his teachers.[1] He was a dignified old man, full of the most elevated sentiments. The style of his oratory had been formed after the florid Sicilian school of Gorgias, but was more severe and artistic than the earlier models of that school. He professed to inculcate what he called “philosophy,” but which was really a kind of thought standing half-way between pure speculative search for truth, like that of Plato, and the merely worldly and practical aims of the Sophists. It was a manly wisdom dealing with politics and morality, analogous to the reflections on such subjects in which Cicero afterwards indulged. The rhetorical school of Isocrates drew pupils from all parts of Greece, from Sicily, and even from Pontus. In it, says Cicero, “the eloquence of all Greece was trained and perfected.” The pupils remained in it sometimes three or four years; they paid a fee of 1000 drachme each (=1000 francs, or £40); and thus in his long life the master became one of the most opulent citizens of Athens. “Isocrates,” says Dionysus, “had the educating of the best of the youth of Greece,” and so many of his scholars became afterwards distinguished in various ways—as orators, statesmen, generals, historians, or philosophers—that a list of them was drawn up by Hermippus. Among the number was Speusippus, nephew to Plato, and afterwards his successor in the headship of the Academy. And yet it may readily be believed that there was small sympathy between the Academy and the school of Isocrates,
- ↑ See Professor Jebb’s ‘Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isæos,’ ii. 5.
