Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/406

390 voluntary starvation. Milton (perhaps thinking -of Eli) seems to conceive the death of Isocrates as instantaneous As that dishonest victory At Chteronea, fatal to liberty, Killed with report that old man eloquent. Now the third of the letters which bears the name of Isocrates is addressed to Philip, and appears to congratulate him on his victory at Chaeronea, as being an event which will enable him to assume the leadership of Greece in a war against Persia. Is the letter genuine 1 ? There is no evidence, external or internal, against its authenticity, except its supposed inconsistency with the views of Isocrates and with the tradition of his suicide. As to his views, those who have studied them in his own writings will be disposed to question whether he would have regarded Philip s victory at Chaeronea as an irreparable disaster for Greece. Undoubtedly he would have deplored the conflict between Philip and Athens; but he would . have divided the blame between the combatants. And, with liis old belief in Philip, he would probably have hoped, even after Chseronea, that the new position won by Philip would eventually prove compatible with the inde pendence of the Greek cities, while it would certainly promote the project on which, as he was profoundly con vinced, the ultimate welfare of Greece depended, a Panhellenic expedition against Persia. As to the tradition of his suicide, the only rational mode of reconciling it with that letter is to suppose that Isocrates destroyed himself, not because Philip had conquered, but because, after that event, he saw Athens still resolved to resist. He might have felt that the moment was coming when duty to his native city would be in sharp conflict with his loyalty to one whom he regarded as the destined saviour of Greece ; nor would he have been the only man who has deliberately preferred death to the agony of a divided allegiance. We should be rather disposed to ask how much weight is to be given to the tradition itself. The earliest authority for it Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the age of Augustus- may have had older sources ; granting, however, that these may have remounted even to the end of the 4th century B.C., that would not prove much. Ancient biography usually contained a large alloy of unsifted popular gossip ; in particular it is strongly marked by a tendency to invent striking coincidences, or to adorn such as had actually occurred. Suppose that Isocrates being then ninety- eight, and an invalid had happened to die from natural causes a few days after the battle of Chseronea. Nothing could have originated more easily than a story that he killed himself from intense chagrin. Everyone knew that Isocrates had believed in Philip ; and most people would have thought that Chaeronea was a crushing refutation of that belief. Once started, the legend would have been sure to live, not merely because it was picturesque, but also because it served to accentuate the contrast between the false prophet and the true, between Isocrates and Demosthenes; and Demosthenes was very justly the national idol of the age which followed the loss of Greek independence. 1 Isocrates is said to have taught his Athenian pupil gratuitously, and to have taken money only from aliens but, as might have been expected, the fame of his schoo exposed him to attacks on the ground of his gains, which his enemies studiously exaggerated. After the financia" reform of 378 B.C., he was one of those 1200 richest citizens who constituted the twenty unions (ooy^noptai) for th assessment of the war-tax (eto-^opa). He had dischargee several public services (A.aToupyi ai) ; in particular, he hac ] The views of several modern critics on the tradition of the suicid are brought together in the Attic Orators, ii. 32, note 2. hrice served as trierarch. He married Plathane, the widow if the "sophist" Hippias of Elis, and then adopted her on Aphareus, afterwards eminent as a rhetorician and a ragic poet. In 355 B.C. he had his first and only lawsuit. A certain Megaclides challenged him to undertake the pierarchy, or exchange properties. This was the lawsuit vhich suggested the form of the discourse which he calls ,he Antidosis ("exchange of properties" 353 B.C.) his defence of his professional life. He was buried on a rising ground near the Cynosarges, a temenos of Heracles, with a gymnasion, on the east side of Athens, outside the Diomeian gate. His tomb was sur mounted by a column some 45 feet high, crowned with the igure of a siren, the symbol of persuasion and of death. A tablet of stone, near the column, represented a group of which Gorgias was the centre ; his pupil Isocrates stood at iis side. Aphareus erected a statue to his adopted father near the Olympieion. Timotheus, the illustrious son of onon, dedicated another in the temple of Eleusis. It was a wonderful century which the life of one man liad thus all but spanned, a century fuller than any other that could be named of great events both in the political and in the intellectual life of Greece. Isocrates had reached early manhood when the long struggle of the Peloponnesian . War begun in his childhood ended with the overthrow of Athens. The middle period of his career was passed under the supremacy of Sparta. His more advanced age saw that brief ascendency which the genius of Epaminondas secured to Thebes. And he lived to urge on Philip of Macedon a greater enterprise than any which the Hellenic world could offer. His early promise had won a glowing tributefrom Plato, and the rhetoric of his maturity furnished matter to the analysis of Aristotle ; he had composed his imaginary picture of that Hellenic host which should move through Asia in a pageant of sacred triumph, just as Xenophon was publishing his plain narrative of the retreat of the Ten Thousand; and, in the next generation, his literary eloquence was still demonstrating the weakness of Persia when Demosthenes was striving to make men feel the deadly peril of Greece. This long life has an element of pathos not unlike that of Greek tragedy ; a power above man was compelling events in a direction which Isocrates could not see ; but his own agency was the ally of that power, though in a sense which he knew not ; his vision was of Greece triumphant over Asia, while he was the unconscious prophet of an age in which Asia should be transformed by the diffusion of Hellenism. 2 A just estimate of Isocrates demands that his character H should be viewed in both its main aspects, the political P<- and the literary. c With regard to the first, two questions have to be asked : (1) How far were the political views of Isocrates peculiar to himself, and different from those of the clearest minds contemporary with him 1 (2) How far were those views which he held- singly, or in common with others falsified by the event ? 1. In regard to Hellenic politics at large, Isocrates held that they must go from bad to worse, unless the wrangling and demoralized cities could be united by the spell of a national enthusiasm, under the leadership of one strong state or one strong man. This national enthusiasm would be, he believed, most certainly evoked by a war against the great Asiatic empire of Persia. Such an expedition might well abolish the miserable squabbles of state with state, if only a captain could be found. 2 Isocrates, a loyal and gennine Hellene, can yet conceive of Hel lenic culture as shared by men not of Hellenic blood, Panegyr., 50. He is thus, as Ernst Curtius has ably shown, a forerunner of Hellenism analogous, in the literary province, to Epaminondas and Timotheus in the political (History of Greece, v. 116, 204, tr. Ward).