly
the period when the sophistic higher education began to be discarded
as superficial and even morally questionable, and the task of training
the keener and more ambitious youth passed into the hands of greater
specialists--either philosophers like Plato and his followers, or
rhetoricians like Isocrates and Antiphon. Socrates forms the connecting
link between the Sophists and the philosophic schools. Isocrates is
hardly such a link, though he professes to be the philosopher in the
guise of a rhetorician. Though he inveighed against his rivals the
Sophists, he is hardly to be distinguished from them save in his being
fixed at Athens, in his avoidance of displays (from natural inability
rather than from choice), and in his declared conservatism in religion
and politics, as contrasted with their scepticism. It is not just that
the eminent respectability of Isocrates personally should be urged as
another difference, when we adopt the fair view of the high characters
of the leading Sophists. Isocrates, whose views are fortunately
preserved in his own very diffuse advocacy of them, was strictly a
university teacher; and so well recognized was this that _a pupil of
Isocrates_ meant something like our A.B. Oxon. For he had a regular
course, and charged a considerable fee for his lessons. His pupils came
from all parts of Greece, and stayed with him a considerable time.
Moreover, he could boast that the most famous public men had been
educated by him, and owned his influence in after-days. This higher
education he called _philosophy_, and he only differed from other
professed Sophists (he says) in the modesty of his promises, and his
distinct admission that he undertook merely to improve natural talent,
not to change a stupid and ignorant youth into a man of acuteness and
power.
§ 58. There is an interesting passage in the speech in vindication of
his life,[52] which gives so clear a view of the prevailing opinions
about higher education at Athens that I will transcribe it freely:
“The ordinary attacks made upon us are of two kinds. Some say that
going to the Sophists for education is mere arrant imposture; never
has there been any system of training discovered by which a man can
become abler in speech or wiser in deed, since all who excel in these
respects differ by nature from the rest of mankind. The other objectors
concede that those who submit to this training become indeed abler, but
in a bad sense, and coupled with moral loss; for when they gain power,
they use it to injure their neighbors. I will now refute both these
objections.
“First, let us consider the absurdity of those who decry all higher
education. They revile it, indeed, as worth nothing, and mere deceit
and imposture, but yet demand from us that our pupils, as soon as
they come, should show a complete change, that after a few days’
intercourse with us they should appear better in discourse and abler
than their elders in age and experience; but if they stay one whole
year, they should all be perfect orators--the idle as well as the
diligent, the commonplace as well as the gifted. This they expect from
us, though we never have made such promises, and though it contradicts
the analogy of all other kinds of training, in which results are
acquired with difficulty, and each with a various measure of success,
so that some two or three only out of all the schools of all kinds
turn out thoroughly proficient, while the rest remain mere average
amateurs. Accordingly, the objectors are silly enough to demand from
a training, which they call unreal, an influence unknown in the
recognized instruction of all arts and sciences! Our teaching, then,
is discredited for accomplishing exactly what the other arts do. For
which of you does not know that many of those put under the Sophists
were not imposed upon, as is alleged, but have become, some of them,
real experts in public life, others able instructors of youth, and even
those who chose to remain in private life more polished in manners than
they had been, and more accurate critics of arguments as well as of
most ordinary things?
“How, then, can a pursuit be fairly despised which has produced such
results? for do not all men confess this, that those are to be esteemed
the most thoroughly versed in their art or handicraft who can make
their apprentices as good workmen as themselves? Now, in philosophy
this very thing has happened. For as many as happened on a genuine
and sensible guide will be found to have such a family likeness in
their way of expressing themselves that any one can tell they have
come from the same trainer. This similarity of type is conclusive
evidence of the method and system to which they have been subjected.
So, too, any of you could mention fellow-pupils who, as children, were
the most ignorant of their fellows, but as they advanced in age became
far superior in good sense and in eloquence to those once far ahead of
them.”
The orator goes on, with his usual elegant diffuseness, to make many
other developments of the same leading idea, all of which might be
used with hardly a word of change by any one defending our university
education against the vulgar objectors who think that vast sums of time
and money are spent upon it, with little or no result. Nor is the good
which he does claim for his higher education anything different from
what our universities could claim, apart from the material good of
prizes and degrees.
§ 59. The peculiar position of Isocrates was that of opposition to
both Sophists and philosophers, and yet of likeness to both. He joined
the Sophists in urging sceptical objections to the subtle theories of
the metaphysicians, and in commenting upon the small outcome of their
elaborate speculations. He joined the philosophers in attacking the
boastful claims of the Sophists, who pretended to teach everything.
But he joined with the more practical side in putting a training in
rhetoric--a training in style--above everything. There were many
reasons why this should be the case with higher education at Athens.
In an age when books were scarce, and a reading public small; when the
power of publicism only existed for poets, and when all State affairs
were settled by discussion either in the assembly or in private
meetings--in such a society a power of clear and elegant utterance was
the highest and best outcome of education. Nor could any man then be
considered educated who lacked that power, just as nowadays no man is
called educated who cannot write correct English; and, furthermore, the
writing of elegant English is justly accounted to indicate a thorough
and general culture. For we are such severe judges in this matter,
everybody thinks himself in this so well able to appreciate beauty and
pick out defects, that a man who can pass through the fire of criticism
unscathed must indeed be equipped with no ordinary preparation, and
may be pronounced a really cultivated man. This will explain to us the
enormous importance of rhetoric in Isocrates’ system--an importance,
perhaps, enhanced by his feeling that here he was really able to do
great and unique service. He evidently depended on natural mother wit
to suggest ideas to his pupils; he apparently assumed that they had
learned the ordinary elements of culture at their primary schools. He
trained them, so far as we know, in nothing but the careful arrangement
of their materials, the smooth transition of their arguments, and the
perfection of their choice and collocation of words. In this matter of
style, Isocrates may be regarded as not only the greatest master that
ever lived, but as the father of the periodic or oratorical style in
all the languages of Europe. Demosthenes, Cicero, St. John Chrysostom,
Massillon, Burke--all these immortal men have profited by the analysis
of expression which, through Isocrates, first formed Greek prose, and
through it the borrowed graces of those who followed Greek models.
§ 60. To enter into a closer description of this system would not be
to discuss education, but rhetoric, and we must refer the reader to
treatises on that subject. We need only here call attention to the
intense _studiedness_ of Greek eloquence, and how they attained their
perfection in prose--not by those violations of propriety which now
please our sated taste, and which, when violent enough, as in the
case of Carlyle, even pass for thoughts, and are to many the index of
deep originality in something or other--but by a close and perpetual
adherence to rules, often of a trivial, generally of a minute kind.
It is very curious for us moderns to read the details of these things
in the old rhetoricians. There is not an apparent touch of nature--a
word emphatically repeated, a sudden break off, an angry burst,
even a _don’t you see?_ or a _by Jove!_ or a _dear me!_--in a Greek
oration which was not noted as a _figure of diction_, or a _figure of
thought_, and brought under the discipline of rules. We are even told
that Demosthenes composed his prose in rhythm, and avoided the use
of more than two short syllables together. Isocrates certainly made
the law against hiatus--against closing a word and beginning the next
with vowels--a law adopted by all the prose writers of his age. Thus
the formal education in rhetoric must have been no light task for the
pupils of Isocrates and the other rhetors, and writing or speaking good
Greek a far stricter and more difficult thing than writing English
which will pass muster with the critics.
§ 61. Still, there is room for surprise that the _matter_ of higher
education, the ideas to be acquired, should have been introduced
indirectly under the guise of preparation for public speaking. No
doubt, this was an artificial and unnatural order of things. To
subordinate the matter of knowledge to the form is always a mistake.
But we may at least conceive the position of Isocrates’ pupils if
we compare it with that of the popular preachers, so powerful a
generation ago, and even now playing no unimportant part in society. I
have known more than one of these eminent men who educated themselves
with great care generally, and in all directions, for the purpose of
supplying themselves with matter for their discourses. And this is
very well-meant, legitimate, and honest education, though perverted in
order, and, like that of Isocrates, not likely to lead to really deep
and thorough knowledge. We are told that in the present day there are
people who read all kinds of books for the purpose of solving double
acrostics, and I have heard men of intelligence advocate this foolish
kind of riddles as promoting general education!
Thus the school of Isocrates stood side by side, and in rivalry, with
the schools of Plato and Aristotle, as one in which elegance of form,
and a superficial but graceful culture, was given to the higher youth,
instead of the exact science and metaphysic which unfitted men for
public life. It was a contrast somewhat like the Oxford and Cambridge
type in England. Isocrates’ own failure as a politician, and the little
influence which his open letters on politics attained, made the wiser
portion of men drift away still farther from the sophistic aspect
of his teaching, from the mixture of philosophy and politics with
rhetoric; and so they again subdivided their training into strictly
rhetorical, such as had already been begun by Lysias and was carried
out by Isæus, and the philosophical, for which an increasing number
of schools now offered themselves. As the political power of Greece
decayed, and its literary and artistic splendor became universally
recognized, Athens became an educational centre, to which youths from
all parts of the civilized world flocked for their training. This
later history of Greek culture will occupy us in our last chapter. But
we must first give a brief account of the deeper theories of State
education which Plato and Aristotle have left us, in contrast to the
shallow popularity of Isocrates.
FOOTNOTES:
[52] Περὶ ἀντιδόσεως, p. 98 sq.