CHAPTER IX.
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.