How far do Plato and Isocrates agree about the teaching of rhetoric?

Benedict Mee

Supplementary №1, Volume II

By 387 BC, Plato had founded his famous Academy in Athens.¹ Less well known today is another school, established a few years earlier, probably around 392 BC, by Isocrates.² While one of these teachers and his school remain renowned even today, the other has faded into relative obscurity. But it was not always so. Dionysius of Halicarnassus praised Isocrates as ‘outstanding among the famous men of his day and the teacher of the most eminent men in Athens and Greece.’³ To Cicero, Isocrates was ‘master of all rhetoricians’; in the eyes of Quintilian ‘we owe the greatest orators to the school of Isocrates.’⁴ By the mid fourth century BC, Plato’s Academy and Isocrates’ school were the two most prominent educational institutions in Athens.⁵ When Plato’s pupil Aristotle began criticising Isocrates in his lectures at Plato’s Academy, Isocrates’ pupils Kephisodorius and Theopompus retaliated, taking aim at Plato’s discourses.⁶ While there has been some debate on the depth of the hostility between Plato and Isocrates, it is most likely that, as their schools grew in parallel, a rivalry developed between these two eminent Athenian educators, as well as their pupils. This rivalry is reflected in their works, in which at various points each takes on the other (with varying degrees of subtlety).⁷ These works reveal a shared concern for the place of a rhetorical education in life, and a common approach touching on the relationship between an education in speaking and truth, its impact on the soul, and who the most successful students of oratory would be. Nevertheless, the two had differences in outlook which are not to be ignored. Plato has gone down in history as a ‘philosopher’, and fittingly he was much more concerned with philosophy than rhetoric, whose place in education (and indeed life itself) he felt should be secondary to philosophy. Isocrates approached the issue from the other direction, indeed he took oratory to be central to education, philosophy and life as a citizen.

Outwardly, Plato and Isocrates appeared to espouse very different views of an educational curriculum, and rhetoric’s place in it. Pupils at Plato’s Academy were taught a wide curriculum which centred on philosophy and mathematics (tradition has it that the motto ‘let no one unschooled in geometry enter’ was inscribed above the entrance – the breadth of study was literally lapidary). Isocrates, on the other hand, looked down upon other areas of study. While he admitted they might be useful training for the mind, he felt subjects like geometry were of little lasting benefit.⁸ Students of these kinds of things gained no practical skills. That does not mean, however, that Isocrates thought that acquiring skill in rhetoric was the sole purpose of an education. His curriculum was certainly broader than a simple check-list of speaking techniques. Not only did Dionysius of Halicarnassus say of Isocrates’ pupils that they were distinguished in politics, public life, and even as Historians; Isocrates positioned himself as a teacher of quite a broad area.⁹ He positioned himself as a rhetorical teacher in opposition to prevailing methods in his manifesto Against the Sophists, published shortly after his school was founded. In it, he levelled three main criticisms of the sophists’ curriculum. Firstly, Isocrates said that they simply doled out analogies for their pupils to learn and apply, unsuited to the circumstances of individual speeches.¹⁰ Secondly, he criticised teachers of rhetoric who did not examine the nature of the knowledge they imparted, with the result that their pupils parroted what they had learned by rote, rather than thinking for themselves.¹¹ The third criticism Isocrates levelled at these sophists was that they had ‘no interest in truth’ in what they taught.¹² Against the Sophists was a manifesto for his teaching, designed to distinguish himself from his competitors and advertise his own methods of teaching.¹³ Clearly, his own pupils could expect a course of studies which taught them not only to think individually and originally, but develop an understanding of both ‘the nature of knowledge’ and the truth behind how they were being taught to speak. Isocrates set out then, to teach his pupils the foundations of the subjects on which they might speak. Moreover, in Against the Sophists, Isocrates is also critical of the sophists’ philosophical teachings, and takes particular aim at the Eristics, who taught ethics.¹⁴ So, given all this and the topics of his own surviving orations – as well as the common applications of rhetoric in the assembly and the law courts – it is plausible that Isocrates’ curriculum could have included History and Politics as well as perhaps even some Philosophy. We cannot know for sure what the curriculum at Isocrates’ school was, just as we are unsure of the Academy’s precise syllabus. What is clear, however, is that while Isocrates’ view of education prioritised rhetoric more than Plato’s Academy, and definitely did not teach mathematics, it was not as unlike the Academy as it might first seem. The broader educational context was crucial to both Plato’s and Isocrates’ approaches to teaching rhetoric.

Isocrates’ concerns with other rhetorical instructors’ disregard for truth (mentioned above) were very much shared by Plato. If anything, Plato was more vehement than Isocrates in his criticism of what he saw as sophists’ dishonesty. Plato repeatedly complained that in public speaking ‘what is true’ had been replaced by ‘what is probable’; it had reached such a ridiculous point, he claimed, that innocent defendants in court would neglect to say what actually happened, because it was better to say something which would have seemed more likely to the jurors.¹⁵ Plato and Isocrates both agreed, too, that sophists’ claims to teach virtue with their rhetorical education was misleading. For instance, the argument that sophists would not have to complain, as they frequently did, of injuries from their pupils – unpaid wages, unfulfilled contracts, and the like – if they had actually taught their pupils to be virtuous is one common to both Plato and Isocrates.¹⁶ Some scholars have found Plato’s criticisms on this subject to be more compelling than Isocrates’. Plato was ‘more vehement’, and raised these criticisms more frequently than Isocrates who only took issue with such methods when he was trying to distinguish himself from other teachers and attract students.¹⁷ I note, however, that these criticisms recur in Isocrates’ Antidosis published forty years later after Against the Sophist. Both Plato and Isocrates then, set out to teach differently to the sophists, and fiercely criticise other methods of rhetorical education.

Nevertheless, Isocrates and Plato disagreed with each other on how the truth and virtue lacking in their competitors’ methods could be taught to orators. While Isocrates does express concern for the truth, Plato is much more ideologically strict. For Plato, truth is absolute and irrefutable.¹⁸ We must strive to reach that truth through dialectic, and any other method is insufficient. So before any of the Academy’s pupils could hope to give a true speech (and speeches, as we have established, ought to be true), he must have undergone a rigorous dialectic education. Isocrates on the other hand did not think it was possible, or at least realistically practical, to achieve certain knowledge on all events.¹⁹ Instead, the student of rhetoric ought to use his experience and conjecture to determine the likely truth of what he was planning to say. Indeed, Isocrates proposes that such a method is usually more consistent in reaching the truth than those who profess to have exact knowledge.²⁰ So Isocrates wanted orators to be taught to make reasonable judgements, but in Plato’s view they ought to have a philosophically rigorous dialectic education and reach the truth before applying rhetoric to a topic.

This difference in thinking extended, too, to how the two thought students of rhetoric could be virtuous. As former pupils of Socrates, both Plato and Isocrates saw being virtuous as comprising at least in part the cultivation of the psuche (i.e. the metaphysical component of our existence, usually translated as soul or mind).²¹ Both Plato and Isocrates separated the psuche from the physical body, and both frequently analogised the two: both saw educating the mind as comparable to, and even more important than, physical training and medicine for the body. But to Plato an education in rhetoric in itself was of little benefit to the psuche. As cooking is to medicine, rhetoric is to cultivating the psuche: a ‘flattery’ which provides some pleasure but does not address what is actually good for one’s health.²² But Isocrates was certain that his pupils’ psuche benefited immensely from a rhetorical education, because the aim of rhetoric is to persuade, and people are most persuaded by those who are most virtuous in life.²³ His pupils would, therefore, strive to be virtuous in their lives in order to be more persuasive. Presumably his school offered some instruction in which behaviours were moral (and therefore persuasive). Indeed, he was so certain that his method of education inspired virtue that he urged a hypothetical jury to convict him at once if just one of his pupils was a bad man.²⁴ Plato, too, thought rhetorical teachers were to blame if their former pupils turned out as bad eggs: Gorgias, one of Socrates’ interlocutors in the eponymous dialogue, is made to say unconvincingly that he is not to blame for his pupils’ misdemeanours.²⁵ To Plato however, what they needed was not the better rhetorical education Isocrates thought he provided, but a foundation in Plato’s dialectic before they were taught rhetoric.

Plato saw the cultivation of the psuche as the central goal of all education, including in rhetoric. As the body must be kept healthy, so must the psuche: the consequences otherwise would be felt in the afterlife when one is judged on the basis of the psuche by Minos and Rhadamanthus (those with the best psuche would be sent to the Isles of the Blessed; those with the worst to suffer in Tartarus).²⁶ Since, as we have seen, Plato did not think an education in rhetoric nourished the psuche in itself, rhetorical education should be pursued less than the education in dialectic philosophy that would nourish the soul. Rhetoric could be useful, however, to teach psuche-nourishing things to the layman, which may have been one of the reasons Plato allowed lectures on rhetoric in his Academy (entire afternoons were even devoted to the lectures given by Aristotle which became his treatise On Rhetoric).²⁷ Isocrates was not blind to the needs of the psuche, though, and as we have seen thought a proper rhetorical education could help those ‘in the hands of the Gods.’²⁸

Nourishment of the psuche was not, however, Isocrates’ only reason for teaching rhetoric. He placed far more emphasis on the practical political benefits of a polis full of great orators.²⁹ Throughout his works political achievements, especially of Athens, are attributed to those well trained in rhetoric: from Solon to Pericles, all the major political highpoints are ascribed to ‘excellent orators’; conversely defeat in the Peloponnesian War, and the Spartan occupation of the acropolis, along with other ‘great misfortunes’ are ascribed to speakers who are incorrectly educated and so ‘full of insolence’. Isocrates dealt with what he saw as the most pressing political concern, the urgency of Panhellenic unity, consistently and vigorously throughout his career, and clearly hoped that his pupils would too use the oratory he taught them to the good of the polis. ‘Our every act,’ he urged, should be ‘to enable us to govern wisely our own household and commonwealth’, and went so far as to say that ‘those who ignore our practical needs’ in their studies do not deserve the title ‘students of philosophy.’³⁰ (He was adamant that his own teaching of rhetoric was ‘philosophy’.) Isocrates was so convinced of the importance of the education he offered to the polis he reportedly did not charge Athenian citizens to attend his school, living instead off fees from foreigners and wealthy donors.³¹ Plato’s Academy, too, may not have charged citizens, and he is known to have received donations from the same wealthy foreigners as Isocrates.³² His mission, however, was much less public spirited than Isocrates. Disgusted by how the polis had treated his mentor Socrates, Plato turned away from public politics and devoted his teaching only to philosophy to enhance the individual psuche.³³

The differences between Plato’s and Isocrates’ views on a rhetorical education are perhaps best encapsulated in their differing approaches to rhetorical style. Isocrates thought that style was essential to a good speech. We have already seen his criticism of other rhetorical educators for their failure to impart good style, instead teaching their pupils stock phrases and unimaginative analogies. Isocrates consistently treated good speeches like poetry.³⁴ Indeed, a sense of poetry pervades Isocrates’ own works. Balanced clauses and antitheses give a rhythm that some have criticised him for prioritising over clarity of meaning. Plato, on the other hand, thought that stylistic form must follow function. By cutting out redundant stylistic features the philosophical meat was exposed, for instance when Socrates asks Gorgias to prioritise brevity over his usual long style for the sake of productive discourse.³⁵ An abundance of style, Plato felt, could obscure or distract from the central issues of a speech – even Socrates himself is distracted by rhetorical acrobatics in the speech Phaedrus recites, and loses focus of the main argument.³⁶ Plato did, however, put a speech in more exuberant style the mouth of his hero Socrates in the dialogue Phaedrus. Socrates mocks his own overblown style, worrying he will soon be speaking in poetry and making tongue in cheek parodies of epic.³⁷ All this silliness, he complains, Phaedrus had foisted upon him.³⁸ This is because style must, Plato felt, adapt to circumstance: Socrates could not persuade Phaedrus with dry philosophical pronouncements. Isocrates agreed that good speeches needed to adapt to circumstances and audiences to persuade and entertain the audience.³⁹ While Plato felt that students of rhetoric had to be able to speak poetically when the occasion demanded it, they learned to do so not because of the inherent value that Isocrates saw in beautiful speeches, but because those speeches could be in service of Plato’s philosophy.

If Plato and Isocrates did not think pupils should study rhetorical techniques for the same reasons, their views on who would be good at studying them were notwithstanding remarkably aligned. They both agreed, as discussed above, that knowledge is crucial for a good speech. In order to become a truly ‘finished’ orator, however, Plato suggested a pupil needs both innate ability and practice.⁴⁰ Isocrates agreed that ‘the practical experience and innate ability of the student’ were very important in becoming a good performer.⁴¹ He added, too, confidence, (though that may be said to be part of innate ability) and even refused to perform himself for fear he lacked presence, instead opting to publish his would be speeches in (some of the world’s first) political pamphlets. Both Plato and Isocrates operated elite institutions; the Academy was not open to all, and Isocrates limited the number of his pupils to nine at a time.⁴² Only those with the abilities they sought were educated by both, despite – or perhaps because of – their respective missions to enhance the psuche and the polis.

Although at first glance they apparently reached very different conclusions, Plato’s and Isocrates’ thoughts covered similar areas in their considerations of a rhetorical education, and in much the same way, and with the same result of founding a school in which their methods could be taught. They were aligned in their criticisms of the sophists. They were both concerned by the lack of truth in rhetoric, and both discussed whether there might be epistemological benefits to an education in speaking. Both, perhaps as a result of the influence their shared teacher Socrates, considered the impact of rhetorical training on the pupil’s psuche. Both were worried with the potentially dangerous misuse of rhetoric, and the responsibilities of the teacher for it. However, Plato did not see a training in rhetoric alone as particularly valuable; his students focused on matters that would enhance their psuche. Isocrates saw an education centred on rhetoric – though encompassing a broader curriculum – as one of the key ways to nourish students’ psuche, as well as create valuable works of poetic beauty, and – most importantly – address matters of key concern to the polis. To Plato, an education in rhetoric was secondary to his dialectic philosophy and at best a tool to be applied (according to circumstance) to spread philosophical teachings. He even has Socrates express the hope to Phaedrus that the promising young Isocrates abandons his current course and turns towards proper dialectic philosophy.⁴³ (A hope that the audience knows is unfulfilled.) To Isocrates, however, an education in speaking was philosophy, and philosophy of a more valuable kind than one without practical application. Most importantly however, Plato and Isocrates agreed on the bigger picture of a rhetorical education. Both Plato and Isocrates presided over the first prominent institutions teaching rhetoric to a select group of pupils selected based on their talent and proficiency for hard work. They both recognised that if would-be pupils of rhetoric were to be taken out of the hands of the sophists and receive an education on what they thought mattered (the benefit of the psuche and polis respectively), they needed to found institutions that taught rhetoric.

Bibliography

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