a celebrated Athenian orator, and the fourth in the order of the Alexandrian canon, was born at Athens n.c. 436. He was the son of Theodorus, a musical instrument maker in that city. As his father was a man of large means Isocrates had the benefit of the best training then to be had in his native city, and Tisias, Gorgias, Prodicus, and Tharamenes were among his teachers. A constitutional shyness and timidity which he tried in vain to overcome led him to abandon all hope of attaining eminence as a public speaker. But though he could not speak himself, none knew better than he the laws of oratory, or the best training for students of that art. In Chios, where he first established himself as a teacher of rhetoric, he did not succeed very well; but when he removed to Athens he was eagerly sought after, and counted among his scholars such men as Theopompus, Ephorus, Xenophon, Isaeus, and Demosthenes. Cicero somewhere observes that the house of Isocrates was a gymnasium, a workshop of words, open to the whole of Greece, and that from his school, as from the horse of Troy, had gone forth a troop of heroes. It became a fashion at Athens to attend his course, and the number of his pupils at last rose to 100, from each of whom he received 1000 drachmae. His terms were often complained of as extravagant; but when at the height of his fame he said that he would gladly pay 10,000 drachmae to any one who could give him a good voice and confidence to speak in public. At the age of 94 he wrote in the exordium of his Panathenaicus, "So utterly destitute am I of the two qualities most valued in an orator at Athens—voice and manner—that I believe no one of my time is in these respects so ill-provided as I." Certain it is that he was never known to speak in public but once. The orations which he wrote were either delivered by others or sent for private perusal to the persons to whom they were addressed, and in this way he amassed large means. Nicocles, king of Cyprus, gave him twenty talents for the oration Πρὸς Νοσκλέων. His persistent refusal to take any direct part in public affairs raised against him a host of enemies. To put an end to the slander that threw suspicion upon his motives, he determined in n.c. 352 to accept the triarchy—the most important and expensive of the extraordinary public services that could be undertaken by a private citizen. Isocrates fulfilled his self-imposed task with a splendid liberality that silenced his enemies, and made him for a time extremely popular. Another accusation charged him with maintaining too friendly and intimate a correspondence with kings, and letters of his are still extant to Philip and Alexander of Macedon. But his political views were too large and wide for any of the factions that then distracted Athens in common with the other states of southern Greece; and he never would identify himself with the politics of any party. His great desire was to see the Greeks (under that name he included all Isocrates, those who spoke the Greek tongue) banded together in a powerful league against their common foe of Persia.

Though a strong advocate of a peaceful policy he urged this war as the only means he could think of that would likely put an end to the wretched little wars in which the Greeks were wasting each other's strength, and which made the whole country an easy prey and a tempting bait to any rapacious neighbour. No better proof of his genuine patriotism can be adduced than his Panegyricus, which it is said that he spent ten years of his life in polishing and retouching. In this harangue (written while Athens was still suffering from the disasters of the Peloponnesian War) he expatiates in glowing terms on the glory and greatness of his native city, her exploits in war, her sufferings in the cause of Greece, and her splendid achievements in literature and the arts. With equal eloquence he enlarges on her services to civilization by her colonies in every corner of the Mediterranean, her management of them, and her development of the commercial resources of every country to which her splendid fleets could penetrate. A powerful appeal to Spartans and Athenians to lay aside their mutual enmity, and combine their forces against their common enemy of Persia, shows at once the genuineness of his patriotism and his enlarged political views. Though he was all his life a friend of peace, yet he was at the same time too much a friend of virtue to purchase it at the cost of honour. His conduct, in the case of his old friend and teacher Theramenes, suffices to refute the charge of personal cowardice sometimes brought against him. When Theramenes was condemned to death by the Thirty Tyrants, Isocrates was bold enough to risk his life in upholding and sympathizing with him. He had reached the great age of 98, when the battle of Charronea was fought, B.C. 338. The victory of the Macedonians extinguished for ever the liberties of Greece; and Isocrates, unwilling to survive the downfall of his country, died by his own act a few days after.

The general esteem in which Isocrates was held by the ancient critics is attested by the number of commentaries which were written upon his works. These, with the history of his school by Hermippus, have all long since perished. Of the sixty-eight orations, which in ancient times passed under the name of Isocrates, twenty-eight were acknowledged as genuine, and of these twenty-eight only twenty-one have come down to us. The titles and a few fragments of twenty-seven others ascribed to his pen have been preserved. Besides these orations, ten letters, bearing chiefly on the political questions of the day, are extant under his name; but some of them are undoubtedly spurious. Of the extant orations eight belong to the forensic class, and contain much valuable information on the civil law of Athens and the forms of legal procedure. Others of them belong to the hortatory or declamatory style; and all alike display the characteristic excellencies and defects of their author. In estimating these orations it must never be forgotten that they were not intended to be valued by their effect upon a miscellaneous audience, but upon the intelligent reader in his closet. He bestows great care on the arrangement and distribution of his subject. His language is always finically Attic. In the choice of his words he was hardly less fastidious than Charles Fox, who would use in his History no word that had not the stamp of Dryden's sanction. His periods are all rounded with consummate care. Every clause is scrupulously balanced with the other members of the sentence, and disposed so as to flow on in harmonious cadence with the whole. Indeed, Cicero expressly says that Isocrates was the first to study rhythm in the writing of prose. His words thus roll on melodiously, till their very melody cloys by its sweet monotony, and the reader begins to long for something more free and forcible, and less obviously artistic. Dionysius neatly decides between Lysias and Isocrates in a single line, when he says Isomerism that "the first pleases naturally, while the latter aims at pleasing." Yet this critic, severe as he is upon the finely modulated phrases and regular antithesis of Isocrates, does ample justice to the high moral tone and noble spirit of piety and virtue that breathe through all his works.

Few of the writers of Greece have been so often or so well edited by modern scholars as Isocrates. It appears, of course, in all the collections of the Attic Ten, and in a vast number of special editions. The best text is that of Bekker. The English edition of Battie, 1749, and the French edition of the Abbé Auger, 1782, are neither of them so good as they ought to have been from the MSS. which these scholars had at command. Coraës' edition, Paris, 1807; that of W. Lange, Halle, 1803; and that of Baier and Salzuppe, Zurich, 1869, are all good. G. S. Dobson published an excellent edition in London in 1828, with a Latin translation and copious notes. Isocrates has been translated into English by Sadeler; Dinsdale, Lond. 1752; and Gillies, Lond. 1778. The French translation of the Abbé Auger, the only one in that language, is regarded as a total failure. Excellent criticisms on the life and writings of Isocrates will be found in some of the works already named, and also in Westermann's History of Greek Oratory; Lecloup's Commentatio de Isocrate, Bonn, 1823; Pluvin's De Isocratis vitâ et scriptis; and Bréguigny's Vies des Anciens Orateurs Grecs.