THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA

A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE AND GENERAL INFORMATION

ELEVENTH EDITION

VOLUME XIV SLICE VIII
Isabnormal Lines to Italic

Articles in This Slice

ISABNORMAL (or Isanomalous) LINES, in physical geography, lines upon a map or chart connecting places having an abnormal temperature. Each place has, theoretically, a proper temperature due to its latitude, and modified by its configuration. Its mean temperature for a particular period is decided by observation and called its normal temperature. Isabnormal lines may be used to denote the variations due to warm winds or currents, great altitudes or depressions, or great land masses as compared with sea. Or they may be used to indicate the abnormal result of weather observations made in an area such as the British Isles for a particular period.

ISAEUS (c. 420 B.C.-c. 350 B.C.), Attic orator, the chronological limits of whose extant work fall between the years 390 and 353 B.C., is described in the Plutarchic life as a Chalcidian; by Suidas, whom Dionysius follows, as an Athenian. The accounts have been reconciled by supposing that his family sprang from the settlement (κληρουχία) of Athenian citizens among whom the lands of the Chalcidian hippobotae (knights) had been divided about 509 B.C. In 411 B.C. Euboea (except Oreos) revolted from Athens; and it would not have been strange if residents of Athenian origin had then migrated from the hostile island to Attica. Such a connexion with Euboea would explain the non-Athenian name Diagoras which is borne by the father of Isaeus, while the latter is said to have been “an Athenian by descent” (Ἀθηναῖος τὸ γένος). So far as we know, Isaeus took no part in the public affairs of Athens. “I cannot tell,” says Dionysius, “what were the politics of Isaeus—or whether he had any politics at all.” Those words strikingly attest the profound change which was passing over the life of the Greek cities. It would have been scarcely possible, fifty years earlier, that an eminent Athenian with the powers of Isaeus should have failed to leave on record some proof of his interest in the political concerns of Athens or of Greece. But now, with the decline of personal devotion to the state, the life of an active citizen had ceased to have any necessary contact with political affairs. Already we are at the beginning of that transition which is to lead from the old life of Hellenic citizenship to that Hellenism whose children are citizens of the world.

Isaeus (who was born probably about 420 B.C.) is believed to have been an early pupil of Isocrates, and he certainly was a student of Lysias. A passage of Photius has been understood as meaning that personal relations had existed between Isaeus and Plato, but this view appears erroneous.[1] The profession of Isaeus was that of which Antiphon had been the first representative at Athens—that of a λογογράφος, who composed speeches which his clients were to deliver in the law-courts. But, while Antiphon had written such speeches chiefly (as Lysias frequently) for public causes, it was with private causes that Isaeus was almost exclusively concerned. The fact marks the progressive subdivision of labour in his calling, and the extent to which the smaller interests of private life now absorbed the attention of the citizen.

The most interesting recorded event in the career of Isaeus is one which belongs to its middle period—his connexion with Demosthenes. Born in 384 B.C., Demosthenes attained his civic majority in 366. At this time he had already resolved to prosecute the fraudulent guardians who had stripped him of his patrimony. In prospect of such a legal contest, he could have found no better ally than Isaeus. That the young Demosthenes actually resorted to his aid is beyond reasonable doubt. But the pseudo-Plutarch embellishes the story after his fashion. He says that Demosthenes, on coming of age, took Isaeus into his house, and studied with him for four years—paying him the sum of 10,000 drachmas (about £400), on condition that Isaeus should withdraw from a school of rhetoric which he had opened, and devote himself wholly to his new pupil. The real Plutarch gives us a more sober and a more probable version. He simply states that Demosthenes “employed Isaeus as his master in rhetoric, though Isocrates was then teaching, either (as some say) because he could not pay Isocrates the prescribed fee of ten minae, or because he preferred the style of Isaeus for his purpose, as being vigorous and astute” (δραστήριον καὶ πανοῦργον). It may be observed that, except by the pseudo-Plutarch, a school of Isaeus is not mentioned,—for a notice in Plutarch need mean no more than that he had written a textbook, or that his speeches were read in schools;[2] nor is any other pupil named. As to Demosthenes, his own speeches against Aphobus and Onetor (363-362 B.C.) afford the best possible gauge of the sense and the measure in which he was the disciple of Isaeus; the intercourse between them can scarcely have been either very close or very long. The date at which Isaeus died can only be conjectured from his work; it may be placed about 350 B.C.

Isaeus has a double claim on the student of Greek literature. He is the first Greek writer who comes before us as a consummate master of strict forensic controversy. He also holds a most important place in the general development of practical oratory, and therefore in the history of Attic prose. Antiphon marks the beginning of that development, Demosthenes its consummation. Between them stand Lysias and Isaeus. The open, even ostentatious, art of Antiphon had been austere and rigid. The concealed art of Lysias had charmed and persuaded by a versatile semblance of natural grace and simplicity. Isaeus brings us to a final stage of transition, in which the gifts distinctive of Lysias were to be fused into a perfect harmony with that masterly art which receives its most powerful expression in Demosthenes. Here, then, are the two cardinal points by which the place of Isaeus must be determined. We must consider, first, his relation to Lysias; secondly, his relation to Demosthenes.

A comparison of Isaeus and Lysias must set out from the distinction between choice of words (λέξις) and mode of putting words together (σύνθεσις). In choice of words, diction, Lysias and Isaeus are closely alike. Both are clear, pure, simple, concise; both have the stamp of persuasive plainness (ἀφέλεια), and both combine it with graphic power (ἐνάργεια). In mode of putting words together, composition, there is, however a striking difference. Lysias threw off the stiff restraints of the earlier periodic style, with its wooden monotony; he is too fond indeed of antithesis always to avoid a rigid effect; but, on the whole, his style is easy, flexible and various; above all, its subtle art usually succeeds in appearing natural. Now this is just what the art of Isaeus does not achieve. With less love of antithesis than Lysias, and with a diction almost equally pure and plain, he yet habitually conveys the impression of conscious and confident art. Hence he is least effective in adapting his style to those characters in which Lysias peculiarly excelled—the ingenuous youth, the homely and peace-loving citizen. On the other hand, his more open and vigorous art does not interfere with his moral persuasiveness where there is scope for reasoned remonstrance, for keen argument or for powerful denunciation. Passing from the formal to the real side of his work, from diction and composition to the treatment of subject-matter, we find the divergence wider still. Lysias usually adheres to a simple four-fold division—proem, narrative, proof, epilogue. Isaeus frequently interweaves the narrative with the proof.[3] He shows the most dexterous ingenuity in adapting his manifold tactics to the case in hand, and often “out-generals” (καταστρατηγεῖ) his adversary by some novel and daring disposition of his forces. Lysias, again, usually contents himself with a merely rhetorical or sketchy proof; Isaeus aims at strict logical demonstration, worked out through all its steps. As Sir William Jones well remarks, Isaeus lays close siege to the understandings of the jury.[4]

Such is the general relation of Isaeus to Lysias. What, we must next ask, is the relation of Isaeus to Demosthenes? The Greek critic who had so carefully studied both authors states his own view in broad terms when he declares that “the power of Demosthenes took its seeds and its beginnings from Isaeus” (Dion. Halic. Isaeus, 20). A closer examination will show that within certain limits the statement may be allowed. Attic prose expression had been continuously developed as an art; the true link between Isaeus and Demosthenes is technical, depending on their continuity. Isaeus had made some original contributions to the resources of the art; and Demosthenes had not failed to profit by these. The composition of Demosthenes resembles that of Isaeus in blending terse and vigorous periods with passages of more lax and fluent ease, as well as in that dramatic vivacity which is given by rhetorical question and similar devices. In the versatile disposition of subject-matter, the divisions of “narrative” and “proof” being shifted and interwoven according to circumstances, Demosthenes has clearly been instructed by the example of Isaeus. Still more plainly and strikingly is this so in regard to the elaboration of systematic, proof; here Demosthenes invites direct and close comparison with Isaeus by his method of drawing out a chain of arguments, or enforcing a proposition by strict legal argument. And, more generally, Demosthenes is the pupil of Isaeus, though here the pupil became even greater than the master, in that faculty of grappling with an adversary’s case point by point, in that aptitude for close and strenuous conflict which is expressed by the words ἀγών, ἐναγώνιος.[5]

The pseudo-Plutarch, in his life of Isaeus, mentions an Art of Rhetoric and sixty-four speeches, of which fifty were accounted genuine. From a passage of Photius it appears that at least[6] the fifty speeches of recognized authenticity were extant as late as A.D. 850. Only eleven, with a large part of a twelfth, have come down to us; but the titles of forty-two[7] others are known.[8]

The titles of the lost speeches confirm the statement of Dionysius that the speeches of Isaeus were exclusively forensic; and only three titles indicate speeches made in public causes. The remainder, concerned with private causes, may be classed under six heads:—(1) κληρικοί—cases of claim to an inheritance; (2) ἐπικληρικοί—cases of claim to the hand of an heiress; (3) διαδικασίαι—cases of claim of property; (4) ἀποστασίου—cases of claim to the ownership of a slave; (5) ἐγγύης—action brought against a surety whose principal had made default; (6) ἀντωμοσία (as = παραγραφή)—a special plea; (7) ἔφεσις—appeal from one jurisdiction to another.

Eleven of the twelve extant speeches belong to class (1), the κληρικοί, or claims to an inheritance. This was probably the branch of practice in which Isaeus had done his most important and most characteristic work. And, according to the ancient custom, this class of speeches would therefore stand first in the manuscript collections of his writings. The case of Antiphon is parallel: his speeches in cases of homicide (φονικοί) were those on which his reputation mainly depended, and stood first in the manuscripts. Their exclusive preservation, like that of the speeches made by Isaeus in will-cases, is thus primarily an accident of manuscript tradition, but partly also the result of the writer’s special prestige.

Six of the twelve extant speeches are directly concerned with claims to an estate; five others are connected with legal proceedings arising out of such a claim. They may be classified thus (the name given in each case being that of the person whose estate is in dispute):

I. Trials of Claim to an Inheritance (διαδικασίαι).

1. Or. i., Cleonymus. Date between 360 and 353 B.C.

2. Or. iv., Nicostratus. Date uncertain.

3. Or. vii., Apollodorus. 353 B.C.

4. Or. viii., Ciron. 375 B.C.

5. Or. ix., Astyphilus. 369 B.C. (c. 390, Schömann).

6. Or. x., Aristarchus. 377-371 B.C. (386-384, Schömann).

II. Actions for False Witness (δίκαι ψευδομαρτυριῶν).

1. Or. ii., Menecles. 354 B.C.

2. Or. iii., Pyrrhus. Date uncertain, but comparatively late.

3. Or. vi., Philoctemon. 364-363 B.C.

III. Action to Compel the Discharge of a Suretyship (ἐγγύης δίκη).

Or. v., Dicaeogenes. 390 B.C.

IV. Indictment of a Guardian for Maltreatment of a Ward (εἰσαγγελία κακώσεως ὀρφανοῦ).

Or. xi., Hagnias. 359 B.C.

V. Appeal from Arbitration to a Dicastery (ἔφεσις).

Or. xii., For Euphiletus. (Incomplete.) Date uncertain.

The speeches of Isaeus supply valuable illustrations to the early history of testamentary law. They show us the faculty of adoption, still, indeed, associated with the religious motive in which it originated, as a mode of securing that the sacred rites of the family shall continue to be discharged by one who can call himself the son of the deceased. But practically the civil aspect of adoption is, for the Athenian citizen, predominant over the religious; he adopts a son in order to bestow property on a person to whom he wishes to bequeath it. The Athenian system, as interpreted by Isaeus, is thus intermediate, at least in spirit, between the purely religious standpoint of the Hindu and the maturer form which Roman testamentary law had reached before the time of Cicero.[9] As to the form of the speeches, it is remarkable for its variety. There are three which, taken together, may be considered as best representing the diversity and range of their author’s power. The fifth, with its simple but lively diction, its graceful and persuasive narrative, recalls the qualities of Lysias. The eleventh, with its sustained and impetuous power, has no slight resemblance to the manner of Demosthenes. The eighth is, of all, the most characteristic, alike in narrative and in argument. Isaeus is here seen at his best. No reader who is interested in the social life of ancient Greece need find Isaeus dull. If the glimpses of Greek society which he gives us are seldom so gay and picturesque as those which enliven the pages of Lysias, they are certainly not less suggestive. Here, where the innermost relations and central interests of the family are in question, we touch the springs of social life; we are not merely presented with scenic details of dress and furniture, but are enabled in no small degree to conceive the feelings of the actors.

The best manuscript of Isaeus is in the British Museum,—Crippsianus A (= Burneianus 95, 13th century), which contains also Antiphon, Andocides, Lycurgus and Dinarchus. The next best is Bekker’s Laurentianus B (Florence), of the 15th century. Besides these, he used Marcianus L (Venice), saec. 14, Vratislaviensis Z saec. 14[10] and two very inferior MSS. Ambrosianus A. 99, P (which he dismissed after Or. i.), and Ambrosianus D. 42, Q (which contains only Or. i., ii.). Schömann, in his edition of 1831, generally followed Bekker’s text; he had no fresh apparatus beyond a collation of a Paris MS. R in part of Or. i.; but he had sifted the Aldine more carefully. Baiter and Sauppe (1850) had a new collation of A, and also used a collation of Burneianus 96, M, given by Dobson in vol. iv. of his edition (1828). C. Scheibe (Teubner, 1860) made it his especial aim to complete the work of his predecessors by restoring the correct Attic forms of words; thus (e.g.) he gives ἠγγύα for ἐνεγύα, δέδιμεν for δεδίαμεν, and the like,—following the consent of the MSS., however, in such forms as the accusative of proper names in -ην rather than -η, or (e.g.) the future φανήσομαι rather than φανοῦμαι, &c., and on such doubtful points as φράτερες instead of φράτορες, or Εἰληθυίας instead of Εἰλειθυίας.

Editions.—Editio princeps (Aldus, Venice, 1513); in Oratores Attici, by I. Bekker (1823-1828); W. S. Dobson (1828); J. G. Baiter and Hermann Sauppe (1850); separately, by G. F. Schömann, with commentary (1831); C. Scheibe (1860) (Teubner series, new ed. by T. Thalheim, 1903); H. Buermann (1883); W. Wyse (1904). English translation by Sir William Jones, 1779.

On Isaeus generally see Wyse’s edition; R. C. Jebb, Attic Orators; F. Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit (2nd ed., 1887-1893); and L. Moy, Étude sur les plaidoyers d’Isée (1876).

(R. C. J.)

[1] See further Jebb’s Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeus, (ii. 264).

[2] Plut. De glor. Athen. p. 350 c, where he mentions τοὺς Ἰσοκράτεις καὶ Ἀντιφῶντας καὶ Ἰσαίους among τοὺς ἐν ταῖς σχολαῖς τὰ μειράκια προδιδάσκοντας.

[3] Here he was probably influenced by the teaching of Isocrates. The forensic speech of Isocrates known as the Aegineticus (Or. xix.), which belongs to the peculiar province of Isaeus, as dealing with a claim to property (ἐπιδικασία), affords perhaps the earliest example of narrative and proof thus interwoven. Earlier forensic writers had kept the διήγησις and πίστεις distinct, as Lysias does.

[4] This is what Dionysius means when he says (Isaeus, 61) that Isaeus differs from Lysias—τῷ μὴ κατ᾿ ἐνθύμημα τι λέγειν ἀλλὰ κατ᾿ ἐπιχείρημα. Here the “enthymeme” means a rhetorical syllogism with one premiss suppressed (curtum, Juv. vi. 449); “epicheireme,” such a syllogism stated in full. Cf. R. Volkmann, Rhetorik der Griechen und Römer, 1872, pp. 153 f.

[5] Cleon’s speech in Thuc. iii. 37, 38, works out this image with remarkable force; within a short space we have ξυνἐσεως ἀγών—τῶν τοιῶνδε ἀγώνων—ἀγωνιστής—ἀγωνίζεσθαι—ἀνταγωνίζεσθαι—ἀγωνοθετεῖν. See Attic Orators, vol. i. 39; ii. 304.

[6] For the words of Photius (cod. 263), τούτων δὲ οἱ τὸ γνήσιον μαρτυρηθέντες ν΄ καταλείπονται μόνον, might be so rendered as to imply that, besides these fifty, others also were extant. See Att. Orat. ii. 311, note 2.

[7] Forty-four are given in Thalheim’s ed.

[8] The second of our speeches (the Meneclean) was discovered in the Laurentian Library in 1785, and was edited in that year by Tyrwhitt. In editions previous to that date, Oration i. is made to conclude with a few lines which really belong to the end of Orat. ii. (§ 47, ἀλλ᾿ ἐπειδὴ τὸ πρᾶγμα ... ψηφίσασθε), and this arrangement is followed in the translation of Isaeus by Sir William Jones, to whom our second oration, was, of course, then (1779) unknown. In Oration i. all that follows the words μὴ ποιήσαντες in § 22 was first published in 1815 by Mai, from a MS. in the Ambrosian Library at Milan.

[9] Cf. Maine’s Ancient Law, ch. vi., and the Tagore Law Lectures (1870) by Herbert Cowell, lect. ix., “On the Rite of Adoption,” pp. 208 f.

[10] The date of L and Z is given as the end of the 15th century in the introduction to Wyse’s edition.

ISAIAH. I. Life and Period.—Isaiah is the name of the greatest, and both in life and in death the most influential of the Old Testament prophets. We do not forget Jeremiah, but Jeremiah’s literary and religious influence is secondary compared with that of Isaiah. Unfortunately we are reduced to inference and conjecture with regard both to his life and to the extent of his literary activity. In the heading (i. 1) of what we may call the occasional prophecies of Isaiah (i.e. those which were called forth by passing events), the author is called “the son of Amoz” and Rabbinical legend identifies this Amoz with a brother of Amaziah, king of Judah; but this is evidently based on a mere etymological fancy. We know from his works that (unlike Jeremiah) he was married (viii. 3), and that he had at least two sons, whose names he regarded as, together with his own, symbolic by divine appointment of certain decisive events or religious truths—Isaiah (Yesha’-yāhū), meaning “Salvation—Yahweh”; Shear-Yāshūb, “a remnant shall return”; and Maher-shalal-hash-baz, “swift (swiftly cometh) spoil, speedy (speedily cometh) prey” (vii. 3, viii. 3, 4, 18). He lived at Jerusalem, perhaps in the “middle” or “lower city” (2 Kings xx. 4), exercised at one time great influence at court (chap. xxxvii.), and could venture to address a king unbidden (vii. 4), and utter the most unpleasant truths, unassailed, in the plainest fashion. Presumably therefore his social rank was far above that of Amos and Micah; certainly the high degree of rhetorical skill displayed in his discourses implies a long course of literary discipline, not improbably in the school of some older prophet (Amos vii. 14 suggests that “schools” or companies “of the prophets” existed in the southern kingdom). We know but little of Isaiah’s predecessors and models in the prophetic art (it were fanaticism to exclude the element of human preparation); but certainly even the acknowledged prophecies of Isaiah (and much more the disputed ones) could no more have come into existence suddenly and without warning than the masterpieces of Shakespeare. In the more recent commentaries (e.g. Cheyne’s Prophecies of Isaiah, ii. 218) lists are generally given of the points of contact both in phraseology and in ideas between Isaiah and the prophets nearly contemporary with him. For Isaiah cannot be studied by himself.

The same heading already referred to gives us our only traditional information as to the period during which Isaiah prophesied; it refers to Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah as the contemporary kings. It is, however, to say the least, doubtful whether any of the extant prophecies are as early as the reign of Uzziah. Exegesis, the only safe basis of criticism for the prophetic literature, is unfavourable to the view that even chap. i. belongs to the reign of this king, and we must therefore regard it as most probable that the heading in i. 1 is (like those of the Psalms) the work of one or more of the Sōpherīm (or students and editors of Scripture) in post-exilic times, apparently the same writer (or company of writers) who prefixed the headings of Hosea and Micah, and perhaps of some of the other books. Chronological study had already begun in his time. But he would be a bold man who would profess to give trustworthy dates either for the kings of Israel or for the prophetic writers. (See [Bible], Old Testament, Chronology; the article “Chronology” in the Encyclopaedia Bíblica; and cf. H. P. Smith, Old Testament History, Edin., 1903, p. 202, note 2.)

II. Chronological Arrangement, how far possible.—Let us now briefly sketch the progress of Isaiah’s prophesying on the basis of philological exegesis, and a comparison of the sound results of the study of the inscriptions. If our results are imperfect and liable to correction, that is only to be expected in the present position of the historical study of the Bible. Chap. vi., which describes a vision of Isaiah “in the death-year of King Uzziah” (740 or 734 B.C.?) may possibly have arisen out of notes put down in the reign of Jotham; but for several reasons it is not an acceptable view that, in its present form, this striking chapter is earlier than the reign of Ahaz. It seems, in short, to have originally formed the preface to the small group of prophecies which now follows it, viz. vii. i.-ix. 7. The portions which may represent discourses of Jotham’s reign are chap. ii. and chap. ix. 8-x. 4—stern denunciations which remind us somewhat of Amos. But the allusions in the greater part of chaps. ii.-v. correspond to no period so closely as the reign of Ahaz, and the same remark applies still more self-evidently to vii. 1-ix. 7.[1] Chap. xvii. 1-11 ought undoubtedly to be read in immediate connexion with chap. vii.; it presupposes the alliance of Syria and northern Israel, whose destruction it predicts, though opening a door of hope for a remnant of Israel. The fatal siege of Samaria (724-722 B.C.) seems to have given occasion to chap. xxviii.; but the following prophecies (chaps. xxix.-xxxiii.) point in the main to Sennacherib’s invasion, 701 B.C., which evidently stirred Isaiah’s deepest feelings and was the occasion of some of his greatest prophecies. It is, however, the vengeance taken by Sargon upon Ashdod (711) which seems to be preserved in chap. xx., and the striking little prophecy in xxi. 1-10, sometimes referred of late to a supposed invasion of Judah by Sargon, rather belongs to some one of the many prophetic personages who wrote, but did not speak like the greater prophets, during and after the Exile. It is also an opinion largely held that the prophetic epilogue in xvi. 13, 14, was attached by Isaiah to an oracle on archaic style by another prophet (Isaiah’s hand has, however, been traced by some in xvi. 4b, 5). In fact no progress can be expected in the accurate study of the prophets until the editorial activity both of the great prophets themselves and of their more reflective and studious successors is fully recognized.

Thus there were two great political events (the Syro-Israelitish invasion under Ahaz, and the great Assyrian invasion of Sennacherib) which called forth the spiritual and oratorical faculties of our prophet, and quickened his faculty of insight into the future. The Sennacherib prophecies must be taken in connexion with the historical appendix, chaps, xxxvi.-xxxix. The beauty and incisiveness of the poetic prophecy in xxxvii. 21-32 have, by some critics, been regarded as evidence for its authenticity. This, however, is, on critical grounds, most questionable.

A special reference seems needed at this point to the oracle on Egypt, chap. xix. The comparative feebleness of the style has led to the conjecture that, even if the basis of the prophecy be Isaianic, yet in its present form it must have undergone the manipulation of a scribe. More probably, however, it belongs to the early Persian period. It should be added that the Isaianic origin of the appendix in xix. 18-24 is, if possible, even more doubtful, because of the precise, circumstantial details of the prophecy which are not like Isaiah’s work. It is plausible to regard v. 18 as a fictitious prophecy in the interests of Onias, the founder of the rival Egyptian temple to Yahweh at Leontopolis in the name of Heliopolis (Josephus, Ant. xii. 9, 7).

III. Disintegration Theories.—We must now enter more fully into the question whether the whole of the so-called Book of Isaiah was really written by that prophet. The question relates, at any rate, to xiii.-xiv. 23, xxi. 1-10, xxiv.-xxvii., xxxiv., xxxv. and xl.-lxvi. The father of the controversy may be said to be the Jewish rabbi, Aben Ezra, who died A.D. 1167. We need not, however, spend much time on the well-worn but inconclusive arguments of the older critics. The existence of a tradition in the last three centuries before Christ as to the authorship of any book is (to those acquainted with the habits of thought of that age) of but little critical moment; the Sōpherīm, i.e. students of Scripture, in those times were simply anxious for the authority of the Scriptures, not for the ascertainment of their precise historical origin. It was of the utmost importance to declare that (especially) Isaiah xl.-lxvi. was a prophetic work of the highest order; this was reason sufficient (apart from any presumed phraseological affinities in xl.-lxvi.) for ascribing them to the royal prophet Isaiah. When the view had once obtained currency, it would naturally become a tradition. The question of the Isaianic or non-Isaianic origin of the disputed prophecies (especially xl.-lxvi.) must be decided on grounds of exegesis alone. It matters little, therefore, when the older critics appeal to Ezra i. 2 (interpreted by Josephus, Ant. xi. 1, 1-2), to the Septuagint version of the book (produced between 260 and 130 B.C.), in which the disputed prophecies are already found, and to the Greek translation of the Wisdom of Jesus, the son of Sirach, which distinctly refers to Isaiah as the comforter of those that mourned in Zion (Eccles. xlviii. 24, 25).

The fault of the controversialists on both sides has been that each party has only seen “one side of the shield.” It will be admitted by philological students that the exegetical data supplied by (at any rate) Isa. xl.-lxvi. are conflicting, and therefore susceptible of no simple solution. This remark applies, it is true, chiefly to the portion which begins at lii. 13. The earlier part of Isa. xl.-lxvi. admits of a perfectly consistent interpretation from first to last. There is nothing in it to indicate that the author’s standing-point is earlier than the Babylonian captivity. His object is (as most scholars, probably, believe) to warn, stimulate or console the captive Jews, some full believers, some semi-believers, some unbelievers or idolaters. The development of the prophet’s message is full of contrasts and surprises: the vanity of the idol-gods and the omnipotence of Israel’s helper, the sinfulness and infirmity of Israel and her high spiritual destiny, and the selection (so offensive to patriotic Jews, xlv. 9, 10) of the heathen Cyrus as the instrument of Yahweh’s purposes, as in fact his Messiah or Anointed One (xlv. 1), are brought successively before us. Hence the semi-dramatic character of the style. Already in the opening passage mysterious voices are heard crying, “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people”; the plural indicates that there were other prophets among the exiles besides the author of Isa. xl.-xlviii. Then the Jews and the Asiatic nations in general are introduced trembling at the imminent downfall of the Babylonian empire. The former are reasoned with and exhorted to believe; the latter are contemptuously silenced by an exhibition of the futility of their religion. Then another mysterious form appears on the scene, bearing the honourable title of “Servant of Yahweh,” through whom God’s gracious purposes for Israel and the world are to be realized. The cycle of poetic passages on the character and work of this “Servant,” or commissioned agent of the Most High, may have formed originally a separate collation which was somewhat later inserted in the Prophecy of Restoration (i.e. chaps. xl.-xlviii., and its appendix chaps. xlix.-lv.).

The new section which begins at chap. xlix. is written in much the same delightfully flowing style. We are still among the exiles at the close of the captivity, or, as others think, amidst a poor community in Jerusalem, whose members have now been dispersed among the Gentiles. The latter view is not so strange as it may at first appear, for the new book has this peculiarity, that Babylon and Cyrus are not mentioned in it at all. [True, there was not so much said about Babylon as we should have expected even in the first book; the paucity of references to the local characteristics of Babylonia is in fact one of the negative arguments urged by older scholars in favour of the Isaianic origin of the prophecy.] Israel himself, with all his inconsistent qualities, becomes the absorbing subject of the prophet’s meditations. The section opens with a soliloquy of the “Servant of Yahweh,” which leads on to a glorious comforting discourse, “Can a woman forget her sucking child,” &c. (xlix. 1, comp. li. 12, 13). Then his tone rises, Jerusalem can and must be redeemed; he even seems to see the great divine act in process of accomplishment. Is it possible, one cannot help asking, that the abrupt description of the strange fortunes of the “Servant”—by this time entirely personalized—was written to follow chap. lii. 1-12?

The whole difficulty seems to arise from the long prevalent assumption that chaps. xl.-lxvi. form a whole in themselves. Natural as the feeling against disintegration may be, the difficulties in the way of admitting the unity of chaps. xl.-lxvi. are insurmountable. Even if, by a bold assumption, we grant the unity of authorship, it is plain upon the face of it that the chapters in question cannot have been composed at the same time or under the same circumstances; literary and artistic unity is wholly wanting. But once admit (as it is only reasonable to do) the extension of Jewish editorial activity to the prophetic books and all becomes clear. The record before us gives no information as to its origin. It is without a heading, and by its abrupt transitions, and honestly preserved variations of style, invites us to such a theory as we are now indicating. It is only the inveterate habit of reading Isa. xlix.-lxvi. as a part of a work relating to the close of the Exile that prevents us from seeing how inconsistent are the tone and details with this presupposition.

The present article in its original form introduced here a survey of the portions of Isa. xl.-lxvi. which were plainly of Palestinian origin. It is needless to reproduce this here, because the information is now readily accessible elsewhere; in 1881 there was an originality in this survey, which gave promise of a still more radical treatment such as that of Bernhard Duhm, a fascinating commentary published in 1892. See also Cheyne, Jewish Quarterly Review, July and October 1891; Introd. to Book of Isaiah (1895), which also point forward, like Stade’s Geschichte in Germany, to a bolder criticism of Isaiah.

IV. Non-Isaianic Elements in Chaps. i.-xxxix.—We have said nothing hitherto, except by way of allusion, of the disputed prophecies scattered up and down the first half of the book of Isaiah. There is only one of these prophecies which may, with any degree of apparent plausibility, be referred to the age of Isaiah, and that is chaps. xxiv.-xxvii. The grounds are (1) that according to xxv. 6 the author dwells on Mount Zion; (2) that Moab is referred to as an enemy (xxv. 10); and (3) that at the close of the prophecy, Assyria and Egypt are apparently mentioned as the principal foes of Israel (xxvii. 12, 13). A careful and thorough exegesis will show the hollowness of this justification. The tone and spirit of the prophecy as a whole point to the same late apocalyptic period to which chap. xxxiv. and the book of Joel; and also the last chapter (especially) of the book of Zechariah, may unhesitatingly be referred.

A word or two may perhaps be expected on Isa. xiii., xiv. and xxxiv., xxxv. These two oracles agree in the elaborateness of their description of the fearful fate of the enemies of Yahweh (Babylon and Edom are merely representatives of a class), and also in their view of the deliverance and restoration of Israel as an epoch for the whole human race. There is also an unrelieved sternness, which pains us by its contrast with Isa. xl.-lxvi. (except those passages of this portion which are probably not homogeneous with the bulk of the prophecy). They have also affinities with Jer. l. li., a prophecy (as most now agree) of post-exilic origin.

There is only one passage which seems in some degree to make up for the aesthetic drawbacks of the greater part of these late compositions. It is the ode on the fall of the king of Babylon in chap. xiv. 4-21, which is as brilliant with the glow of lyric enthusiasm as the stern prophecy which precedes it is, from the same point of view, dull and uninspiring. It is in fact worthy to be put by the side of the finest passages of chaps. xl.-lxvi.—of those passages which irresistibly rise in the memory when we think of “Isaiah.”

V. Prophetic Contrasts in Isaiah.—From a religious point of view there is a wide difference, not only between the acknowledged and the disputed prophecies of the book of Isaiah, but also between those of the latter which occur in chaps. i.-xxxix., on the one hand, and the greater and more striking part of chaps. xl.-lxvi. on the other. We may say, upon the whole, with Duhm, that Isaiah represents a synthesis of Amos and Hosea, though not without important additions of his own. And if we cannot without much hesitation admit that Isaiah was really the first preacher of a personal Messiah whose record has come down to us, yet his editors certainly had good reason for thinking him capable of such a lofty height of prophecy. It is not because Isaiah could not have conceived of a personal Messiah, but because the Messiah-passages are not plainly Isaiah’s either in style or in thought. If Isaiah had had those bright visions, they would have affected him more.

Perhaps the most characteristic religious peculiarities of the various disputed prophecies are—(1) the emphasis laid on the uniqueness, eternity, creatorship and predictive power of Yahweh (xl. 18, 25, xli. 4, xliv. 6, xlviii. 12, xlv. 5, 6, 18, 22, xlvi. 9, xlii. 5, xlv. 18, xli. 26, xliii. 9, xliv. 7, xlv. 21, xlviii. 14); (2) the conception of the “Servant of Yahweh”; (3) the ironical descriptions of idolatry (Isaiah in the acknowledged prophecies only refers incidentally to idolatry) xl. 19, 20, xli. 7, xliv. 9-17, xlvi. 6; (4) the personality of the Spirit of Yahweh (mentioned no less than seven times, see especially xl. 3, xlviii. 16, lxiii. 10, 14); (5) the influence of the angelic powers (xxiv. 21); (6) the resurrection of the body (xxvi. 19); (7) the everlasting punishment of the wicked (lxvi. 24); (8) vicarious atonement (chap. liii.).

We cannot here do more than chronicle the attempts of a Jewish scholar, the late Dr Kohut, in the Z.D.M.G. for 1876 to prove a Zoroastrian influence on chaps. xl.-lxvi. The idea is not in itself inadmissible, at least for post-exilic portions, for Zoroastrian ideas were in the intellectual atmosphere of Jewish writers in the Persian age.

There is an equally striking difference among the disputed prophecies themselves, and one of no small moment as a subsidiary indication of their origin. We have already spoken of the difference of tone between parts of the latter half of the book; and, when we compare the disputed prophecies of the former half with the Prophecy of Israel’s Restoration, how inferior (with all reverence be it said) do they appear! Truly “in many parts and many manners did God speak” in this composite book of Isaiah! To the Prophecy of Restoration we may fitly apply the words, too gracious and too subtly chosen to be translated, of Renan, “ce second Isaïe, dont l’âme lumineuse semble comme imprégnée, six cent ans d’avance, de toutes les rosées, de tous les parfums de l’avenir” (L’Antéchrist, p. 464); though, indeed, the common verdict of sympathetic readers sums up the sentence in a single phrase—“the Evangelical Prophet.” The freedom and the inexhaustibleness of the undeserved grace of God is a subject to which this gifted son constantly returns with “a monotony which is never monotonous.” The defect of the disputed prophecies in the former part of the book (a defect, as long as we regard them in isolation, and not as supplemented by those which come after) is that they emphasize too much for the Christian sentiment the stern, destructive side of the series of divine interpositions in the latter days.

VI. The Cyrus Inscriptions.—Perhaps one of the most important contributions to the study of II. Isaiah has been the discovery of two cuneiform texts relative to the fall of Babylon and the religious policy of Cyrus. The results are not favourable to a mechanical view of prophecy as involving absolute accuracy of statement. Cyrus appears in the unassailably authentic cylinder inscription “as a complete religious indifferentist, willing to go through any amount of ceremonies to soothe the prejudices of a susceptible population.” He preserves a strange and significant silence with regard to Ahura-mazda, the supreme God of Zoroastrianism, and in fact can hardly have been a Zoroastrian believer at all. On the historical and religious bearings of these two inscriptions the reader may be referred to the article “Cyrus” in the Encyclopaedia Biblica and the essay on “II. Isaiah and the Inscriptions” in Cheyne’s Prophecies of Isaiah, vol. ii. It may, with all reverence, be added that our estimate of prophecy must be brought into harmony with facts, not facts with our preconceived theory of inspiration.

Authorities.—Lowth, Isaiah: a new translation, with a preliminary dissertation and notes (1778); Gesenius, Der Proph. Jes. (1821); Hitzig, Der Proph. Jes. (1833); Delitzsch, Der Pr. Jes. (4th ed., 1889); Dillmann-Kittel, Isaiah (1898); Duhm (1892; 2nd ed., 1902); Marti (1900); Cheyne, The Prophecies of Isaiah (2 vols., 1880-1881); Introd. to Book of Isaiah (1898); “The Book of the Prophet Isaiah,” in Paul Haupt’s Polychrome Bible (1898); S. R. Driver, Isaiah, his life and times (1888); J. Skinner, “The Book of Isaiah,” in Cambridge Bible (2 vols., 1896, 1898); G. A. Smith, in Expositor’s Bible (2 vols., 1888, 1890); Condamin (Rom. Cath.) (1905); G. H. Box (1908); Article on Isaiah in Ency. Bib. by Cheyne; in Hastings’ Dict. of the Bible by Prof. G. A. Smith. R. H. Kennett’s Schweich Lecture (1909), The Composition of the Book of Isaiah in the Light of Archaeology and History, an interesting attempt at a synthesis of results, is a brightly written but scholarly sketch of the growth of the book of Isaiah, which went on till the great success of the Jews under Judas Maccabaeus. The outbursts of triumph (e.g. Isa. ix. 2-7) are assigned to this period. The most original statement is perhaps the view that the words of Isaiah were preserved orally by his disciples, and did not see the light (in a revised form) till a considerable time after the crystallization of the reforms of Josiah into laws.

(T. K. C.)

[1] On the question of the Isaianic origin of the prophecy, ix. 1-6, and the companion passage, xi. 1-8, see Cheyne Introd. to the Book of Isaiah, 1895, pp. 44, 45 and 62-66. Cf., however, J. Skinner “Isaiah i.-xxxix.” in Cambridge Bible.

ISAIAH, ASCENSION OF, an apocryphal book of the Old Testament. The Ascension of Isaiah is a composite work of very great interest. In its present form it is probably not older than the latter half of the 2nd century of our era. Its various constituents, however, and of these there were three—the Martyrdom of Isaiah, the Testament of Hezekiah and the Vision of Isaiah—circulated independently as early as the 1st century. The first of these was of Jewish origin, and is of less interest than the other two, which were the work of Christian writers. The Vision of Isaiah is important for the knowledge it affords us of 1st-century beliefs in certain circles as to the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Seven Heavens, &c. The long lost Testament of Hezekiah, which is, in the opinion of R. H. Charles, to be identified with iii. 13b-iv. 18, of our present work, is unquestionably of great value owing to the insight it gives us into the history of the Christian Church at the close of the 1st century. Its descriptions of the worldliness and lawlessness which prevailed among the elders and pastors, i.e. the bishops and priests, of the wide-spread covetousness and vainglory as well as the growing heresies among Christians generally, agree with similar accounts in 2 Peter, 2 Timothy and Clement of Rome.

Various Titles.—Origen in his commentary on Matt. xiii. 57 (Lommatzsch iii. 4, 9) calls it Apocryph of Isaiah—Ἀπόκρυφον Ἡσαίου, Epiphanius (Haer. xl. 2) terms it the Ascension of Isaiah—τὸ ἀναβατικὸν Ἡσαίου, and similarly Jerome—Ascensio Isaiae. It was also known as the Vision of Isaiah and finally as the Testament of Hezekiah (see Charles, The Ascension of Isaiah, pp. xii.-xv.).

The Greek Original and the Versions.—The book was written in Greek, though not improbably the middle portion, the Testament of Hezekiah, was originally composed in Semitic. The Greek in its original form, which we may denote by G, is lost. It has, however, been in part preserved to us in two of its recensions, G¹ and G². From G¹ the Ethiopic Version and the first Latin Version (consisting of ii. 14-iii. 13, vii. 1-19) were translated, and of this recension the actual Greek has survived in a multitude of phrases in the Greek Legend. G² denotes the Greek text from which the Slavonic and the second Latin Version (consisting of vi.-xi.) were translated. Of this recension ii. 4-iv. 2 have been discovered by Grenfell and Hunt.[1] For complete details see Charles, op. cit. pp. xviii.-xxxiii.; also Flemming in Hennecke’s NTliche Apok.

Latin Version.—The first Latin Version (L¹) is fragmentary (=ii. 14-iii. 13, vii. 1-19). It was discovered and edited by Mai in 1828 (Script. vet. nova collectio III. ii. 238), and reprinted by Dillmann in his edition of 1877, and subsequently in a more correct form by Charles in his edition of 1900. The second version (L²), which consists of vi.-xi., was first printed at Venice in 1522, by Gieseler in 1832, Dillmann in 1877 and Charles in 1900.

Ethiopic Version.—There are three MSS. This version is on the whole a faithful reproduction of G¹. These were used by Dillmann and subsequently by Charles in their editions.

Different Elements in the Book.—The compositeness of this work is universally recognized. Dillmann’s analysis is as follows, (i.) Martyrdom of Isaiah, of Jewish origin; ii. 1-iii. 12, v. 2-14. (ii.) The Vision of Isaiah, of Christian origin, vi. 1-xi. 1, 23-40. (iii.) The above two constituents were put together by a Christian writer, who prefixed i. 1, 2, 4b-13 and appended xi. 42, 43. (iv.) Finally a later Christian editor incorporated the two sections iii. 13-v. 1 and xi. 2-22, and added i. 3, 4a, v. 15, 16, xi. 41.

This analysis has on the whole been accepted by Harnack, Schürer, Deane and Beer. These scholars have been influenced by Gebhardt’s statement that in the Greek Legend there is not a trace of iii. 13-v. 1, xi. 2-22, and that accordingly these sections were absent from the text when the Greek Legend was composed. But this statement is wrong, for at least five phrases or clauses in the Greek Legend are derived from the sections in question. Hence R. H. Charles has examined (op. cit. pp. xxxviii.-xlvii.) the problem de novo, and arrived at the following conclusions. The book is highly composite, and arbitrariness and disorder are found in every section. There are three original documents at its base, (i.) The Martyrdom of Isaiah = i. 1, 2a, 6b-13a, ii. 1-8, 10-iii. 12, v. 1b-14. This is but an imperfect survival of the original work. Part of the original work omitted by the final editor of our book is preserved in the Opus imperfectum, which goes back not to our text, but to the original Martyrdom, (ii.) The Testament of Hezekiah = iii. 13b-iv. 18. This work is mutilated and without beginning or end. (iii.) The Vision of Isaiah = vi.-xi. 1-40. The archetype of this section existed independently in Greek; for the second Latin and the Slavonic Versions presuppose an independent circulation of their Greek archetype in western and Slavonic countries. This archetype differs in many respects from the form in which it was republished by the editor of the entire work.

We may, in short, put this complex matter as follows: The conditions of the problem are sufficiently satisfied by supposing a single editor, who had three works at his disposal, the Martyrdom of Isaiah, of Jewish origin, and the Testament of Hezekiah and the Vision of Isaiah, of Christian origin. These he reduced or enlarged as it suited his purpose, and put them together as they stand in our text. Some of the editorial additions are obvious, as i. 2b-6a, 13a, ii. 9, iii. 13a, iv. 1a, 19-v. 1a, 15, 16, xi. 41-43.

Dates of the Various Constituents of the Ascension.—(a) The Martyrdom is quoted by the Opus Imperfectum, Ambrose, Jerome, Origen, Tertullian and by Justin Martyr. It was probably known to the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Thus we are brought back to the 1st century A.D. if the last reference is trustworthy. And this is no doubt the right date, for works written by Jews in the 2nd century would not be likely to become current in the Christian Church. (b) The Testament of Hezekiah was written between A.D. 88-100. The grounds for this date will be found in Charles, op. cit. pp. lxxi.-lxxii. and 30-31. (c) The Vision of Isaiah. The later recension of this Vision was used by Jerome, and a more primitive form of the text by the Archontici according to Epiphanius. It is still earlier attested by the Actus Petri Vercellenses. Since the Protevangel of James was apparently acquainted with it, and likewise Ignatius (ad. Ephes. xix.), the composition of the primitive form of the Vision goes back to the close of the 1st century.

The work of combining and editing these three independent writings may go back to early in the 3rd or even to the 2nd century.

Literature.—Editions of the Ethiopic Text: Laurence, Ascensio Isaiae vatis (1819); Dillmann, Ascensio Isaiae Aethiopice et Latine, cum prolegomenis, adnotationibus criticis et exegeticis, additis versionum Latinarum reliquiis edita (1877); Charles, Ascension of Isaiah, translated from the Ethiopic Version, which, together with the new Greek Fragment, the Latin Versions and the Latin translation of the Slavonic, is here published in full, edited with Introduction, Notes and Indices (1900); Flemming, in Hennecke’s NTliche Apok. 292-305; NTliche Apok.-Handbuch, 323-331. This translation is made from Charles’s text, and his analysis of the text is in the main accepted by this scholar. Translations: In addition to the translations given in the preceding editions, Basset, Les Apocryphes éthiopiens, iii. “L’Ascension d’Isaïe” (1894); Beer, Apok. und Pseud. (1900) ii. 124-127. The latter is a German rendering of ii.-iii. 1-12, v. 2-14, of Dillmann’s text. Critical Inquiries: Stokes, art. “Isaiah, Ascension of,” in Smith’s Dict. of Christian Biography (1882), iii. 298-301; Robinson, “The Ascension of Isaiah” in Hastings’ Bible Dict. ii. 499-501. For complete bibliography see Schürer,3 Gesch. des jüd. Volks, iii. 280-285; Charles, op. cit.

(R. H. C.)

[1] Published by them in the Amherst Papyri, an account of the Greek papyri in the collection of Lord Amherst (1900), and by Charles in his edition.

ISANDHLWANA, an isolated hill in Zululand, 8 m. S.E. of Rorke’s Drift across the Tugela river, and 105 m. N. by W. of Durban. On the 22nd of January 1879 a British force encamped at the foot of the hill was attacked by about 10,000 Zulus, the flower of Cetewayo’s army, and destroyed. Of eight hundred Europeans engaged about forty escaped (see [Zululand]: History).

ISAR (identical with Isère, in Celtic “the rapid”), a river of Bavaria. It rises in the Tirolese Alps N.E. from Innsbruck, at an altitude of 5840 ft. It first winds in deep, narrow glens and gorges through the Alps, and at Tölz (2100 ft.), due north from its source, enters the Bavarian plain, which it traverses in a generally north and north-east direction, and pours its waters into the Danube immediately below Deggendorf after a course of 219 m. The area of its drainage basin is 38,200 sq. m. Below Munich the stream is 140 to 350 yards wide, and is studded with islands. It is not navigable, except for rafts. The total fall of the river is 4816 ft. The Isar is essentially the national stream of the Bavarians. It has belonged from the earliest times to the Bavarian people and traverses the finest corn land in the kingdom. On its banks lie the cities of Munich and Landshut, and the venerable episcopal see of Freising, and the inhabitants of the district it waters are reckoned the core of the Bavarian race.

See C. Gruber, Die Isar nach ihrer Entwickelung und ihren hydrologischen Verhältnissen (Munich, 1889); and Die Bedeutung der Isar als Verkehrsstrasse (Munich, 1890).

ISATIN, C8H5NO2, in chemistry, a derivative of indol, interesting on account of its relation to indigo; it may be regarded as the anhydride of ortho-aminobenzoylformic or isatinic acid. It crystallizes in orange red prisms which melt at 200-201° C. It may be prepared by oxidizing indigo with nitric or chromic acid (O. L. Erdmann, Jour. prak. Chem., 1841, 24, p. 11); by boiling ortho-nitrophenylpropiolic acid with alkalis (A. Baeyer, Ber., 1880, 13, p. 2259), or by oxidizing carbostyril with alkaline potassium permanganate (P. Friedlander and H. Ostermaier, Ber., 1881, 14, p. 1921). P. J. Meyer (German Patent 26736 (1883)) obtains substituted isatins by condensing para-toluidine with dichloracetic acid, oxidizing the product with air and then hydrolysing the oxidized product with hydrochloric acid. T. Sandmeyer (German Patents 113981 and 119831 (1899)) obtained isatin-α-anilide by condensing aniline with chloral hydrate and hydroxylamine, an intermediate product isonitrosodiphenylacetamidine being obtained, which is converted into isatin-α-anilide by sulphuric acid. This can be converted into indigo by reduction with ammonium sulphide. Isatin dissolved in concentrated sulphuric acid gives a blue coloration with thiophene, due to the formation of indophenin (see Abst. J.C.S., 1907). Concentrated nitric acid oxidizes it to oxalic acid, and alkali fusion yields aniline. It dissolves in soda forming a violet solution, which soon becomes yellow, a change due to the transformation of sodium N-isatin into sodium isatate, the aci-isatin salt being probably formed intermediately (Heller, Abst. J.C.S., 1907, i. p. 442). Most metallic salts are N-derivatives yielding N-methyl ethers; the silver salt is, however, an O-derivative, yielding an O-methyl ether (A. v. Baeyer, 1883; W. Peters, Abst. J.C.S., 1907, i. p. 239).

ISAURIA, in ancient geography, a district in the interior of Asia Minor, of very different extent at different periods. The permanent nucleus of it was that section of the Taurus which lies directly to south of Iconium and Lystra. Lycaonia had all the Iconian plain; but Isauria began as soon as the foothills were reached. Its two original towns, Isaura Nea and Isaura Palaea, lay, one among these foothills (Dorla) and the other on the watershed (Zengibar Kalé). When the Romans first encountered the Isaurians (early in the 1st century B.C.), they regarded Cilicia Trachea as part of Isauria, which thus extended to the sea; and this extension of the name continued to be in common use for two centuries. The whole basin of the Calycadnus was reckoned Isaurian, and the cities in the valley of its southern branch formed what was known as the Isaurian Decapolis. Towards the end of the 3rd century A.D., however, all Cilicia was detached for administrative purposes from the northern slope of Taurus, and we find a province called at first Isauria-Lycaonia, and later Isauria alone, extending up to the limits of Galatia, but not passing Taurus on the south. Pisidia, part of which had hitherto been included in one province with Isauria, was also detached, and made to include Iconium. In compensation Isauria received the eastern part of Pamphylia. Restricted again in the 4th century, Isauria ended as it began by being just the wild district about Isaura Palaea and the heads of the Calycadnus. Isaura Palaea was besieged by Perdiccas, the Macedonian regent after Alexander’s death; and to avoid capture its citizens set the place alight and perished in the flames. During the war of the Cilician and other pirates against Rome, the Isaurians took so active a part that the proconsul P. Servilius deemed it necessary to follow them into their fastnesses, and compel the whole people to submission, an exploit for which he received the title of Isauricus (75 B.C.). The Isaurians were afterwards placed for a time under the rule of Amyntas, king of Galatia; but it is evident that they continued to retain their predatory habits and virtual independence. In the 3rd century they sheltered the rebel emperor, Trebellianus. In the 4th century they are still described by Ammianus Marcellinus as the scourge of the neighbouring provinces of Asia Minor; but they are said to have been effectually subdued in the reign of Justinian. In common with all the eastern Taurus, Isauria passed into the hands of Turcomans and Yuruks with the Seljuk conquest. Many of these have now coalesced with the aboriginal population and form a settled element: but the district is still lawless.

This comparatively obscure people had the honour of producing two Byzantine emperors, Zeno, whose native name was Traskalisseus Rousoumbladeotes, and Leo III., who ascended the throne of Constantinople in 718, reigned till 741, and became the founder of a dynasty of three generations. The ruins of Isaura Palaea are mainly remarkable for their fine situation and their fortifications and tombs. Those of Isaura Nea have disappeared, but numerous inscriptions and many sculptured stelae, built into the houses of Dorla, prove the site. It was the latter, and not the former town, that Servilius reduced by cutting off the water supply. The site was identified by W. M. Ramsay in 1901. The only modern exploration of highland Isauria was that made by J. S. Sterrett in 1885; but it was not exhaustive.

Bibliography.—W. M. Ramsay, Historical Geography of Asia Minor (1890), and article “Nova Isaura” in Journ. Hell. Studies (1905); A. M. Ramsay, ibid. (1904); J. R. S. Sterrett, “Wolfe Expedition to Asia Minor,” Papers Amer. Inst. of Arch. iii. (1888); C. Ritter, Erdkunde, xix. (1859); E. J. Davis, Life in As. Turkey (1879).

(D. G. H.)

ISCHIA (Gr. Πιθηκοῦσα, Lat. Aenaria, in poetry Inarime), an island off the coast of Campania, Italy, 16 m. S.W. of Naples, to the province of which it belongs, and 7 m. S.W. of the Capo Miseno, the nearest point of the mainland. Pop. about 20,000. It is situated at the W. extremity of the Gulf of Naples, and is the largest island near Naples, measuring about 19 m. in circumference and 26 sq. m. in area. It belongs to the same volcanic system as the mainland near it, and the Monte Epomeo (anc. Ἐπωπεύς, viewpoint), the highest point of the island (2588 ft.), lies on the N. edge of the principal crater, which is surrounded by twelve smaller cones. The island was perhaps occupied by Greek settlers even before Cumae; its Eretrian and Chalcidian inhabitants abandoned it about 500 B.C. owing to an eruption, and it is said to have been deserted almost at once by the greater part of the garrison which Hiero I. of Syracuse had placed there about 470 B.C., owing to the same cause. Later on it came into the possession of Naples, but passed into Roman hands in 326, when Naples herself lost her independence. The ancient town, traces of the fortifications of which still exist, was situated near Lacco, at the N.W. corner of the island. Augustus gave it back to Naples in exchange for Capri. After the fall of Rome it suffered attacks and devastations from the successive masters of Italy, until it was finally taken by the Neapolitans in 1299.

Several eruptions are recorded in Roman times. The last of which we have any knowledge occurred in 1301, but the island was visited by earthquakes in 1881 and 1883, 1700 lives being lost in the latter year, when the town of Casamicciola on the north side of the island was almost entirely destroyed. The hot springs here, which still survive from the period of volcanic activity, rise at a temperature of 147° Fahr. and are alkaline and saline; they are much visited by bathers, especially in summer. They were known in Roman times, and many votive altars dedicated to Apollo and the nymphs have been found. The whole island is mountainous, and is remarkable for its beautiful scenery and its fertility. Wine, corn, oil and fruit are produced, especially the former, while the mountain slopes are clothed with woods. Tiles and pottery are made in the island. Straw-plaiting is a considerable industry at Lacco; and a certain amount of fishing is also done. The potter’s clay of Ischia served for the potteries of Cumae and Puteoli in ancient times, and was indeed in considerable demand until the catastrophe at Casamicciola in 1883.

The chief towns are Ischia on the E. coast, the capital and the seat of a bishop (pop. in 1901, town, 2756; commune, 7012), with a 15th-century castle, to which Vittoria Colonna retired after the death of her husband in 1525; Casamicciola (pop. in 1901, town, 1085; commune, 3731) on the north, and Forīo on the west coast (pop. in 1901, town, 3640; commune, 7197). There is regular communication with Naples, both by steamer direct, and also by steamer to Torregaveta, 2 m. W.S.W. of Baiae and 12½ m. W.S.W. of Naples, and thence by rail.

See J. Beloch, Campanien (Breslau, 1890), 202 sqq.

(T. As.)

ISCHL, a market-town and watering-place of Austria, in Upper Austria, 55 m. S.S.W. of Linz by rail. Pop. (1900) 9646. It is beautifully situated on the peninsula formed by the junction of the rivers Ischl and Traun and is surrounded by high mountains, presenting scenery of the finest description. To the S. is the Siriuskogl or Hundskogl (1960 ft.), and to the W. the Schafberg (5837 ft.), which is ascended from St Wolfgang by a rack-and-pinion railway, built in 1893. It possesses a fine parish church, built by Maria Theresa and renovated in 1877-1880, and the Imperial Villa is surrounded by a magnificent park. Ischl is one of the most fashionable spas of Europe, being the favourite summer residence of the Austrian Imperial family and of the Austrian nobility since 1822. It has saline and sulphureous drinking springs and numerous brine and brine-vapour baths. The brine used at Ischl contains about 25% of salt and there are also mud, sulphur and pine-cone baths. Ischl is situated at an altitude of 1533 ft. above sea-level and has a very mild climate. Its mean annual temperature is 49.4° F. and its mean summer temperature is 63.5° F. Ischl is an important centre of the salt industry and 4 m. to its W. is a celebrated salt mine, which has been worked as early as the 12th century.

ISEO, LAKE OF (the Lacus Sebinus of the Romans), a lake in Lombardy, N. Italy, situated at the southern foot of the Alps, and between the provinces of Bergamo and Brescia. It is formed by the Oglio river, which enters the northern extremity of the lake of Lovere, and issues from the southern end at Sarnico, on its way to join the Po. The area of the lake is about 24 sq. m., it is 17½ m. in length, and 3 m. wide in the broadest portion, while the greatest depth is said to be about 984 ft. and the height of its surface above sea-level 607 ft. It contains one large island, that of Siviano, which culminates in the Monte Isola (1965 ft.) that is crowned by a chapel, while to the south is the islet of San Paolo, occupied by the buildings of a small Franciscan convent now abandoned, and to the north the equally tiny island of Loreto, with a ruined chapel containing frescoes. At the southern end of the lake are the small towns of Iseo (15 m. by rail N.W. of Brescia) and of Sarnico. From Paratico, opposite Sarnico, on the other or left bank of the Oglio, a railway runs in 6¼ m. to Palazzolo, on the main Brescia-Bergamo line. Towards the head of the lake, the deep wide valley of the Oglio is seen, dominated by the glittering snows of the Adamello (11,661 ft.), a glorious prospect. Along the east shore (the west shore is far more rugged) a fine carriage road rims from Iseo to the considerable town of Pisogne (13½ m.), situated at the northern end of the lake, and nearly opposite that of Lovere, on the right bank of the Oglio. The portion of this road some way S. of Pisogne is cleverly engineered, and is carried through several tunnels. The lake’s charms were celebrated by Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, who spent ten summers (1747-1757) in a villa at Lovere, then much frequented by reason of an iron spring. The lake has several sardine and eel fisheries.

(W. A. B. C.)

ISÈRE [anc. Isara], one of the chief rivers in France as well as of those flowing down on the French side of the Alpine chain. Its total length from its source to its junction with the Rhône is about 180 m., during which it descends a height of about 7550 ft. Its drainage area is about 4725 sq. m. It flows through the departments of Savoie, Isère and Drôme. This river rises in the Galise glaciers in the French Graian Alps and flows, as a mountain torrent, through a narrow valley past Tignes in a north-westerly direction to Bourg St Maurice, at the western foot of the Little St Bernard Pass. It now bends S.W., as far as Moutiers, the chief town of the Tarentaise, as the upper course of the Isère is named. Here it again turns N.W. as far as Albertville, where after receiving the Arly (right) it once more takes a south-westerly direction, and near St Pierre d’Albigny receives its first important tributary, the Arc (left), a wild mountain stream flowing through the Maurienne and past the foot of the Mont Cenis Pass. A little way below, at Montmélian, it becomes officially navigable (for about half of its course), though it is but little used for that purpose owing to the irregular depth of its bed and the rapidity of its current. Very probably, in ancient days, it flowed from Montmélian N.W. and, after passing through or forming the Lac du Bourget, joined the Rhône. But at present it continues from Montmélian in a south-westerly direction, flowing through the broad and fertile valley of the Graisivaudan, though receiving but a single affluent of any importance, the Bréda (left). At Grenoble, the most important town on its banks, it bends for a short distance again N.W. But just below that town it receives by far its most important affluent (left) the Drac, which itself drains the entire S. slope of the lofty snow-clad Dauphiné Alps, and which, 11 m. above Grenoble, had received the Romanche (right), a mountain stream which drains the entire central and N. portion of the same Alps. Hence the Drac is, at its junction with the Isère, a stream of nearly the same volume, while these two rivers, with the Durance, drain practically the entire French slope of the Alpine chain, the basins of the Arve and of the Var forming the sole exceptions. A short distance below Moirans the Isère changes its direction for the last time and now flows S.W. past Romans before joining the Rhône on the left, as its principal affluent after the Saône and the Durance, between Tournon and Valence. The Isère is remarkable for the way in which it changes its direction, forming three great loops of which the apex is respectively at Bourg St Maurice, Albertville and Moirans. For some way after its junction with the Rhône the grey troubled current of the Isère can be distinguished in the broad and peaceful stream of the Rhône.

(W. A. B. C )

ISÈRE, a department of S.E. France, formed in 1790 out of the northern part of the old province of Dauphiné. Pop. (1906) 562,315. It is bounded N. by the department of the Ain, E. by that of Savoie, S. by those of the Hautes Alpes and the Drôme and W. by those of the Loire and the Rhône. Its area is 3179 sq. m. (surpassed only by 7 other departments), while its greatest length is 93 m. and its greatest breadth 53 m. The river Isère runs for nearly half its course through this department, to which it gives its name. The southern portion of the department is very mountainous, the loftiest summit being the Pic Lory (13,396 ft.) in the extensive snow-clad Oisans group (drained by the Drac and Romanche, two mighty mountain torrents), while minor groups are those of Belledonne, of Allevard, of the Grandes Rousses, of the Dévoluy, of the Trièves, of the Royannais, of the Vercors and, slightly to the north of the rest, that of the Grande Chartreuse. The northern portion of the department is composed of plateaux, low hills and plains, while on every side but the south it is bounded by the course of the Rhône. It forms the bishopric of Grenoble (dating from the 4th century), till 1790 in the ecclesiastical province of Vienne, and now in that of Lyons. The department is divided into four arrondissements (Grenoble, St Marcellin, La Tour du Pin and Vienne), 45 cantons and 563 communes. Its capital is Grenoble, while other important towns in it are the towns of Vienne, St Marcellin and La Tour du Pin. It is well supplied with railways (total length 342 m.), which give access to Gap, to Chambéry, to Lyons, to St Rambert and to Valence, while it also possesses many tramways (total length over 200 m.). It contains silver, lead, coal and iron mines, as well as extensive slate, stone and marble quarries, besides several mineral springs (Allevard, Uriage and La Motte). The forests cover much ground, while among the most flourishing industries are those of glove making, cement, silk weaving and paper making. The area devoted to agriculture (largely in the fertile valley of the Graisivaudan, or Isère, N.E. of Grenoble) is about 1211 sq. m.

(W. A. B. C.)

ISERLOHN, a town in the Prussian province of Westphalia, on the Baar, in a bleak and hilly region, 17 m. W. of Arnsberg, and 30 m. E.N.E. from Barmen by rail. Pop. (1900) 27,265. Iserlohn is one of the most important manufacturing towns in Westphalia. Both in the town and neighbourhood there are numerous foundries and works for iron, brass, steel and bronze goods, while other manufactures include wire, needles and pins, fish-hooks, machinery, umbrella-frames, thimbles, bits, furniture, chemicals, coffee-mills, and pinchbeck and britannia-metal goods. Iserlohn is a very old town, its gild of armourers being referred to as “ancient” in 1443.

ISFAHĀN (older form Ispahān), the name of a Persian province and town. The province is situated in the centre of the country, and bounded S. by Fars, E. by Yezd, N. by Kashān, Natanz and Irāk, and W. by the Bakhtiāri district and Arabistān. It pays a yearly revenue of about £100,000, and its population exceeds 500,000. It is divided into twenty-five districts, its capital, the town of Isfahān, forming one of them. These twenty-five districts, some very small and consisting of only a little township and a few hamlets, are Isfahān, Jai, Barkhār, Kahāb, Kararaj, Baraān, Rūdasht, Marbin, Lenjān, Kerven, Rār, Kiar, Mizdej, Ganduman, Somairam, Jarkūyeh, Ardistan, Kūhpāyeh, Najafabad, Komisheh, Chadugan, Varzek, Tokhmaklu, Gurji, Chinarūd. Most of these districts are very fertile, and produce great quantities of wheat, barley, rice, cotton, tobacco and opium. Lenjān, west of the city of Isfahān, is the greatest rice-producing district; the finest cotton comes from Jarkūyeh; the best opium and tobacco from the villages in the vicinity of the city.

The town of Isfahān or Ispahān, formerly the capital of Persia, now the capital of the province, is situated on the Zāyendeh river in 32° 39′ N. and 51° 40′ E.[1] at an elevation of 5370 ft. Its population, excluding that of the Armenian colony of Julfa on the right or south bank of the river (about 4000), is estimated at 100,000 (73,654, including 5883 Jews, in 1882). The town is divided into thirty-seven mahallehs (parishes) and has 210 mosques and colleges (many half ruined), 84 caravanserais, 150 public baths and 68 flour mills. The water supply is principally from open canals led off from the river and from several streams and canals which come down from the hills in the north-west. The name of the Isfahān river was originally Zendeh (Pahlavi zendek) rūd, “the great river”; it was then modernized into Zindeh-rūd, “the living river,” and is now called Zayendeh rūd, “the life-giving river.” Its principal source is the Janāneh rūd which rises on the eastern slope of the Zardeh Kuh about 90 to 100 m. W. of Isfahān. After receiving the Khursang river from Feridan on the north and the Zarīn rūd from Chaharmahal on the south it is called Zendeh rūd. It then waters the Lenjan and Marbin districts, passes Isfahān as Zayendeh-rūd and 70 m. farther E. ends in the Gavkhani depression. From its entrance into Lenjan to its end 105 canals are led off from it for purposes of irrigation and 14 bridges cross it (5 at Isfahān). Its volume of water at Isfahān during the spring season has been estimated at 60,000 cub. ft. per second; in autumn the quantity is reduced to one-third, but nearly all of it being then used for feeding the irrigation canals very little is left for the river bed. The town covers about 20 sq. m., but many parts of it are in ruins. The old city walls—a ruined mud curtain—are about 5 m. in circumference.

Of the many fine public buildings constructed by the Sefavis and during the reign of the present dynasty very little remains. There are still standing in fairly good repair the two palaces named respectively Chehel Sitūn, “the forty pillars,” and Hasht Behesht, “the eight paradises,” the former constructed by Shah Abbas I. (1587-1629), the latter by Shah Soliman in 1670, and restored and renovated by Fath Ali Shah (1797-1834). They are ornamented with gilding and mirrors in every possible variety of Arabesque decoration, and large and brilliant pictures, representing scenes of Persian history, cover the walls of their principal apartments and have been ascribed in many instances to Italian and Dutch artists who are known to have been in the service of the Sefavis. Attached to these palaces were many other buildings such as the Imaretino built by Amīn ed-Dowleh (or Addaula) for Fath Ali Shah, the Imaret i Ashref built by Ashref Khan, the Afghan usurper, the Talār Tavīleh, Guldasteh, Sarpushīdeh, &c., erected in the early part of the 19th century by wealthy courtiers for the convenience of the sovereign and often occupied as residences of European ministers travelling between Bushire and Teheran and by other distinguished travellers. Perhaps the most agreeable residence of all was the Haft Dast, “the seven courts,” in the beautiful garden of Saādetabad on the southern bank of the river, and 2 or 3 m. from the centre of the city. This palace was built by Shah Abbas II. (1642-1667), and Fath Ali Shad Kajār died there in 1834. Close to it was the Aineh Khaneh, “hall of mirrors” and other elegant buildings in the Hazar jerib (1000 acre) garden. All these palaces and buildings on both sides of the river were surrounded by extensive gardens, traversed by avenues of tall trees, principally planes, and intersected by paved canals of running water with tanks and fountains. Since Fath Ali Shah’s death, palaces and gardens have been neglected. In 1902 an official was sent from Teheran to inspect the crown buildings, to report on their condition, and repair and renovate some, &c. The result was that all the above-mentioned buildings, excepting the Chehel Sitūn and Hasht Behesht, were demolished and their timber, bricks, stone, &c., sold to local builders. The gardens are wildernesses. The garden of the Chehel Sitūn palace opens out through the Alā Kapū (“highest gate, sublime porte”) to the Maidān-i-Shah, which is one of the most imposing piazzas in the world, a parallelogram of 560 yds. (N.-S.) by 174 yds. (E.-W.) surrounded by brick buildings divided into two storeys of recessed arches, or arcades, one above the other. In front of these arcades grow a few stunted planes and poplars. On the south side of the maidan is the famous Masjed i Shah (the shah’s mosque) erected by Shah Abbas I. in 1612-1613. It is covered with glazed tiles of great brilliancy and richly decorated with gold and silver ornaments and cost over £175,000. It is in good repair, and plans of it were published by C. Texier (L’Arménie, la Perse, &c., vol. i. pls. 70-72) and P. Coste (Monuments de la Perse). On the eastern side of the maidan stands the Masjed i Lutf Ullah with beautiful enamelled tiles and in good repair. Opposite to it on the western side of the maidan is the Alā Kapū, a lofty building in the form of an archway overlooking the maidan and crowned in the fore part by an immense open throne-room supported by wooden columns, while the hinder part is elevated three storeys higher. On the north side of the maidan is the entrance gate to the main bazaar surmounted by the Nekkāreh-Khaneh, or drumhouse, where is blared forth the appalling music saluting the rising and setting sun, said to have been instituted by Jamshīd many thousand years ago. West of the Chehel Sitūn palace and conducting N.-S. from the centre of the city to the great bridge of Allah Verdi Khan is the great avenue nearly a mile in length called Chahār Bagh, “the four gardens,” recalling the fact that it was originally occupied by four vineyards which Shah Abbas I. rented at £360 a year and converted into a splendid approach to his capital.

It was thus described by Lord Curzon of Kedleston in 1880: “Of all the sights of Isfahān, this in its present state is the most pathetic in the utter and pitiless decay of its beauty. Let me indicate what it was and what it is. At the upper extremity a two-storeyed pavilion,[2] connected by a corridor with the Seraglio of the palace, so as to enable the ladies of the harem to gaze unobserved upon the merry scene below, looked out upon the centre of the avenue. Water, conducted in stone channels, ran down the centre, falling in miniature cascades from terrace to terrace, and was occasionally collected in great square or octagonal basins where cross roads cut the avenue. On either side of the central channel was a row of oriental planes and a paved pathway for pedestrians. Then occurred a succession of open parterres, usually planted or sown. Next on either side was a second row of planes, between which and the flanking walls was a raised causeway for horsemen. The total breadth is now fifty-two yards. At intervals corresponding with the successive terraces and basins, arched doorways with recessed open chambers overhead conducted through these walls into the various royal or noble gardens that stretched on either side, and were known as the Gardens of the Throne, of the Nightingale, of Vines, of Mulberries, Dervishes, &c. Some of these pavilions were places of public resort and were used as coffee-houses, where when the business of the day was over, the good burghers of Isfahān assembled to sip that beverage and inhale their kalians the while; as Fryer puts it: ’Night drawing on, all the pride of Spahaun was met in the Chaurbaug and the Grandees were Airing themselves, prancing about with their numerous Trains, striving to outvie each other in Pomp and Generosity.’ At the bottom, quays lined the banks of the river, and were bordered with the mansions of the nobility.”

Such was the Chahar Bagh in the plenitude of its fame. But now what a tragical contrast! The channels are empty, their stone borders crumbled and shattered, the terraces are broken down, the parterres are unsightly bare patches, the trees, all lopped and pollarded, have been chipped and hollowed out or cut down for fuel by the soldiery of the Zil, the side pavilions are abandoned and tumbling to pieces and the gardens are wildernesses. Two centuries of decay could never make the Champs Élysées in Paris, the Unter den Linden in Berlin, or Rotten Row in London, look one half as miserable as does the ruined avenue of Shah Abbas. It is in itself an epitome of modern Iran.”

Towards the upper end of the avenue on its eastern side stands the medresseh (college) which Shah Hosain built in 1710. It still has a few students, but is very much out of repair; Lord Curzon spoke of it in 1888 as “one of the stateliest ruins that he saw in Persia.” South of this college the avenue is altogether without trees, and the gardens on both sides have been turned into barley fields. Among the other notable buildings of Isfahān must be reckoned its five bridges, all fine structures, and one of them, the bridge of Allah Verdi Kahn, 388 yds. in length with a paved roadway of 30 ft. in breadth, is one of the stateliest bridges in the world, and has suffered little by the march of decay.

Another striking feature of Isfahān is the line of covered bazaars, which extends for nearly 3 m. and divides the city from south to north. The confluence of people in these bazaars is certainly very great, and gives an exaggerated idea of the populousness of the city, the truth being that while the inhabitants congregate for business in the bazaars, the rest of the city is comparatively deserted. When surveyed from a commanding height within the city, or in the immediate environs, the enormous extent of mingled garden and building, about 30 m. in circuit, gives an impression of populousness and busy life, but a closer scrutiny reveals that the whole scene is nothing more than a gigantic sham. With the exception of the bazaars and a few parishes there is really no continuous inhabited area. Whole streets, whole quarters of the city have fallen into utter ruin and are absolutely deserted, and the traveller who is bent on visiting some of the remarkable sites in the northern part of the city or in the western suburbs, such as the minarets dating from the 12th century, the remains of the famous castle of Tabarrak built by the Buyid Rukn addaula (d. 976), the ruins of the old fire temple, the shaking minarets of Guladān, &c., has to pass through miles of crumbling mud walls and roofless houses. It is believed indeed that not a twentieth part of the area of the old city is at present peopled, and the million or 600,000 inhabitants of Chardin’s time (middle of the 17th century) have now dwindled to about 85,000. The Armenian suburb of Julfa, at any rate, which contained a population of 30,000 souls in the 17th century, has now only 4000, and the Christian churches, which numbered thirteen and were maintained with splendour, are now reduced to half a dozen edifices with bare walls and empty benches. Much improvement has recently taken place in the education of the young and also in their religious teaching, the wealthy Armenians of India and Java having liberally contributed to the national schools, and the Church Missionary Society of London having a church, schools and hospitals there since 1869.

The people of Isfahān have a very poor reputation in Persia either for courage or morals. They are regarded as a clever but at the same time dissolute and disorderly community, whose government requires a strong hand. The lutis (hooligans) of Isfahān are proverbial as the most turbulent and rowdy set of vagabonds in Persia. The priesthood of Isfahān are much respected for their learning and high character, and the merchants are a very respectable class. The commerce of Isfahān has greatly fallen off from its former flourishing condition, and it is doubtful whether the trade of former days can ever be restored.

(A. H.-S.)

History.—The natural advantages of Isfahān—a genial climate, a fertile soil and abundance of water for irrigation—must have always made it a place of importance. In the most ancient cuneiform documents, referring to a period between 3000 and 2000 B.C., the province of Anshan, which certainly included Isfahān, was the limit of the geographical knowledge of the Babylonians, typifying the extreme east, as Syria (or Martu-ki) typified the west. The two provinces of Anshan and Subarta, by which we must understand the country from Isfahān to Shuster, were ruled in those remote ages by the same king, who undoubtedly belonged to the great Turanian family; and from this first notice of Anshan down to the 7th century B.C. the region seems to have remained, more or less, dependent on the paramount power of Susa. With regard to the eastern frontier of Anshan, however, ethnic changes were probably in extensive operation during this interval of twenty centuries. The western Iranians, for instance, after separating from their eastern brethren on the Oxus, as early perhaps as 3000 B.C., must have followed the line of the Elburz mountains, and then bifurcating into two branches must have scattered, westward into Media and southward towards Persia. The first substantial settlement of the southern branch would seem then to have been at Isfahān, where Jem, the eponym of the Persian race, is said to have founded a famous castle, the remains of which were visible as late as the 10th century A.D. This castle is known in the Zoroastrian writings as Jem-gird, but its proper name was Sarū or Sarūk (given in the Bundahish as Sruwa or Srobak), and it was especially famous in early Mahommedan history as the building where the ancient records and tables of the Persians were discovered which proved of so much use to Albumazar and his contemporaries. A valuable tradition, proceeding from quite a different source, has also been preserved to the effect that Jem, who invented the original Persian character, “dwelt in Assan, a district of Shuster” (see Flügel’s Fihrist, p. 12, l. 21), which exactly accords with the Assyrian notices of Assan or Anshan classed as a dependency of Elymais. Now, it is well known that native legend represented the Persian race to have been held in bondage for a thousand years, after the reign of Jem, by the foreign usurper Zohāk or Bīverasp, a period which may well represent the duration of Elymaean supremacy over the Aryans of Anshan. At the commencement of the 7th century B.C. Persia and Ansan are still found in the annals of Sennacherib amongst the tributaries of Elymais, confederated against Assyria; but shortly afterwards the great Susian monarchy, which had lasted for full 2000 years, crumbled away under continued pressure from the west, and the Aryans of Anshan recovered their independence, founding for the first time a national dynasty, and establishing their seat of government at Gabae on the site of the modern city of Isfahān.

The royal city of Gabae was known as a foundation of the Achaemenidae as late as the time of Strabo, and the inscriptions show that Achaemenes and his successors did actually rule at Anshan until the great Cyrus set out on his career of western victory. Whether the Kābi or Kāvi of tradition, the blacksmith of Isfahān, who is said to have headed the revolt against Zohāk, took his name from the town of Gabae may be open to question; but it is at any rate remarkable that the national standard of the Persian race, named after the blacksmith, and supposed to have been first unfurled at this epoch, retained the title of Darafsh-a Kavāni (the banner of Kāvi) to the time of the Arab conquest, and that the men of Isfahān were, moreover, throughout this long period, always especially charged with its protection. The provincial name of Anshan or Assan seems to have been disused in the country after the age of Cyrus, and to have been replaced by that of Gabene or Gabiane, which alone appears in the Greek accounts of the wars of Alexander and his successors, and in the geographical descriptions of Strabo. Gabae or Gāvi became gradually corrupted to Jaī during the Sassanian period, and it was thus by the latter name that the old city of Isfahān was generally known at the time of the Arab invasion. Subsequently the title of Jaī became replaced by Sheheristān or Medīneh, “the city” par excellence, while a suburb which had been founded in the immediate vicinity, and which took the name of Yahudīeh, or the “Jews’ town,” from its original Jewish inhabitants, gradually rose into notice and superseded the old capital.[3]

Sheheristān and Yahudīeh are thus in the early ages of Islam described as independent cities, the former being the eastern and the latter the western division of the capital, each surrounded by a separate wall; but about the middle of the 10th century the famous Buyid king, known as the Rukn-addaula (al-Dowleh), united the two suburbs and many of the adjoining villages in one general enclosure which was about 10 m. in circumference. The city, which had now resumed its old name of Isfahān, continued to flourish till the time of Timur (A.D. 1387), when in common with so many other cities of the empire it suffered grievously at the hands of the Tatar invaders. Timur indeed is said to have erected a Kelleh Minār or “skull tower” of 70,000 heads at the gate of the city, as a warning to deter other communities from resisting his arms. The place, however, owing to its natural advantages, gradually recovered from the effects of this terrible visitation, and when the Safavid dynasty, who succeeded to power in the 16th century, transferred their place of residence to it from Kazvin, it rose rapidly in populousness and wealth. It was under Shah Abbas the first, the most illustrious sovereign of this house, that Isfahān attained its greatest prosperity. This monarch adopted every possible expedient, by stimulating commerce, encouraging arts and manufactures, and introducing luxurious habits, to attract visitors to his favourite capital. He built several magnificent palaces in the richest style of Oriental decoration, planted gardens and avenues, and distributed amongst them the waters of the Zendeh-rūd in an endless series of reservoirs, fountains and cascades. The baths, the mosques, the colleges, the bazaars and the caravanserais of the city received an equal share of his attention, and European artificers and merchants were largely encouraged to settle in his capital. Ambassadors visited his court from many of the first states of Europe, and factories were permanently established for the merchants of England, France, Holland, the Hanseatic towns, Spain, Portugal and Moscow. The celebrated traveller Chardin, who passed a great portion of his life at Isfahān in the latter half of the 17th century, has left a detailed and most interesting account of the statistics of the city at that period. He himself estimated the population at 600,000, though in popular belief the number exceeded a million. There were 1500 flourishing villages in the immediate neighbourhood; the enceinte of the city and suburbs was reckoned at 24 m., while the mud walls surrounding the city itself, probably nearly following the lines of the Buyid enclosure, measured 20,000 paces. In the interior were counted 162 mosques, 48 public colleges, 1802 caravanserais, 273 baths and 12 cemeteries. The adjoining suburb of Julfa was also a most flourishing place. Originally founded by Shah Abbas the Great, who transported to this locality 3400 Armenian families from the town of Julfa on the Arras, the colony increased rapidly under his fostering care, both in wealth and in numbers, the Christian population being estimated in 1685 at 30,000 souls. The first blow to the prosperity of modern Isfahān was given by the Afghan invasion at the beginning of the 18th century, since which date, although continuing for some time to be the nominal head of the empire, the city has gradually dwindled in importance, and now only ranks as a second or third rate provincial capital. When the Kajar dynasty indeed mounted the throne of Persia at the end of the 18th century the seat of government was at once transferred to Teherān, with a view to the support of the royal tribe, whose chief seat was in the neighbouring province of Mazenderān; and, although it has often been proposed, from considerations of state policy in reference to Russia, to re-establish the court at Isfahān, which is the true centre of Persia, the scheme has never commanded much attention. At the same time the government of Isfahān, owing to the wealth of the surrounding districts, has always been much sought after. Early in the 19th century the post was often conferred upon some powerful minister of the court, but in later times it has been usually the apanage of a favourite son or brother of the reigning sovereign.[4] Fath Ali Shāh, who had a particular affection for Isfahān, died here in 1834, and it became a time-honoured custom for the monarch on the throne to seek relief from the heat of Teherān by forming a summer camp at the rich pastures of Gandumān, on the skirts of Zardeh-Kuh, to the west of Isfahān, for the exercise of his troops and the health and amusement of his courtiers, but in recent years the practice has been discontinued.

(H. C. R.)

[1] These figures are approximate for the centre of the town north of the river. The result of astronomical observations taken by the German expedition for observing the transit of Venus in 1874 and by Sir O. St John in 1870 on the south bank of the river near, and in Julfa respectively was 51° 40′ 3.45″ E., 32° 37′ 30″ N. The stone slab commemorating the work of the expedition and placed on the spot where the observations were taken has been carried off and now serves as a door plinth of an Armenian house.

[2] This pavilion was the Persian telegraph office of Isfahān for nearly forty years and was demolished in 1903.

[3] The name of Yahudīeh or “Jews’ town” is derived by the early Arab geographers from a colony of Jews who are said to have migrated from Babylonia to Isfahān shortly after Nebuchadrezzar’s conquest of Jerusalem, but this is pure fable. The Jewish settlement really dates from the 3rd century A.D. as is shown by a notice in the Armenian history of Moses of Chorene, lib. iii. cap. 35. The name Isfahān has been generally compared with the Aspadana of Ptolemy in the extreme north of Persis, and the identification is probably correct. At any rate the title is of great antiquity being found in the Bundahish, and being derived in all likelihood from the family name of the race of Feridūn, the Athviyān of romance, who were entitled Aspiyān in Pahlavi, according to the phonetic rules of that language.

[4] Zill es Sultan, elder brother of Muzafar ed d-n Shah, became governor-general of the Isfahān province in 1869.

ISHIM, a town of West Siberia, in the government of Tobolsk, 180 m. N.W. of Omsk, on a river of the same name, tributary, on the left, of the Irtysh. Pop. (1897) 7161. The town, which was founded in 1630, has tallow-melting and carries on a large trade in rye and rye flour. The fair is one of the most important in Siberia, its returns being estimated at £500,000 annually.

ISHMAEL (a Hebrew name meaning “God hears”), in the Bible, the son of Abraham by his Egyptian concubine Hagar, and the eponym of a number of (probably) nomadic tribes living outside Palestine. Hagar in turn personifies a people found to the east of Gilead (1 Chron. v. 10) and Petra (Strabo).[1] Through the jealousy of Sarah, Abraham’s wife, mother and son were driven away, and they wandered in the district south of Beersheba and Kadesh (Gen. xvi. J, xxi. E); see [Abraham]. It had been foretold to his mother before his birth that he should be “a wild ass among men,” and that he should dwell “before the face of” (that is, to the eastward of) his brethren. It is subsequently stated that after leaving his father’s roof he “became an archer,[2] and dwelt in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother took him a wife out of the land of Egypt.” But the genealogical relations were rather with the Edomites, Midianites and other peoples of North Arabia and the eastern desert than with Egypt proper, and this is indicated by the expressions that “they dwelt from Havilah unto Shur that is east of Egypt, and he settled to the eastward of his brethren” (see [Mizraim]). Like Jacob, the ancestor of the Israelites, he had twelve sons (xxv. 12-18, P), of which only a few have historical associations apart from the biblical records. Nebaioth and Kedar suggest the Nabataei and Cedrei of Pliny (v. 12). the first-mentioned of whom were an important Arab people after the time of Alexander (see [Nabataeans]). The names correspond to the Nabaitu and Kidru of the Assyrian inscriptions occupying the desert east of the Jordan and Dead Sea, whilst the Massa and Tema lay probably farther south. Dumah may perhaps be the same as the Domata of Pliny (vi. 32) and the Δούμεθα or Δουμαίθα of Ptolemy (v. 19, 7, viii. 22, 3)—Sennacherib conquered a fortress of “Aribi” named Adumu,—and Jetur is obviously the Ituraea of classical geographers.[3]

“Ishmael,” therefore, is used in a wide sense of the wilder, roving peoples encircling Canaan from the north-east to the south, related to but on a lower rank than the “sons” of Isaac. It is practically identical with the term “Arabia” as used by the Assyrians. Nothing certain is known of the history of these mixed populations. They arc represented as warlike nomads and with a certain reputation for wisdom (Baruch iii. 23). Not improbably they spoke a dialect (or dialects) akin to Arabic or Aramaic.[4] According to the Mahommedans, Ishmael, who is recognized as their ancestor, lies buried with his mother in the Kaaba in Mecca. See further, T. Nöldeke, Ency. Bib., s.v., and the articles [Edom], [Midian].

(S. A. C.)

[1] On Paul’s use of the story of Hagar (Gal. iv. 24-26), see Ency. Bib. col. 1934; and H. St J. Thackeray, Relation of St Paul to contemporary Jewish Thought (London, 1900), pp. 196 sqq.; Hagar typifies the old Sinaitic covenant, and Sarah represents the new covenant of freedom from bondage. The treatment of the concubine and her son in Gen. xvi. compared with ch. xxi. illustrates old Hebrew customs, on which see further S. A. Cook, Laws of Moses, &c. (London, 1903), pp. 116 sqq., 140 sq.

[2] The Ituraean archers were of Jetur, one of the “sons” of Ishmael (Gen. xxv. 15), and were Roman mercenaries, perhaps even in Great Britain (Pal. Expl. Fund, Q.S., 1909, p. 283).

[3] With Adbeel (Gen. xxv. 13) may be identified Idibi’il (-ba’il) a tribe employed by Tiglath-Pileser IV. (733 B.C.) to watch the frontier of Musri (Sinaitic peninsula or N. Arabia?).

[4] This is suggested by the fact that Ashurbanipal (7th century) mentions as the name of their deity Atar-Samain (i.e. “Ishtar of the heavens”).

ISHPEMING, a city of Marquette county, Michigan, U.S.A., about 15 m. W. by S. of Marquette, in the N. part of the upper peninsula. Pop. (1890) 11,197; (1900) 13,255, of whom 5970 were foreign-born; (1904) 11,623; (1910) 12,448. It is served by the Chicago & North Western, the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic, and the Lake Superior and Ishpeming railways. The city is 1400 ft. above sea-level (whence its name, from an Ojibway Indian word, said to mean “high up”), in the centre of the Marquette Range iron district, and has seven mines within its limits; the mining of iron ore is its principal industry. Ishpeming was settled about 1854, and was incorporated as a city in 1873.

ISHTAR, or Ištar, the name of the chief goddess of Babylonia and Assyria, the counterpart of the Phoenician Astarte (q.v.). The meaning of the name is not known, though it is possible that the underlying stem is the same as that of Assur (q.v.), which would thus make her the “leading one” or “chief.” At all events it is now generally recognized that the name is Semitic in its origin. Where the name originated is likewise uncertain, but the indications point to Erech where we find the worship of a great mother-goddess independent of any association with a male counterpart flourishing in the oldest period of Babylonian history. She appears under various names, among which are Nanā, Innanna, Ninā and Anunit. As early as the days of Khammurabi we find these various names which represented originally different goddesses, though all manifest as the chief trait the life-giving power united in Ishtar. Even when the older names are employed it is always the great mother-goddess who is meant. Ishtar is the one goddess in the pantheon who retains her independent position despite and throughout all changes that the Babylonian-Assyrian religion undergoes. In a certain sense she is the only real goddess in the pantheon, the rest being mere reflections of the gods with whom they are associated as consorts. Even when Ishtar is viewed as the consort of some chief—of Marduk occasionally in the south, of Assur more frequently in the north—the consciousness that she has a personality of her own apart from this association is never lost sight of.

We may reasonably assume that the analogy drawn from the process of reproduction among men and animals led to the conception of a female deity presiding over the life of the universe. The extension of the scope of this goddess to life in general—to the growth of plants and trees from the fructifying seed—was a natural outcome of a fundamental idea; and so, whether we turn to incantations or hymns, in myths and in epics, in votive inscriptions and in historical annals, Ishtar is celebrated and invoked as the great mother, as the mistress of lands, as clothed in splendour and power—one might almost say as the personification of life itself.

But there are two aspects to this goddess of life. She brings forth, she fertilizes the fields, she clothes nature in joy and gladness, but she also withdraws her favours and when she does so the fields wither, and men and animals cease to reproduce. In place of life, barrenness and death ensue. She is thus also a grim goddess, at once cruel and destructive. We can, therefore, understand that she was also invoked as a goddess of war and battles and of the chase; and more particularly among the warlike Assyrians she assumes this aspect. Before the battle she appears to the army, clad in battle array and armed with bow and arrow. In myths symbolizing the change of seasons she is portrayed in this double character, as the life-giving and the life-depriving power. The most noteworthy of these myths describes her as passing through seven gates into the nether world. At each gate some of her clothing and her ornaments are removed until at the last gate she is entirely naked. While she remains in the nether world as a prisoner—whether voluntary or involuntary it is hard to say—all fertility ceases on earth, but the time comes when she again returns to earth, and as she passes each gate the watchman restores to her what she had left there until she is again clad in her full splendour, to the joy of mankind and of all nature. Closely allied with this myth and personifying another view of the change of seasons is the story of Ishtar’s love for Tammuz—symbolizing the spring time—but as midsummer approaches her husband is slain and, according to one version, it is for the purpose of saving Tammuz from the clutches of the goddess of the nether world that she enters upon her journey to that region.

In all the great centres Ishtar had her temples, bearing such names as E-anna, “heavenly house,” in Erech; E-makh, “great house,” in Babylon; E-mash-mash, “house of offerings,” in Nineveh. Of the details of her cult we as yet know little, but there is no evidence that there were obscene rites connected with it, though there may have been certain mysteries introduced at certain centres which might easily impress the uninitiated as having obscene aspects. She was served by priestesses as well as by priests, and it would appear that the votaries of Ishtar were in all cases virgins who, as long as they remained in the service of Ishtar, were not permitted to marry.

In the astral-theological system, Ishtar becomes the planet Venus, and the double aspect of the goddess is made to correspond to the strikingly different phases of Venus in the summer and winter seasons. On monuments and seal-cylinders she appears frequently with bow and arrow, though also simply clad in long robes with a crown on her head and an eight-rayed star as her symbol. Statuettes have been found in large numbers representing her as naked with her arms folded across her breast or holding a child. The art thus reflects the popular conceptions formed of the goddess. Together with Sin, the moon-god, and Shamash, the sun-god, she is the third figure in a triad personifying the three great forces of nature—moon, sun and earth, as the life-force. The doctrine involved illustrates the tendency of the Babylonian priests to centralize the manifestations of divine power in the universe, just as the triad Anu, Bel and Ea (q.v.)—the heavens, the earth and the watery deep—form another illustration of this same tendency.

Naturally, as a member of a triad, Ishtar is dissociated from any local limitations, and similarly as the planet Venus—a conception which is essentially a product of theological speculation—no thought of any particular locality for her cult is present. It is because her cult, like that of Sin (q.v.) and Shamash (q.v.), is spread over all Babylonia and Assyria, that she becomes available for purposes of theological speculation.

Cf. [Astarte], [Atargatis], [Great Mother of the Gods], and specially [Babylonian and Assyrian Religion].

(M. Ja.)

ISHTIB, or Istib (anc. Astibon, Slav. Shtipliye or Shtip), a town of Macedonia, European Turkey, in the vilayet of Kossovo; 45 m. E.S.E. of Uskub. Pop. (1905) about 10,000. Ishtib is built on a hill at the confluence of the small river Ishtib with the Bregalnitza, a tributary of the Vardar. It has a thriving agricultural trade, and possesses several fine mosques, a number of fountains and a large bazaar. A hill on the north-west is crowned by the ruins of an old castle.

ISIDORE OF ALEXANDRIA,[1] Greek philosopher and one of the last of the Neoplatonists, lived in Athens and Alexandria towards the end of the 5th century A.D. He became head of the school in Athens in succession to Marinus who followed Proclus. His views alienated the chief members of the school and he was compelled to resign his position to Hegias. He is known principally as the preceptor of Damascius whose testimony to him in the Life of Isidorus presents him in a very favourable light as a man and a thinker. It is generally admitted, however, that he was rather an enthusiast than a thinker; reasoning with him was subsidiary to inspiration, and he preferred the theories of Pythagoras and Plato to the unimaginative logic and the practical ethics of the Stoics and the Aristotelians. He seems to have given loose rein to a sort of theosophical speculation and attached great importance to dreams and waking visions on which he used to expatiate in his public discourses.

Damascius’ Life is preserved by Photius in the Bibliotheca, and the fragments are printed in the Didot edition of Diogenes Laërtius. See Agathias, Hist. ii. 30; Photius, Bibliotheca, 181; and histories of Neoplatonism.

[1] With Isidore of Alexandria has been confused an Isidore of Gaza, mentioned by Photius. Little is known of him except that he was one of those who accompanied Damascius to the Persian court when Justinian closed the schools in Athens in 529. Suidas, in speaking of Isidore of Alexandria, says that Hypatia was his wife, but there is no means of approximating the dates (see [Hypatia]). Suetonius, in his Life of Nero, refers to a Cynic philosopher named Isidore, who is said to have jested publicly at the expense of Nero.

ISIDORE OF SEVILLE, or Isidorus Hispalensis (c. 560-636), Spanish encyclopaedist and historian, was the son of Severianus, a distinguished native of Cartagena, who came to Seville about the time of the birth of Isidore. Leander, bishop of Seville, was his elder brother. Left an orphan while still young, Isidore was educated in a monastery, and soon distinguished himself in controversies with the Arians. In 599, on the death of his brother, he was chosen archbishop of Seville, and acquired high renown by his successful administration of the episcopal office, as well as by his numerous theological, historical and scientific works. He founded a school at Seville, and taught in it himself. In the provincial and national councils he played an important part, notably at Toledo in 610, at Seville in 619 and in 633 at Toledo, which profoundly modified the organization of the church in Spain. His great work, however, was in another line. Profoundly versed in the Latin as well as in the Christian literature, his indefatigable intellectual curiosity led him to condense and reproduce in encyclopaedic form the fruit of his wide reading. His works, which include all topics—science, canon law, history or theology—are unsystematic and largely uncritical, merely reproducing at second hand the substance of such sources as were available. Yet in their inadequate way they served to keep alive throughout the dark ages some little knowledge of the antique culture and learning. The most elaborate of his writings is the Originum sive etymologiarum libri XX. It was the last of his works, written between 622 and 633, and was corrected by his friend and disciple Braulion. It is an encyclopaedia of all the sciences, under the form of an explanation of the terms proper to each of them. It was one of the capital books of the middle ages.

On the Libri differentiarum sive de proprietate sermonum—of which the first book is a collection of synonyms, and the second of explanations of metaphysical and religious ideas—see A. Macé’s doctoral dissertation, Rennes, 1900. Mommsen has edited the Chronica majora or Chronicon de sex aetatibus (from the creation to A.D. 615) and the “Historia Gothorum, Wandalorum, Sueborum,” in the Monumenta Germaniae historica, auctores antiqitissimi: Chronica minora II. The history of the Goths is a historical source of the first order. The De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis or better De viris illustribus, was a continuation of the work of St Jerome and of Gennadius (cf. G. von Dzialowski in Kirchengeschichtliche Studien, iv. (1899). Especially interesting is the De natura rerum ad Sisebutum regem, a treatise on astronomy and meteorology, which contained the sum of physical philosophy during the early middle ages. The Regula monachorum of Isidore was adopted by many of the monasteries in Spain during the 7th and 8th centuries. The collection of canons known as the Isidoriana or Hispalensis is not by him, and the following, attributed to him, are of doubtful authenticity: De ortu ac obitu patrum qui in Scriptura laudibus efferuntur; Allegoriae scripturae sacrae et liber numerorum; De ordine creaturarum.

The edition of all of Isidore’s works by F. Orevalo (Rome, 1797-1803, 7 vols.), reproduced in Migne, Patrologia Latina, 81-84, is carefully edited. See also C. Canal, San Isidoro, exposicion de sus obras e indicaciones a cerca de la influencia que han ejercido en la civilizacion española (Seville, 1897). A list of monographs is in the Bibliographie of Ulysse Chevalier.

ISINGLASS (probably a corruption of the Dutch huisenblas, Ger. Hausenblase, literally “sturgeon’s bladder”), a pure form of commercial gelatin obtained from the swimming bladder or sound of several species of fish. The sturgeon is the most valuable, various species of which, especially Acipenser stellatus (the seuruga), A. ruthenus (the sterlet) and A. güldenstädtii (the ossétr), flourish in the Volga and other Russian rivers, in the Caspian and Black Seas, and in the Arctic Ocean, and yield the “Russian isinglass”; a large fish, Silurus parkerii, and probably some other fish, yield the “Brazilian isinglass”; other less definitely characterized fish yield the “Penang” product; while the common cod, the hake and other Gadidae also yield a variety of isinglass. The sounds, having been removed from the fish and cleansed, undergo no other preparation than desiccation or drying, an operation needing much care; but in this process the sounds are subjected to several different treatments. If the sound be unopened the product appears in commerce as “pipe,” “purse” or “lump isinglass”; if opened and unfolded, as “leaf” or “honeycomb”; if folded and dried, as “book,” and if rolled out, as “ribbon isinglass.” Russian isinglass generally appears in commerce as leaf, book, and long and short staple; Brazilian isinglass, from Para and Maranham, as pipe, lump and honeycomb; the latter product, and also the isinglass of Hudson’s Bay, Penang, Manila, &c., is darker in colour and less soluble than the Russian product.

The finest isinglass, which comes from the Russian ports of Astrakhan and Taganrog, is prepared by steeping the sounds in hot water in order to remove mucus, &c.; they are then cut open and the inner membrane exposed to the air; after drying, the outer membrane is removed by rubbing and beating. As imported, isinglass is usually too tough and hard to be directly used. To increase its availability, the raw material is sorted, soaked in water till it becomes flexible and then trimmed; the trimmings are sold as a lower grade. The trimmed sheets are sometimes passed between steel rollers, which reduce them to the thickness of paper; it then appears as a transparent ribbon, “shot” like watered silk. The ribbon is dried, and, if necessary, cut into strips.

The principal use of isinglass is for clarifying wines, beers and other liquids. This property is the more remarkable since it is not possessed by ordinary gelatin; it has been ascribed to its fibrous structure, which forms, as it were, a fine network in the liquid in which it is disseminated, and thereby mechanically carries down all the minute particles which occasion the turbidity. The cheaper varieties are more commonly used; many brewers prefer the Penang product; Russian leaf, however, is used by some Scottish brewers; and Russian long staple is used in the Worcestershire cider industry. Of secondary importance is its use for culinary and confectionery purposes, for example, in making jellies, stiffening jams, &c. Here it is often replaced by the so-called “patent isinglass,” which is a very pure gelatin, and differs from natural isinglass by being useless for clarifying liquids. It has few other applications in the arts. Mixed with gum, it is employed to give a lustre to ribbons and silk; incorporated with water, Spanish liquorice and lamp black it forms an Indian ink; a solution, mixed with a little tincture of benzoin, brushed over sarsenet and allowed to dry, forms the well-known “court plaster.” Another plaster is obtained by adding acetic acid and a little otto of roses to a solution of fine glue. It also has valuable agglutinating properties; by dissolving in two parts of pure alcohol it forms a diamond cement, the solution cooling to a white, opaque, hard solid; it also dissolves in strong acetic acid to form a powerful cement, which is especially useful for repairing glass, pottery and like substances.

ISIS (Egyptian Ēse), the most famous of the Egyptian goddesses. She was of human form, in early times distinguished only by the hieroglyph of her name

upon her head. Later she commonly wore the horns of a cow, and the cow was sacred to her; it is doubtful, however, whether she had any animal representation in early times, nor had she possession of any considerable locality until a late period, when Philae, Behbēt and other large temples were dedicated to her worship. Yet she was of great importance in mythology, religion and magic, appearing constantly in the very ancient Pyramid texts as the devoted sister-wife of Osiris and mother of Horus. In the divine genealogies she is daughter of Keb and Nut (earth and sky). She was supreme in magical power, cunning and knowledge. A legend of the New Kingdom tells how she contrived to learn the all-powerful hidden name of Rē’ which he had confided to no one. A snake which she had fashioned for the purpose stung the god, who sent for her as a last resort in his unendurable agony; whereupon she represented to him that nothing but his own mysterious name could overcome the venom of the snake. Much Egyptian magic turns on the healing or protection of Horus by Isis, and it is chiefly from magical texts that the myth of Isis and Osiris as given by Plutarch can be illustrated. The Metternich stela (XXXth Dynasty), the finest example of a class of prophylactic stelae generally known by the name of “Horus on the crocodiles,” is inscribed with a long text relating the adventures of Isis and Horus in the marshes of the Delta. With her sister Nephthys, Isis is frequently represented as watching the body of Osiris or mourning his death.

Isis was identified with Demeter by Herodotus, and described as the goddess who was held to be the greatest by the Egyptians; he states that she and Osiris, unlike other deities, were worshipped throughout the land. The importance of Isis had increased greatly since the end of the New Kingdom. The great temple of Philae was begun under the XXXth Dynasty; that of Behbēt seems to have been built by Ptolemy II. The cult of Isis spread into Greece with that of Serapis early in the 3rd century B.C. In Egypt itself Isea, or shrines of Isis, swarmed. At Coptos Isis became a leading divinity on a par with the early god Min. About 80 B.C. Sulla founded an Isiac college in Rome, but their altars within the city were overthrown by the consuls no less than four times in the decade from 58 to 48 B.C., and the worship of Isis at Rome continued to be limited or suppressed by a succession of enactments which were enforced until the reign of Caligula. The Isiac mysteries were a representation of the chief events in the myth of Isis and Osiris—the murder of Osiris, the lamentations of Isis and her wanderings, followed by the triumph of Horus over Seth and the resurrection of the slain god—accompanied by music and an exposition of the inner meaning of the spectacle. These were traditional in ancient Egypt, and in their later development were no doubt affected by the Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter. They appealed powerfully to the imagination and the religious sense. The initiated went through rites of purification, and practised a degree of asceticism; but for many the festival was believed to be an occasion for dark orgies. Isis nursing the child Horus (Harpokhrates) was a very common figure in the Deltaic period, and in these later days was still a favourite representation. The Isis temples discovered at Pompeii and in Rome show that ancient monuments as well as objects of small size were brought from Egypt to Italy for dedication to her worship, but the goddess absorbed the attributes of all female divinities; she was goddess of the earth and its fruits, of the Nile, of the sea, of the underworld, of love, healing and magic. From the time of Vespasian onwards the worship of Isis, always popular with some sections, had a great vogue throughout the western world, and is not without traces in Britain. It proved the most successful of the pagan cults in maintaining itself against Christianity, with which it had not a little in common, both in doctrine and in emblems. But the destruction of the Serapeum at Alexandria in A.D. 397 was a fatal blow to the prestige of the Graeco-Egyptian divinities. The worship of Isis, however, survived in Italy into the 5th century. At Philae her temple was frequented by the barbarous Nobatae and Blemmyes until the middle of the 6th century, when the last remaining shrine of Isis was finally closed.

See G. Lafaye, art. “Isis” in Daremberg et Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquités (1900); id. Hist. du culte des divinités d’Alexandrie hors de l’Égypte (1883); Meyer and Drexler, art. “Isis” in Röscher’s Lexicon der griech. und röm. Mythologie (1891-1892) (very elaborate); E. A. W. Budge, Gods of the Egyptians, vol. ii. ch. xiii.; Ad. Rusch, De Serapide et Iside in Graecia cultis (dissertation) (Berlin, 1906). (The author especially collects the evidence from Greek inscriptions earlier than the Roman conquest; he contends that the mysteries of Isis were not equated with the Eleusinian mysteries.)

(F. Ll. G.)

ISKELIB, the chief town of a Caza (governed by a kaimakam) in the vilayet of Angora in Asia Minor, altitude 2460 ft., near the left bank of the Kizil Irmak (anc. Halys), 100 m. in an air-line N.E. of Angora and 60 S.E. of Kastamūni (to which vilayet it belonged till 1894). Pop. 10,600 (Cuinet, La Turquie d’Asie, 1894). It lies several miles off the road, now abandoned by wheeled traffic, between Changra and Amasia in a picturesque cul de sac amongst wooded hills, at the foot of a limestone rock crowned by the ruins of an ancient fortress now filled with houses (photograph in Anderson, Studia Pontica, p. 4). Its ancient name is uncertain. Near the town (on S.) are saline springs, whence salt is extracted.

ISLA, JOSÉ FRANCISCO DE (1703-1781), Spanish satirist, was born at Villavidanes (León) on the 24th of March 1703. He joined the Jesuits in 1719, was banished from Spain with his brethren in 1767, and settled at Bologna, where he died on the 2nd of November 1781. His earliest publication, a Carta de un residente en Roma (1725), is a panegyric of trifling interest, and La Juventud triunfante (1727) was written in collaboration with Luis de Lovada. Isla’s gifts were first shown in his Triunfo del amor y de la lealtad: Dia Grande de Navarra, a satirical description of the ceremonies at Pamplona in honour of Ferdinand VI.’s accession; its sly humour so far escaped the victims that they thanked the writer for his appreciation of their local efforts, but the true significance of the work was discovered shortly afterwards, and the protests were so violent that Isla was transferred by his superiors to another district. He gained a great reputation as an effective preacher, and his posthumous Sermones morales (1792-1793) justify his fame in this respect. But his position in the history of Spanish literature is due to his Historia del famoso predicador fray Gerundio de Campazas, alias Zotes (1758), a novel which wittily caricatures the bombastic eloquence of pulpit orators in Spain. Owing to the protests of the Dominicans and other regulars, the book was prohibited in 1760, but the second part was issued surreptitiously in 1768. He translated Gil Blas, adopting more or less seriously Voltaire’s unfounded suggestion that Le Sage plagiarized from Espinel’s Marcos de Obregón, and other Spanish books; the text appeared in 1783, and in 1828 was greatly modified by Evaristo Peña y Martín, whose arrangement is still widely read.

See Policarpo Mingote y Tarrazona, Varones ilustres de la provincia de León (León, 1880), pp. 185-215; Bernard Gaudeau, Les Prêcheurs burlesques en Espagne au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1891); V. Cian, L’ Immigrazione dei Gesuiti spagnuoli letterati in Italia (Torino, 1895).

(J. F.-K.)

ISLAM, an Arabic word meaning “pious submission to the will of God,” the name of the religion of the orthodox Mahommedans, and hence used, generically, for the whole body of Mahommedan peoples. Salama, from which the word is derived appears in salaam, “peace be with you,” the greeting of the East, and in Moslem, and means to be “free” or “secure.” (See [Mahommedan Religion], &c.)

ISLAMABAD, a town of India in the state of Kashmir, on the north bank of the Jhelum. Pop. (1901) 9390. The town crowns the summit of a long low ridge, extending from the mountains eastward. It is the second town in Kashmir, and was originally the capital of the valley, but is now decaying. It contains an old summer palace, overshadowed by plane trees, with numerous springs, and a fine mosque and shrine. Below the town is a reservoir containing a spring of clear water called the Anant Nag, slightly sulphurous, from which volumes of gas continually arise; the water swarms with sacred fish. There are manufactures of Kashmir shawls, also of chintzes, cotton and woollen goods.

ISLAND (O.E. ieg = isle, + land[1]), in physical geography, a term generally definable as a piece of land surrounded by water. Islands may be divided into two main classes, continental and oceanic. The former are such as would result from the submergence of a coastal range, or a coastal highland, until the mountain bases were cut off from the mainland while their summits remained above water. The island may have been formed by the sea cutting through the landward end of a peninsula, or by the eating back of a bay or estuary until a portion of the mainland is detached and becomes surrounded by water. In all cases where the continental islands occur, they are connected with the mainland by a continental shelf, and their structure is essentially that of the mainland. The islands off the west coast of Scotland and the Isles of Man and Wight have this relation to Britain, while Britain and Ireland have a similar relation to the continent of Europe. The north-east coast of Australia furnishes similar examples, but in addition to these in that locality there are true oceanic islands near the mainland, formed by the growth of the Great Barrier coral reef. Oceanic islands are due to various causes. It is a question whether the numberless islands of the Malay Archipelago should be regarded as continental or oceanic, but there is no doubt that the South Sea islands scattered over a portion of the Pacific belong to the oceanic group. The ocean floor is by no means a level plain, but rises and falls in mounds, eminences and basins towards the surface. When this configuration is emphasized in any particular oceanic area, so that a peak rises above the surface, an oceanic island is produced. Submarine volcanic activity may also raise material above sea-level, or the buckling of the ocean-bed by earth movements may have a similar result. Coral islands (see [Atoll]) are oceanic islands, and are frequently clustered upon plateaux where the sea is of no great depth, or appear singly as the crown of some isolated peak that rises from deep water.

Island life contains many features of peculiar interest. The sea forms a barrier to some forms of life but acts as a carrier to other colonizing forms that frequently develop new features in their isolated surroundings where the struggle for existence is greater or less than before. When a sea barrier has existed for a very long time there is a marked difference between the fauna and flora even of adjacent islands. In Bali and Borneo, for example, the flora and fauna are Asiatic, while in Lombok and Celebes they are Australian, though the Bali Straits are very narrow. In Java and Sumatra, though belonging to the same group, there are marked developments of bird life, the peacock being found in Java and the Argus pheasant in Sumatra, having become too specialized to migrate. The Cocos, Keeling Islands and Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean have been colonized by few animal forms, chiefly sea-birds and insects, while they are clothed with abundant vegetation, the seeds of which have been carried by currents and by other means, but the variety of plants is by no means so great as on the mainland. Island life, therefore, is a sure indication of the origin of the island, which may be one of the remnants of a shattered or dissected continent, or may have arisen independently from the sea and become afterwards colonized by drift.

The word “island” is sometimes used for a piece of land cut off by the tide or surrounded by marsh (e.g. Hayling Island).

[1] The O.E. ieg, ig, still appearing in local names, e.g. Anglesey, Battersea, is cognate with Norw. öy, Icel. ey, and the first part of Ger. Eiland, &c.; it is referred to the original Teut. ahwia, a place in water, ahwa, water, cf. Lat. aqua; the same word is seen in English “eyot,” “ait,” an islet in a river. The spelling “island,” accepted before 1700, is due to a false connexion with “isle,” Fr. île, Lat. insula.

ISLAY, the southernmost island of the Inner Hebrides, Argyllshire, Scotland, 16 m. W. of Kintyre and ¾ m. S.W. of Jura, from which it is separated by the Sound of Islay. Pop. (1901) 6857; area, 150,400 acres; maximum breadth 19 m. and maximum length 25 m. The sea-lochs Gruinart and Indaal cut into it so deeply as almost to convert the western portion into a separate island. It is rich and productive, and has been called the “Queen of the Hebrides.” The surface generally is regular, the highest summits being Ben Bheigeir (1609 ft.) and Sgorr nam Faoileann (1407 ft.). There are several freshwater lakes and streams, which provide good fishing. Islay was the ancient seat of the “lord of the Isles,” the first to adopt that title being John Macdonald of Isle of Islay, who died about 1386; but the Macdonalds were ultimately ousted by their rivals, the Campbells, about 1616. Islay House, the ancient seat of the Campbells of Islay, stands at the head of Loch Indaal. The island was formerly occupied by small crofters and tacksmen, but since 1831 it has been gradually developed into large sheep and arable farms and considerable business is done in stock-raising. Dairy-farming is largely followed, and oats, barley and various green crops are raised. The chief difficulty in the way of reclamation is the great area of peat (60 sq. m.), which, at its present rate of consumption, is calculated to last 1500 years. The island contains several whisky distilleries, producing about 400,000 gallons annually. Slate and marble are quarried, and there is a little mining of iron, lead and silver. At Bowmore, the chief town, there is a considerable shipping trade. Port Ellen, the principal village, has a quay with lighthouse, a fishery and a golf-course. Port Askaig is the ferry station for Faolin on Jura. Regular communication with the Clyde is maintained by steamers, and a cable was laid between Lagavulin and Kintyre in 1871.

ISLES OF THE BLEST, or Fortunate Islands (Gr. αἱ τῶν μακάρων νῆσοι: Lat., Fortunatae Insulae), in Greek mythology a group of islands near the edge of the Western Ocean, peopled not by the dead, but by mortals upon whom the gods had conferred immortality. Like the islands of the Phaeacians in Homer (Od. viii.) or the Celtic Avalon and St Brendan’s island, the Isles of the Blest are represented as a land of perpetual summer and abundance of all good things. No reference is made to them by Homer, who speaks instead of the Elysian Plain (Od. iv. and ix.), but they are mentioned by Hesiod (Works and Days, 168) and Pindar (Ol. ii.). A very old tradition suggests that the idea of such an earthly paradise was a reminiscence of some unrecorded voyage to Madeira and the Canaries, which are sometimes named Fortunatae Insulae by medieval map-makers. (See [Atlantis].)

ISLINGTON (in Domesday and later documents Iseldon, Isendon and in the 16th century Hisselton), a northern metropolitan borough of London, England, bounded E. by Stoke Newington and Hackney, S. by Shoreditch and Finsbury, and W. by St Pancras, and extending N. to the boundary of the county of London. Pop. (1901) 334,991. The name is commonly applied to the southern part of the borough, which, however, includes the districts of Holloway in the north, Highbury in the east, part of Kingsland in the south-east, and Barnsbury and Canonbury in the south-central portion. The districts included preserve the names of ancient manors, and in Canonbury, which belonged as early as the 13th century to the priory of St Bartholomew, Smithfield, traces of the old manor house remain. The fields and places of entertainment in Islington were favourite places of resort for the citizens of London in the 17th century and later; the modern Ball’s Pond Road recalls the sport of duck-hunting practised here and on other ponds in the parish, and the popularity of the place was increased by the discovery of chalybeate wells. At Copenhagen Fields, now covered by the great cattle market (1855) adjoining Caledonian Road, a great meeting of labourers was held in 1834. They were suspected of intending to impose their views on parliament by violence, but a display of military force held them in check. The most noteworthy modern institutions in Islington are the Agricultural Hall, Liverpool Road, erected in 1862, and used for cattle and horse shows and other exhibitions; Pentonville Prison, Caledonian Road (1842), a vast pile of buildings radiating from a centre, and Holloway Prison. The borough has only some 40 acres of public grounds, the principal of which is Highbury Fields. Among its institutions are the Great Northern Central Hospital, Holloway, the London Fever Hospital, the Northern Polytechnic, and the London School of Divinity, St John’s Hall Highbury. Islington is a suffragan bishopric in the diocese of London. The parliamentary borough of Islington has north, south, east and west divisions, each returning one member. The borough council consists of a mayor, 10 aldermen and 60 councillors. Area, 3091.5 acres.

ISLIP, a township of Suffolk county, New York, U.S.A., in the central part of the S. side of Long Island. Pop. (1905, state census) 13,721; (1910) 18,346. The township is 16 m. long from E. to W., and 8 m. wide in its widest part. It is bounded on the S. by the Atlantic Ocean; between the ocean and the Great South Bay, here 5-7 m. wide, is a long narrow strip of beach, called Fire Island, at the W. end of which is Fire Island Inlet. The “Island” beach and the Inlet, both very dangerous for shipping, are protected by the Fire Island Lighthouse, the Fire Island Lightship, and a Life Saving Station near the Lighthouse and another at Point o’ Woods. Near the Lighthouse there are a United States Wireless Telegraph Station and a station of the Western Union Telegraph Company, which announces to New York incoming steamships; and a little farther E., on the site formerly occupied by the Surf House, a well-known resort for hay-fever patients, is a state park. Along the “Island” beach there is excellent surf-bathing. The township is served by two parallel branches of the Long Island railroad about 4 m. apart. On the main (northern) division are the villages of Brentwood (first settled as Modern Times, a quasi free-love community), which now has the Convent and School of St Joseph and a large private sanitarium; Central Islip, the seat of the Central Islip State Hospital for the Insane; and Ronkonkoma, on the edge of a lake of the same name (with no visible outlet or inlet and suffering remarkable changes in area). On the S. division of the Long Island railroad are the villages of Bay Shore (to the W. of which is West Islip); Oakdale; West Sayville, originally a Dutch settlement; Sayville and Bayport. The “South Country Road” of crushed clam or oyster shells runs through these villages, which are famous for oyster and clam fisheries. About one-half of the present township was patented in 1684, 1686, 1688 and 1697 by William Nicolls (1657-1723), the son of Matthias Nicolls, who came from Islip in Oxfordshire, England; this large estate (on either side of the Connetquot or Great river) was kept intact until 1786; the W. part of Islip was mostly included in the Moubray patent of 1708; and the township was incorporated in 1710.

ISLY, the name of a small river on the Moroccan-Algerian frontier, a sub-tributary of the Tafna, famous as the scene of the greatest victory of the French army in the Algerian wars. The intervention of Morocco on the side of Abd-el-Kader led at once to the bombardment of Tangier by the French fleet under the prince de Joinville, and the advance of the French army of General Bugeaud (1844). The enemy, 45,000 strong, was found to be encamped on the Isly river near Kudiat-el-Khodra. Bugeaud disposed of some 6500 infantry and 1500 cavalry, with a few pieces of artillery. In his own words, the formation adopted was “a boar’s head.” With the army were Lamoricière, Pélissier and other officers destined to achieve distinction. On the 14th of August the “boar’s head” crossed the river about 9 m. to the N.W. of Kudiat and advanced upon the Moorish camp; it was immediately attacked on all sides by great masses of cavalry; but the volleys of the steady French infantry broke the force of every charge, and at the right moment the French cavalry in two bodies, each of the strength of a brigade, broke out and charged. One brigade stormed the Moorish camp (near Kudiat) in the face of artillery fire, the other sustained a desperate conflict on the right wing with a large body of Moorish horse which had not charged; and only the arrival of infantry put an end to the resistance in this quarter. A general rally of the Moorish forces was followed by another action in which they endeavoured to retake the camp. Bugeaud’s forces, which had originally faced S. when crossing the river, had now changed direction until they faced almost W. Near Kudiat-el-Khodra the Moors had rallied in considerable force, and prepared to retake their camp. The French, however, continued to attack in perfect combination, and after a stubborn resistance the Moors once more gave way. For this great victory, which was quickly followed by proposals of peace, Bugeaud was made duc d’Isly.

ISMAIL (1830-1895), khedive of Egypt, was born at Cairo on the 31st of December 1830, being the second of the three sons of Ibrahim and grandson of Mehemet Ali. After receiving a European education at Paris, where he attended the École d’État-Major, he returned home, and on the death of his elder brother became heir to his uncle, Said Mohammed, the Vali of Egypt. Said, who apparently conceived his own safety to lie in ridding himself as much as possible of the presence of his nephew, employed him in the next few years on missions abroad, notably to the pope, the emperor Napoleon III. and the sultan of Turkey. In 1861 he was despatched at the head of an army of 14,000 to quell an insurrection in the Sudan, and this he successfully accomplished. On the death of Said, on 18th January 1863, Ismail was proclaimed viceroy without opposition. Being of an Orientally extravagant disposition, he found with considerable gratification that the Egyptian revenue was vastly increased by the rise in the value of cotton which resulted from the American Civil War, the Egyptian crop being worth about £25,000,000 instead of £5,000,000. Besides acquiring luxurious tastes in his sojourns abroad, Ismail had discovered that the civilized nations of Europe made a free use of their credit for raising loans. He proceeded at once to apply this idea to his own country by transferring his private debts to the state and launching out on a grand scale of expenditure. Egypt was in his eyes the ruler’s estate which was to be exploited for his benefit and his renown. His own position had to be strengthened, and the country provided with institutions after European models. To these objects Ismail applied himself with energy and cleverness, but without any stint of expense. During the ’sixties and ’seventies Egypt became the happy hunting-ground of self-seeking financiers, to whose schemes Ismail fell an easy and a willing prey. In 1866-1867 he obtained from the sultan of Turkey, in exchange for an increase in the tribute, firmans giving him the title of khedive, and changing the law of succession to direct descent from father to son; and in 1873 he obtained a new firman making him to a large extent independent. He projected vast schemes of internal reform, remodelling the customs system and the post office, stimulating commercial progress, creating a sugar industry, introducing European improvements into Cairo and Alexandria, building palaces, entertaining lavishly and maintaining an opera and a theatre. It has been calculated that, of the total amount of debt incurred by Ismail for his projects, about 10% may have been sunk in works of permanent utility—always excluding the Suez Canal. Meanwhile the opening of the Canal had given him opportunities for asserting himself in foreign courts. On his accession he refused to ratify the concessions to the Canal company made by Said, and the question was referred in 1864 to the arbitration of Napoleon III., who awarded £3,800,000 to the company as compensation for the losses they would incur by the changes which Ismail insisted upon in the original grant. Ismail then used every available means, by his own undoubted powers of fascination and by judicious expenditure, to bring his personality before the foreign sovereigns and public, and he had no little success. He was made G.C.B. in 1867, and in the same year visited Paris and London, where he was received by Queen Victoria and welcomed by the lord mayor; and in 1869 he again paid a visit to England. The result was that the opening of the Canal in November 1869 enabled him to claim to rank among European sovereigns, and to give and receive royal honours: this excited the jealousy of the sultan, but Ismail was clever enough to pacify his overlord. In 1876 the old system of consular jurisdiction for foreigners was modified, and the system of mixed courts introduced, by which European and native judges sat together to try all civil cases without respect of nationality. In all these years Ismail had governed with éclat and profusion, spending, borrowing, raising the taxes on the fellahin and combining his policy of independence with dazzling visions of Egyptian aggrandizement. In 1874 he annexed Darfur, and was only prevented from extending his dominion into Abyssinia by the superior fighting power of the Abyssinians. But at length the inevitable financial crisis came. A national debt of over one hundred millions sterling (as opposed to three millions when he became viceroy) had been incurred by the khedive, whose fundamental idea of liquidating his borrowings was to borrow at increased interest. The bond-holders became restive. Judgments were given against the khedive in the international tribunals. When he could raise no more loans he sold his Suez Canal shares (in 1875) to Great Britain for £3,976,582; and this was immediately followed by the beginning of foreign intervention. In December 1875 Mr Stephen Cave was sent out by the British government to inquire into the finances of Egypt, and in April 1876 his report was published, advising that in view of the waste and extravagance it was necessary for foreign Powers to interfere in order to restore credit. The result was the establishment of the Caisse de la Dette. In October Mr (afterwards Lord) Goschen and M. Joubert made a further investigation, which resulted in the establishment of Anglo-French control. A further commission of inquiry by Major Baring (afterwards Lord Cromer) and others in 1878 culminated in Ismail making over his estates to the nation and accepting the position of a constitutional sovereign, with Nubar as premier, Mr (afterwards Sir Charles) Rivers Wilson as finance minister, and M. de Blignières as minister of public works. Ismail professed to be quite pleased. “Egypt,” he said, “is no longer in Africa; it is part of Europe.” The new régime, however, only lasted six months, and then Ismail dismissed his ministers, an occasion being deliberately prepared by his getting Arabi (q.v.) to foment a military pronunciamiento. England and France took the matter seriously, and insisted (May 1879) on the reinstatement of the British and French ministers; but the situation was no longer a possible one; the tribunals were still giving judgments for debt against the government, and when Germany and Austria showed signs of intending to enforce execution, the governments of Great Britain and France perceived that the only chance of setting matters straight was to get rid of Ismail altogether. He was first advised to abdicate, and a few days afterwards (26th June), as he did not take the hint, he received a telegram from the sultan (who had not forgotten the earlier history of Mehemet Ali’s dynasty), addressed to him as ex-khedive, and informing him that his son Tewfik was his successor. He at once left Egypt for Naples, but eventually was permitted by the sultan to retire to his palace of Emirghian on the Bosporus. There he remained, more or less a state prisoner, till his death on the 2nd of March 1895. Ismail was a man of undoubted ability and remarkable powers. But beneath a veneer of French manners and education he remained throughout a thorough Oriental, though without any of the moral earnestness which characterizes the better side of Mahommedanism. Some of his ambitions were not unworthy, and though his attitude towards western civilization was essentially cynical, he undoubtedly helped to make the Egyptian upper classes realize the value of European education. Moreover, spendthrift as he was, it needed—as is pointed out in Milner’s England in Egypt—a series of unfortunate conditions to render his personality as pernicious to his country as it actually became. “It needed a nation of submissive slaves, not only bereft of any vestige of liberal institutions, but devoid of the slightest spark of the spirit of liberty. It needed a bureaucracy which it would have been hard to equal for its combination of cowardice and corruption. It needed the whole gang of swindlers—mostly European—by whom Ismail was surrounded.” It was his early encouragement of Arabi, and his introduction of swarms of foreign concession-hunters, which precipitated the “national movement” that led to British occupation. His greatest title to remembrance in history must be that he made European intervention in Egypt compulsory.

(H. Ch.)

ISMAIL HADJI MAULVI-MOHAMMED (1781-1831), Mussulman reformer, was born at Pholah near Delhi. In co-operation with Syed Ahmed he attempted to free Indian Mahommedanism from the influence of the native early Indian faiths. The two men travelled extensively for many years and visited Mecca. In the Wahhabite movement they found much that was akin to their own views, and on returning to India preached the new doctrine of a pure Islam, and gathered many adherents. The official Mahommedan leaders, however, regarded their propaganda with disfavour, and the dispute led to the reformers being interdicted by the British government in 1827. The little company then moved to Punjab where, aided by an Afghan chief, they declared war on the Sikhs and made Peshawar the capital of the theocratic community which they wished to establish (1829). Deserted by the Afghans they had to leave Peshawar, and Ismail Hadji fell in battle against the Sikhs amid the Pakhli mountains (1831). The movement survived him, and some adherents are still found in the mountains of the north-west frontier.

Ismail’s book Taqouaīyat el Imān was published in Hindustani and translated in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, xiii. 1852.

ISMAILIA, a town of Lower Egypt, the central station on the Suez Canal, on the N.W. shore of Lake Timsa, about 50 m. from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and 93 m. N.E. of Cairo by rail. Pop. (1907) 10,373. It was laid out in 1863, in connexion with the construction of the canal, and is named after the khedive Ismail. It is divided into two quarters by the road leading from the landing-place to the railway station, and has numerous public offices, warehouses and other buildings, including a palace of the khedive, used as a hospital during the British military operations in 1882, but subsequently allowed to fall into a dilapidated condition. The broad macadamized streets and regular squares bordered with trees give the town an attractive appearance; and it has the advantage, a rare one in Egypt, of being surrounded on three sides by flourishing gardens. The Quai Mehemet Ali, which lies along the canal for upwards of a mile, contains the châlet occupied by Ferdinand de Lesseps during the building of the canal. At the end of the quay are the works for supplying Port Said with water. On the other side of the lake are the so-called Quarries of the Hyenas, from which the building material for the town was obtained.

ISMAY, THOMAS HENRY (1837-1899), British shipowner, was born at Maryport, Cumberland, on the 7th of January 1837. He received his education at Croft House School, Carlisle, and at the age of sixteen was apprenticed to Messrs Imrie & Tomlinson, shipowners and brokers, of Liverpool. He then travelled for a time, visiting the ports of South America, and on returning to Liverpool started in business for himself. In 1867 he took over the White Star line of Australian clippers, and in 1868, perceiving the great future which was open to steam navigation, established, in conjunction with William Imrie, the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company, which has since become famous as the White Star Line. While continuing the Australian service, the firm determined to engage in the American trade, and to that end ordered from Messrs Harland & Wolff, of Belfast, the first Oceanic (3807 tons), which was launched in 1870. This vessel may fairly be said to have marked an era in North Atlantic travel. The same is true of the successive types of steamer which Ismay, with the co-operation of the Belfast shipbuilding firm, subsequently provided for the American trade. To Ismay is mainly due the credit of the arrangement by which some of the fastest ships of the British mercantile marine are held at the disposal of the government in case of war. The origin of this plan dates from the Russo-Turkish war, when there seemed a likelihood of England being involved in hostilities with Russia, and when, therefore, Ismay offered the admiralty the use of the White Star fleet. In 1892 he retired from partnership in the firm of Ismay, Imrie and Co., though he retained the chairmanship of the White Star Company. He served on several important committees and was a member of the royal commission in 1888 on army and navy administration. He was always most generous in his contributions to charities for the relief of sailors, and in 1887 he contributed £20,000 towards a pension fund for Liverpool sailors. He died at Birkenhead on the 23rd of November 1899.

ISMID, or ISNIKMID (anc. Nicomedia), the chief town of the Khoja Ili sanjak of Constantinople, in Asia Minor, situated on rising ground near the head of the gulf of Ismid. The sanjak has an area of 4650 sq. m. and a population of 225,000 (Moslems 131,000). It is an agricultural district, producing cocoons and tobacco, and there are large forests of oak, beech and fir. Near Yalova there are hot mineral springs, much frequented in summer. The town is connected by the lines of the Anatolian railway company with Haidar Pasha, the western terminus, and with Angora, Konia and Smyrna. It contains a fine 16th-century mosque, built by the celebrated architect Sinan. Pop. 20,000 (Moslems 9500, Christians 8000, Jews, 2500). As the seat of a mutessarif, a Greek metropolitan and an Armenian archbishop, Ismid retains somewhat of its ancient dignity, but the material condition of the town is little in keeping with its rank. The head of the gulf of Ismid is gradually silting up. The dockyard was closed in 1879, and the port of Ismid is now at Darinje, 3¾ m. distant, where the Anatolian Railway Company have established their workshops and have built docks and a quay.

ISNARD, MAXIMIN (1758-1825), French revolutionist, was a dealer in perfumery at Draguignan when he was elected deputy for the department of the Var to the Legislative Assembly, where he joined the Girondists. Attacking the court, and the “Austrian committee” in the Tuileries, he demanded the disbandment of the king’s bodyguard, and reproached Louis XVI. for infidelity to the constitution. But on the 20th of June 1792, when the crowd invaded the palace, he was one of the deputies who went to place themselves beside the king to protect him. After the 10th of August 1792 he was sent to the army of the North to justify the insurrection. Re-elected to the Convention, he voted the death of Louis XVI. and was a member of the Committee of General Defence when it was organized on the 4th of January 1793. The committee, consisting of 25 members, proved unwieldy, and on the 4th of April Isnard presented, on behalf of the Girondist majority, the report recommending a smaller committee of nine, which two days later was established as the Committee of Public Safety. On the 25th of May, Isnard was presiding at the Convention when a deputation of the commune of Paris came to demand that J. R. Hébert should be set at liberty, and he made the famous reply: “If by these insurrections, continually renewed, it should happen that the principle of national representation should suffer, I declare to you in the name of France that soon people will search the banks of the Seine to see if Paris has ever existed.” On the 2nd of June 1793 he offered his resignation as representative of the people, but was not comprised in the decree by which the Convention determined upon the arrest of twenty-nine Girondists. On the 3rd of October, however, his arrest was decreed along with that of several other Girondist deputies who had left the Convention and were fomenting civil war in the departments. He escaped, and on the 8th of March 1795 was recalled to the Convention, where he supported all the measures of reaction. He was elected deputy for the Var to the Council of Five Hundred, where he played a very insignificant rôle. In 1797 he retired to Draguignan. In 1800 he published a pamphlet De l’immortalité de l’âme, in which he praised Catholicism; in 1804 Réflexions relatives au senatus-consulte du 28 floréal an XII., which is an enthusiastic apology for the Empire. Upon the restoration he professed such royalist sentiments that he was not disturbed, in spite of the law of 1816 proscribing regicide ex-members of the Convention.

See F. A. Aulard, Les Orateurs de la Législative et de la Convention (Paris, 2nd ed., 1906).

ISOBAR (from Gr. ἴσος, equal, and βάρος, weight), a line upon a meteorological map or pressure chart connecting points where the atmospheric pressure is the same at sea-level, or upon the earth’s surface. A general pressure map will indicate, by these lines, the average pressure for any month or season over large areas. The daily weather charts for more confined regions indicate the presence of a cyclonic or anticyclonic system by means of lines, which connect all places having the same barometric pressure at the same time. It is to be noted that isobaric lines are the intersections of inclined isobaric surfaces with the surface of the earth.

ISOCLINIC LINES (Gr. ἴσος, equal, and κλίνειν, to bend), lines connecting those parts of the earth’s surface where the magnetic inclination is the same in amount. (See [Magnetism, Terrestrial].)

ISOCRATES (436-338 B.C.), Attic orator, was the son of Theodorus, an Athenian citizen of the deme of Erchia—the same in which, about 431 B.C., Xenophon was born—who was sufficiently wealthy to have served the state as choregus. The fact that he possessed slaves skilled in the trade of flute-making perhaps lends point to a passage in which his son is mentioned by the comic poet Strattis.[1] Several popular “sophists” are named as teachers of the young Isocrates. Like other sons of prosperous parents, he may have been trained in such grammatical subtleties as were taught by Protagoras or Prodicus, and initiated by Theramenes into the florid rhetoric of Gorgias, with whom at a later time (about 390 B.C.) he was in personal intercourse. He tells us that his father had been careful to provide for him the best education which Athens could afford. A fact of greater interest is disclosed by Plato’s Phaedrus (278 E). “Isocrates is still young, Phaedrus,” says the Socrates of that dialogue, “but I do not mind telling you what I prophesy of him.... It would not surprise me if, as years go on, he should make all his predecessors seem like children in the kind of oratory to which he is now addressing himself, or if—supposing this should not content him—some divine impulse should lead him to greater things. My dear Phaedrus, a certain philosophy is inborn in him.” This conversation is dramatically supposed to take place about 410 B.C. It is unnecessary to discuss here the date at which the Phaedrus was actually composed. From the passage just cited it is at least clear that there had been a time—while Isocrates could still be called “young”—at which Plato had formed a high estimate of his powers.

Isocrates took no active part in the public life of Athens; he was not fitted, as he tells us, for the contests of the popular assembly or of the law-courts. He lacked strength of voice—a fatal defect in the ecclesia, when an audience of many thousands was to be addressed in the open air; he was also deficient in “boldness.” He was, in short, the physical opposite of the successful Athenian demagogue in the generation after that of Pericles; by temperament as well as taste he was more in sympathy with the sedate decorum of an older school. Two ancient biographers have, however, preserved a story which, if true, would show that this lack of voice and nerve did not involve any want of moral courage. During the rule of the Thirty Tyrants, Critias denounced Theramenes, who sprang for safety to the sacred hearth of the council chamber. Isocrates alone, it is said, dared at that moment to plead for the life of his friend.[2] Whatever may be the worth of the story, it would scarcely have connected itself with the name of a man to whose traditional character it was repugnant. While the Thirty were still in power, Isocrates withdrew from Athens to Chios.[3] He has mentioned that, in the course of the Peloponnesian War—doubtless in the troubles which attended on its close—he lost the whole of that private fortune which had enabled his father to serve the state, and that he then adopted the profession of a teacher. The proscription of the “art of words” by the Thirty would thus have given him a special motive for withdrawing from Athens. He returned thither, apparently, either soon before or soon after the restoration of the democracy in 403 B.C.

For ten years from this date he was occupied—at least occasionally—as a writer of speeches for the Athenian law-courts. Six of these speeches are extant. The earliest (Or. xxi.) may be referred to 403 B.C.; the latest (Or. xix.) to 394-393 B.C. This was a department of his own work which Isocrates afterwards preferred to ignore. Nowhere, indeed, does he say that he had not written forensic speeches. But he frequently uses a tone from which that inference might be drawn. He loves to contrast such petty concerns as engage the forensic writer with those larger and nobler themes which are treated by the politician. This helps to explain how it could be asserted—by his adopted son, Aphareus—that he had written nothing for the law-courts. Whether the assertion was due to false shame or merely to ignorance, Dionysius of Halicarnassus decisively disposes of it. Aristotle had, indeed, he says, exaggerated the number of forensic speeches written by Isocrates; but some of those which bore his name were unquestionably genuine, as was attested by one of the orator’s own pupils, Cephisodorus. The real vocation of Isocrates was discovered from the moment that he devoted himself to the work of teaching and writing. The instruction which Isocrates undertook to impart was based on rhetorical composition, but it was by no means merely rhetorical. That “inborn philosophy,” of which Plato recognized the germ, still shows itself. In many of his works—notably in the Panegyricus—we see a really remarkable power of grasping a complex subject, of articulating it distinctly, of treating it, not merely with effect but luminously, at once in its widest bearings and in its most intricate details. Young men could learn more from Isocrates than the graces of style; nor would his success have been what it was if his skill had been confined to the art of expression.

It was about 392 B.C.—when he was forty-four—that he opened his school at Athens near the Lyceum. In 339 B.C. he describes himself as revising the Panathenaicus with some of his pupils; he was then ninety-seven. The celebrity enjoyed by the school of Isocrates is strikingly attested by ancient writers. Cicero describes it as that school in which the eloquence of all Greece was trained and perfected: its disciples were “brilliant in pageant or in battle,”[4] foremost among the accomplished writers or powerful debaters of their time. The phrase of Cicero is neither vague nor exaggerated. Among the literary pupils of Isocrates might be named the historians Ephorus and Theopompus, the Attic archaelogist Androtion, and Isocrates of Apollonia, who succeeded his master in the school. Among the practical orators we have, in the forensic kind, Isaeus; in the political, Leodamas of Acharnae, Lycurgus and Hypereides. Hermippus of Smyrna (mentioned by Athenaeus) wrote a monograph on the “Disciples of Isocrates.” And scanty as are now the sources for such a catalogue, a modern scholar[5] has still been able to recover forty-one names. At the time when the school of Isocrates was in the zenith of its fame it drew disciples, not only from the shores and islands of the Aegean, but from the cities of Sicily and the distant colonies of the Euxine. As became the image of its master’s spirit, it was truly Panhellenic. When Mausolus, prince of Caria, died in 351 B.C., his widow Artemisia instituted a contest of panegyrical eloquence in honour of his memory. Among all the competitors there was not one—if tradition may be trusted—who had not been the pupil of Isocrates.

Meanwhile the teacher who had won this great reputation had also been active as a public writer. The most interesting and most characteristic works of Isocrates are those in which he deals with the public questions of his own day. The influence which he thus exercised throughout Hellas might be compared to that of an earnest political essayist gifted with a popular and attractive style. And Isocrates had a dominant idea which gained strength with his years, until its realization had become, we might say, the main purpose of his life. This idea was the invasion of Asia by the united forces of Greece. The Greek cities were at feud with each other, and were severally torn by intestine faction. Political morality was become a rare and a somewhat despised distinction. Men who were notoriously ready to sell their cities for their private gain were, as Demosthenes says, rather admired than otherwise.[6] The social condition of Greece was becoming very unhappy. The wealth of the country had ceased to grow; the gulf between rich and poor was becoming wider; party strife was constantly adding to the number of homeless paupers; and Greece was full of men who were ready to take service with any captain of mercenaries, or, failing that, with any leader of desperadoes. Isocrates draws a vivid and terrible picture of these evils. The cure for them, he firmly believed, was to unite the Greeks in a cause which would excite a generous enthusiasm. Now was the time, he thought, for that enterprise in which Xenophon’s comrades had virtually succeeded, when the headlong rashness of young Cyrus threw away their reward with his own life.[7] The Persian empire was unsound to the core—witness the retreat of the Ten Thousand: let united Greece attack it and it must go down at the first onset. Then new wealth would flow into Greece; and the hungry pariahs of Greek society would be drafted into fertile homes beyond the Aegean.

A bright vision; but where was the power whose spell was first to unite discordant Greece, and, having united it, to direct its strength against Asia? That was the problem. The first attempt of Isocrates to solve it is set forth in his splendid Panegyricus (380 B.C.). Let Athens and Sparta lay aside their jealousies. Let them assume, jointly, a leadership which might be difficult for either, but which would be assured to both. That eloquent pleading failed. The next hope was to find some one man equal to the task. Jason of Pherae, Dionysius I. of Syracuse, Archidamus III., son of Agesilaus—each in turn rose as a possible leader of Greece before the imagination of the old man who was still young in his enthusiastic hope, and one after another they failed him. But now a greater than any of these was appearing on the Hellenic horizon, and to this new luminary the eyes of Isocrates were turned with eager anticipation. Who could lead united Greece against Asia so fitly as the veritable representative of the Heracleidae, the royal descendant of the Argive line—a king of half-barbarians it is true, but by race, as in spirit, a pure Hellene—Philip of Macedon? We can still read the words in which this fond faith clothed itself; the ardent appeal of Isocrates to Philip is extant; and another letter shows that the belief of Isocrates in Philip lasted at any rate down to the eve of Chaeronea.[8] Whether it survived that event is a doubtful point. The popular account of the orator’s death ascribed it to the mental shock which he received from the news of Philip’s victory. He was at Athens, in the palaestra of Hippocrates, when the tidings came. He repeated three verses in which Euripides names three foreign Conquerors of Greece—Danaus, Pelops, Cadmus—and four days later he died of voluntary starvation. Milton (perhaps thinking of Eli) seems to conceive the death of Isocrates as instantaneous:—

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? 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 his old belief in Philip, he would probably have hoped, even after Chaeronea, that the new position won by Philip would eventually prove compatible with the independence of the Greek cities, while it would certainly promote the project on which, as he was profoundly convinced, 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. We should be rather disposed to ask how much weight is to be given to the tradition. 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. Suppose that Isocrates—being then ninety-eight and an invalid—had happened to die from natural causes a few days after the battle of Chaeronea. Nothing could have originated more easily than a story that he killed himself from intense chagrin. Every one 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.[9]

Isocrates is said to have taught his Athenian pupils gratuitously, and to have taken money only from aliens; but, as might have been expected, the fame of his school exposed him to attacks on the ground of his gains, which his enemies studiously exaggerated. After the financial reform of 378 B.C. he was one of those 1200 richest citizens who constituted the twenty unions (συμμορίαι) for the assessment of the war-tax (εἰσφορά). He had discharged several public services (λειτουργίαι); in particular, he had thrice served as trierarch. He married Plathane, the widow of the “sophist” Hippias of Elis, and then adopted her son Aphareus, afterwards eminent as a rhetorician and a tragic poet. In 355 B.C. he had his first and only lawsuit. A certain Megaclides (introduced into the speech under the fictitious name of Lysimachus) challenged him to undertake the trierarchy or exchange properties. This was the lawsuit which suggested the form of the discourse which he calls the 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 surmounted by a column some 45 ft. high, crowned with the figure 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 his side. Aphareus erected a statue to his adopted father near the Olympieum. Timotheus, the illustrious son of Conon, dedicated another in the temple of Eleusis.

It was a wonderful century which the life of one man had thus all but spanned. 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 ascendancy which the genius of Epameinondas 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 tribute from 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.[10]

His character should be viewed in both its main aspects—the political and the literary.

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? (2) How far were those views falsified by the event?

1. The whole tone of Greek thought in that age had taken a bent towards monarchy in some form. This tendency may be traced alike in the practical common sense of Xenophon and in the lofty idealism of Plato. There could be no better instance of it than a well-known passage in the Politics of Aristotle. He is speaking of the gifts which meet in the Greek race—a race warlike, like the Europeans, but more subtle—keen, like the Asiatics, but braver. Here, he says, is a race which “might rule all men, if it were brought under a single government.”[11] It is unnecessary to suppose a special allusion to Alexander; but it is probable that Aristotle had in his mind a possible union of the Greek cities under a strong constitutional monarchy. His advice to Alexander (as reported by Plutarch) was to treat the Greeks in the spirit of a leader (ἡγεμονικῶς) and the barbarians in the spirit of a master (δεσποτικῶς).[12] Aristotle conceived the central power as political and permanent; Isocrates conceived it as, in the first place, military, having for its immediate aim the conduct of an expedition against Asia. The general views of Isocrates as to the largest good possible for the Greek race were thus in accord with the prevailing tendency of the best Greek thought in that age.

2. The vision of the Greek race “brought under one polity” was not, indeed, fulfilled in the sense of Aristotle or of Isocrates. But the invasion of Asia by Alexander, as captain-general of Greece, became the event which actually opened new and larger destinies to the Greek race. The old political life of the Greek cities was worn out; in the new fields which were now opened, the empire of Greek civilization entered on a career of world-wide conquest, until Greece became to East and West more than all that Athens had been to Greece. Athens, Sparta, Thebes, ceased indeed to be the chief centres of Greek life; but the mission of the Greek mind could scarcely have been accomplished with such expansive and penetrating power if its influence had not radiated over the East from Pergamum, Antioch and Alexandria.

Panhellenic politics had the foremost interest for Isocrates. But in two of his works—the oration On the Peace and the Areopagiticus (both of 355 B.C.)—he deals specially with the politics of Athens. The speech On the Peace relates chiefly to foreign affairs. It is an eloquent appeal to his fellow-citizens to abandon the dream of supremacy, and to treat their allies as equals, not as subjects. The fervid orator personifies that empire, that false mistress which has lured Athens, then Sparta, then Athens once more, to the verge of destruction. “Is she not worthy of detestation?” Leadership passes into empire; empire begets insolence; insolence brings ruin. The Areopagiticus breathes a kindred spirit in regard to home policy. Athenian life had lost its old tone. Apathy to public interests, dissolute frivolity, tawdry display and real poverty—these are the features on which Isocrates dwells. With this picture he contrasts the elder democracy of Solon and Cleisthenes, and, as a first step towards reform, would restore to the Areopagus its general censorship of morals. It is here, and here alone—in his comments on Athenian affairs at home and abroad—that we can distinctly recognize the man to whom the Athens of Pericles was something more than a tradition. We are carried back to the age in which his long life began. We find it difficult to realize that the voice to which we listen is the same which we hear in the letter to Philip.

Turning from the political to the literary aspect of his work, we are at once upon ground where the question of his merits will now provoke comparatively little controversy. Perhaps the most serious prejudice with which his reputation has had to contend in modern times has been due to an accident of verbal usage. He repeatedly describes that art which he professed to teach as his φιλοσοφία. His use of this word—joined to the fact that in a few passages he appears to allude slightingly to Plato or to the Socratics—has exposed him to a groundless imputation. It cannot be too distinctly understood that, when Isocrates speaks of his φιλοσοφία, he means simply his theory or method of “culture”—to use the only modern term which is really equivalent in latitude to the Greek word as then current.[13]

The φιλοσοφία, or practical culture, of Isocrates was not in conflict, because it had nothing in common, with the Socratic or Platonic philosophy. The personal influence of Socrates may, indeed, be traced in his work. He constantly desires to make his teaching bear on the practical life. His maxims of homely moral wisdom frequently recall Xenophon’s Memorabilia. But there the relation ends. Plato alludes to Isocrates in perhaps three places. The glowing prophecy in the Phaedrus has been quoted; in the Gorgias a phrase of Isocrates is wittily parodied; and in the Euthydemus Isocrates is probably meant by the person who dwells “on the borderland between philosophy and statesmanship.”[14] The writings of Isocrates contain a few more or less distinct allusions to Plato’s doctrines or works, to the general effect that they are barren of practical result.[15] But Isocrates nowhere assails Plato’s philosophy as such. When he declares “knowledge” (ἐπιστήμη) to be unattainable, he means an exact “knowledge” of the contingencies which may arise in practical life. “Since it is impossible for human nature to acquire any science (ἐπιστήμην) by which we should know what to do or to say, in the next resort I deem those wise who, as a rule, can hit what is best by their opinions” (δόξας).[16]

Isocrates should be compared with the practical teachers of his day. In his essay Against the Sophists, and in his speech on the Antidosis, which belong respectively to the beginning and the close of his professional career, he has clearly marked the points which distinguish him from “the sophists of the herd” (ἀγελαῖοι σοφισταί). First, then, he claims, and justly, greater breadth of view. The ordinary teacher confined himself to the narrow scope of local interests—training the young citizen to plead in the Athenian law courts, or to speak on Athenian affairs in the ecclesia. Isocrates sought to enlarge the mental horizon of his disciples by accustoming them to deal with subjects which were not merely Athenian, but, in his own phrase, Hellenic. Secondly, though he did not claim to have found a philosophical basis for morals, it has been well said of him that “he reflects the human spirit always on its nobler side,”[17] and that, in an age of corrupt and impudent selfishness, he always strove to raise the minds of his hearers into a higher and purer air. Thirdly, his method of teaching was thorough. Technical exposition came first. The learner was then required to apply the rules in actual composition, which the master revised. The ordinary teachers of rhetoric (as Aristotle says) employed their pupils in committing model pieces to memory, but neglected to train the learner’s own faculty through his own efforts. Lastly, Isocrates stands apart from most writers of that day in his steady effort to produce results of permanent value. While rhetorical skill was largely engaged in the intermittent journalism of political pamphlets, Isocrates set a higher ambition before his school. His own essays on contemporary questions received that finished form which has preserved them to this day. The impulse to solid and lasting work, communicated by the example of the master, was seen in such monuments as the Atthis of Androtion, the Hellenics of Theopompus and the Philippica of Ephorus.

In one of his letters to Atticus, Cicero says that he has used “all the fragrant essences of Isocrates, and all the little stores of his disciples.”[18] The phrase has a point of which the writer himself was perhaps scarcely conscious: the style of Isocrates had come to Cicero through the school of Rhodes; and the Rhodian imitators had more of Asiatic splendour than of Attic elegance. But, with this allowance made, the passage may serve to indicate the real place of Isocrates in the history of literary style. The old Greek critics consider him as representing what they call the “smooth” or “florid” mode of composition (γλαφυρά, ἀνθηρὰ ἀρμονία) as distinguished from the “harsh” (αὐστηρά) style of Antiphon and the perfect “mean” (μέση) of Demosthenes. Tried by a modern standard, the language of Isocrates is certainly not “florid.” The only sense in which he merits the epithet is that (especially in his earlier work) he delights in elaborate antitheses. Isocrates is an “orator” in the larger sense of the Greek word rhetor; but his real distinction consists in the fact that he was the first Greek who gave an artistic finish to literary rhetoric. The practical oratory of the day had already two clearly separated branches—the forensic, represented by Isaeus, and the deliberative, in which Callistratus was the forerunner of Demosthenes. Meanwhile Isocrates was giving form and rhythm to a standard literary prose. Through the influence of his school, this normal prose style was transmitted—with the addition of some florid embellishments—to the first generation of Romans who studied rhetoric in the Greek schools. The distinctive feature in the composition of Isocrates is his structure of the periodic sentence. This, with him, is no longer rigid or monotonous, as with Antiphon—no longer terse and compact, as with Lysias—but ample, luxuriant, unfolding itself (to use a Greek critic’s image) like the soft beauties of a winding river. Isocrates was the first Greek who worked out the idea of a prose rhythm. He saw clearly both its powers and its limits; poetry has its strict rhythms and precise metres; prose has its metres and rhythms, not bound by a rigid framework, yet capable of being brought under certain general laws which a good ear can recognize, and which a speaker or writer may apply in the most various combinations. This fundamental idea of prose rhythm, or number, is that which the style of Isocrates has imparted to the style of Cicero. When Quintilian (x. 1. 108) says, somewhat hyperbolically, that Cicero has artistically reproduced (effinxisse) “the force of Demosthenes, the wealth of Plato, the charm of Isocrates,” he means principally this smooth and harmonious rhythm. Cicero himself expressly recognizes this original and distinctive merit of Isocrates.[19] Thus, through Rome, and especially through Cicero, the influence of Isocrates, as the founder of a literary prose, has passed into the literatures of modern Europe. It is to the eloquence of the preacher that we may perhaps look for the nearest modern analogue of that kind in which Isocrates excelled—especially, perhaps, to that of the great French preachers. Isocrates was one of the three Greek authors, Demosthenes and Plato being the others, who contributed most to form the style of Bossuet.

Works.—The extant works of Isocrates consist of twenty-one speeches or discourses and nine letters.[20] Among these, the six forensic speeches represent the first period of his literary life—belonging to the years 403-393 B.C. All six concern private causes. They may be classed as follows: 1. Action for Assault (δίκη αἰκίας), Or. xx., Against Lochites, 394 B.C. 2. Claim to an Inheritance (ἐπιδικασία), Or. xix., Aegineticus, end of 394 or early in 393 B.C. 3. Actions to Recover a Deposit: (1) Or. xxi., Against Euthynus, 403 B.C.; (2) Or. xvii., Trapeziticus, end of 394 or early in 393 B.C. 4. Action for Damage (δίκη βλάβης), Or. xvi., Concerning the Team of Horses, 397 B.C. 5. Special Plea (παραγραφή), Or. xviii., Against Callimachus, 402 B.C. Two of these have been regarded as spurious by G. E. Benseler, viz. Or. xxi., on account of the frequent hiatus and the short compact periods, and Or. xvii., on the first of these grounds. But we are not warranted in applying to the early work of Isocrates those canons which his mature style observed. The genuineness of the speech against Euthynus is recognized by Philostratus; while the Trapeziticus—thrice named without suspicion by Harpocration—is treated by Dionysius, not only as authentic, but as the typical forensic work of its author. The speech against Lochites—where “a man of the people” (τοῦ πλήθους εἶς) is the speaker—exhibits much rhetorical skill. The speech Περὶ τοῦ ζεύγους (“concerning the team of horses”) has a curious interest. An Athenian citizen had complained that Alcibiades had robbed him of a team of four horses, and sues the statesman’s son and namesake (who is the speaker) for their value. This is not the only place in which Isocrates has marked his admiration for the genius of Alcibiades; it appears also in the Philippus and in the Busiris. But, among the forensic speeches, we must, on the whole, give the palm to the Aegineticus—a graphic picture of ordinary Greek life in the islands of the Aegean. Here—especially in the narrative—Isocrates makes a near approach to the best manner of Lysias.

The remaining fifteen orations or discourses do not easily lend themselves to the ordinary classification under the heads of “deliberative” and “epideictic.” Both terms must be strained; and neither is strictly applicable to all the pieces which it is required to cover. The work of Isocrates travelled out of the grooves in which the rhetorical industry of the age had hitherto moved. His position among contemporary writers was determined by ideas peculiar to himself; and his compositions, besides having a style of their own, are in several instances of a new kind. The only adequate principle of classification is one which considers them in respect to their subject-matter. Thus viewed, they form two clearly separated groups—the scholastic and the political.

Scholastic Writings.—Under this head we have, first, three letters or essays of a hortatory character. (1) The letter to the young Demonicus[21]—once a favourite subject in the schools—contains a series of precepts neither below nor much above the average practical morality of Greece. (2) The letter to Nicocles—the young king of the Cyprian Salamis—sets forth the duty of a monarch to his subjects. (3) In the third piece, it is Nicocles who speaks, and impresses on the Salaminians their duty to their king—a piece remarkable as containing a popular plea for monarchy, composed by a citizen of Athens. These three letters may be referred to the years 374-372 B.C.

Next may be placed four pieces which are “displays” (ἐπιδείξεις) in the proper Greek sense. The Busiris (Or. xi., 390-391 B.C.) is an attempt to show how the ill-famed king of Egypt might be praised. The Encomium on Helen (Or. x., 370 B.C.), a piece greatly superior to the last, contains the celebrated passage on the power of beauty. These two compositions serve to illustrate their author’s view that “encomia” of the hackneyed type might be elevated by combining the mythical matter with some topic of practical interest—as, in the case of Busiris, with the institutions of Egypt, or, in that of Helen, with the reforms of Theseus. The Evagoras (Or. ix., 365 B.C.?), the earliest known biography, is a laudatory epitaph on a really able man—the Greek king of the Cyprian Salamis. A passage of singular interest describes how, under his rule, the influences of Hellenic civilization had prevailed over the surrounding barbarism. The Panathenaicus (Or. xii.), intended for the great Panathenaea of 342 B.C., but not completed till 339 B.C., contains a recital of the services rendered by Athens to Greece, but digresses into personal defence against critics; his last work, written in extreme old age, it bears the plainest marks of failing powers.

The third subdivision of the scholastic writings is formed by two most interesting essays on education—that entitled Against the Sophists (Or. xiii., 391-390 B.C.), and the Antidosis (Or. xv., 353 B.C.). The first of these is a manifesto put forth by Isocrates at the outset of his professional career of teaching, in which he seeks to distinguish his aims from those of other “sophists.” These “sophists” are (1) the “eristics” (οἱ περὶ τὰς ἔριδας), by whom he seems to intend the minor Socratics, especially Euclides; (2) the teachers of practical rhetoric, who had made exaggerated claims for the efficacy of mere instruction, independently of natural faculty or experience; (3) the writers of “arts” of rhetoric, who virtually devoted themselves (as Aristotle also complains) to the lowest, or forensic, branch of their subject (see also E. Holzner, Platos Phaedrus und die Sophistenrede des Isokrates, Prague, 1894). As this piece is the prelude to his career, its epilogue is the speech on the “Antidosis”—so called because it has the form of a speech made in court in answer to a challenge to undertake the burden of the trierarchy, or else exchange properties with the challenger. The discourse “Against the Sophists” had stated what his art was not; this speech defines what it is. His own account of his φιλοσοφία—“the discipline of discourse” (ἡ τῶν λόγων παιδεία)—has been embodied in the sketch of it given above.

Political Writings.—These, again, fall into two classes—those which concern (1) the relations of Greece with Persia, (2) the internal affairs of Greece. The first class consist of the Panegyricus (Or. iv., 380 B.C.) and the Philippus (Or. v., 346 B.C.). The Panegyricus takes its name from the fact that it was given to the Greek public at the time of the Olympic festivals—probably by means of copies circulated there. The orator urges that Athens and Sparta should unite in leading the Greeks against Persia. The feeling of antiquity that this noble discourse is a masterpiece of careful work finds expression in the tradition that it had occupied its author for more than ten years. Its excellence is not merely that of language, but also—and perhaps even more conspicuously—that of lucid arrangement. The Philippus is an appeal to the king of Macedon to assume that initiative in the war on Persia which Isocrates had ceased to expect from any Greek city. In the view of Demosthenes, Philip was the representative barbarian; in that of Isocrates, he is the first of Hellenes, and the natural champion of their cause.

Of those discourses which concern the internal affairs of Greece, two have already been noticed,—that On the Peace (Or. viii.), and the Areopagiticus (Or. vii.)—both of 355 B.C.—as dealing respectively with the foreign and the home affairs of Athens. The Plataicus (Or. xiv.) is supposed to be spoken by a Plataean before the Athenian ecclesia in 373 B.C. In that year Plataea had for the second time in its history been destroyed by Thebes. The oration—an appeal to Athens to restore the unhappy town—is remarkable both for the power with which Theban cruelty is denounced, and for the genuine pathos of the peroration. The Archidamus (Or. vi.) is a speech purporting to be delivered by Archidamus III., son of Agesilaus, in a debate at Sparta on conditions of peace offered by Thebes in 366 B.C. It was demanded that Sparta should recognize the independence of Messene, which had lately been restored by Epameinondas (370 B.C.). The oration gives brilliant expression to the feeling which such a demand was calculated to excite in Spartans who knew the history of their own city. Xenophon witnesses that the attitude of Sparta on this occasion was actually such as the Archidamus assumes (Hellen. vii. 4. 8-11).

Letters.—The first letter—to Dionysius I.—is fragmentary; but a passage in the Philippus leaves no doubt as to its object. Isocrates was anxious that the ruler of Syracuse should undertake the command of Greece against Persia. The date is probably 368 B.C. Next in chronological order stands the letter “To the Children of Jason” (vi.). Jason, tyrant of Pherae, had been assassinated in 370 B.C.; and no fewer than three of his successors had shared the same fate. Isocrates now urges Thebe, the daughter of Jason, and her half-brothers to set up a popular government. The date is 359 B.C.[22] The letter to Archidamus III. (ix.)—the same person who is the imaginary speaker of Oration vi.—urges him to execute the writer’s favourite idea,—“to deliver the Greeks from their feuds, and to crush barbarian insolence.” It is remarkable for a vivid picture of the state of Greece; the date is about 356 B.C. The letter to Timotheus (vii., 345 B.C.), ruler of Heraclea on the Euxine, introduces an Athenian friend who is going thither, and at the same time offers some good counsels to the benevolent despot. The letter “to the government of Mytilene” (viii., 350 B.C.) is a petition to a newly established oligarchy, begging them to permit the return of a democratic exile, a distinguished musician named Agenor. The first of the two letters to Philip of Macedon (ii.) remonstrates with him on the personal danger to which he had recklessly exposed himself, and alludes to his beneficent intervention in the affairs of Thessaly; the date is probably the end of 342 B.C. The letter to Alexander (v.), then a boy of fourteen, is a brief greeting sent along with the last, and congratulates him on preferring “practical” to “eristic” studies—a distinction which is explained by the sketch of the author’s φιλοσοφία, and of his essay “Against the Sophists,” given above. It was just at this time, probably, that Alexander was beginning to receive the lessons of Aristotle (342 B.C.). The letter to Antipater (iv.) introduces a friend who wished to enter the military service of Philip. Antipater was then acting as regent in Macedonia during Philip’s absence in Thrace (340-339 B.C.). The later of the two letters to Philip (iii.) appears to be written shortly after the battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C. The questions raised by it have already been discussed.

No lost work of Isocrates is known from a definite quotation, except an “Art of Rhetoric,” from which some scattered precepts are cited. Quintilian, indeed, and Photius, who had seen this “Art,” felt a doubt as to whether it was genuine. Only twenty-five discourses—out of an ascriptive total of some sixty—were admitted as authentic by Dionysius; Photius (circ. A.D. 850) knew only the number now extant—twenty-one.

With the exception of defects at the end of Or. xiii., at the beginning of Or. xvi., and probably at the end of Letters i., vi., ix., the existing text is free from serious mutilations. It is also unusually pure. The smooth and clear style of Isocrates gave few opportunities for the mistakes of copyists. On the other hand, he was a favourite author of the schools. Numerous glosses crept into his text through the comments or conjectures of rhetoricians. This was already the case before the 6th century, as is attested by the citations of Priscian and Stobaeus. Jerome Wolf and Koraes successively accomplished much for the text. But a more decided advance was made by Immanuel Bekker. He used five MSS., viz. (1) Codex Urbinas III., Γ (this, the best, was his principal guide); (2) Vaticanus 936, Δ; (3) Laurentianus 87, 14, Θ (13th century); (4) Vaticanus 65, Λ; and (5) Marcianus 415, Ξ. The first three, of the same family, have Or. xv. entire; the last two are from the same original, and have Or. xv. incomplete.

J. G. Baiter and H. Sauppe in their edition (1850) follow Γ “even more constantly than Bekker.” Their apparatus is enriched, however, by a MS. to which he had not access—Ambrosianus O. 144, Ε, which in some cases, as they recognize, has alone preserved the true reading. The readings of this MS. were given in full by G. E. Benseler in his second edition (1854-1855). The distinctive characteristic of Benseler’s textual criticism was a tendency to correct the text against even the best MS., where the MS. conflicted with the usage of Isocrates as inferred from his recorded precepts or from the statements of ancient writers. Thus, on the strength of the rule ascribed to Isocrates—φωνήεντα μὴ συμπίπτειν—Benseler would remove from the text every example of hiatus (on the MSS. of Isocrates, see H. Bürmann, Die handschriftliche Überlieferung des Isocrates, Berlin, 1885-1886, and E. Drerup, in Leipziger Studien, xvii., 1895).

(R. C. J.)

Editions.—In Oratores Attici, ed. Imm. Bekker (1823, 1828); W. S. Dobson (1828); J. G. Baiter and Hermann Sauppe (1850). Separately Ausgewählte Reden, Panegyrikos und Areopagitikos, by Rudolf Rauchenstein, 6th ed., Karl Münscher (1908); in Teubner’s series, by G. E. Benseler (new ed., by F. Blass, 1886-1895) and by E. Drerup (1906-  ); Ad Demonicum et Panegyricus, ed. J. E. Sandys (1868); Evagoras, ed. H. Clarke (1885). Extracts from Orations iii., iv., vi., vii., viii., ix., xiii., xiv., xv., xix., and Letters iii., v., edited with revised text and commentary, in Selections from the Attic Orators, by R. C. Jebb (1880); vol. i. of an English prose translation, with introduction and notes by J. H. Freese, has been published in Bohn’s Classical Library (1894). See generally Jebb’s Attic Orators (where a list of authorities is given) and F. Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit (2nd ed., 1887-1898), and the latter’s Die Rhythmen der attischen Kunstprosa (1901). There is a special lexicon by S. Preuss (1904). On the philosophy of Isocrates and his relation to the Socratic schools, see Thompson’s ed. of Plato’s Phaedrus, Appendix 2.

[1] Ἀταλάντη, fr. 1, Meineke, Poëtarum comicorum Graecorum frag. (1855), p. 292.

[2] [Plut.] Vita Isocr., and the anonymous biographer. Dionysius does not mention the story, though he makes Isocrates a pupil of Theramenes.

[3] Some would refer the sojourn of Isocrates at Chios to the years 398-395 B.C., others to 393-388 B.C. The reasons which support the view given in the text will be found in Jebb’s Attic Orators, vol. ii. (1893), p. 6, note 2.

[4] Partim in pompa, partim in acie illustres (De orat. ii. 24).

[5] P. Sanneg, De schola Isocratea (Halle, 1867).

[6] De falsa legat. p. 426 οὐχ ὅπως ὠργίζοντο ἢ κολάζειν τοὺς ταῦτα ποιοῦντας, ἀλλ᾽ ἀπέβλεπον, ἐζήλουν, ἐτίμων, ἅνδρας ἡγοῦντο.

[7] ἐκείνους γὰρ ὁμολογεῖται ... ἤδη ἐγκρατεῖς δοκοῦντας εἶναι τῶν πραγμάτων διὰ τὴν Κύρου προπέτειαν ἀτυχῆσαι (Philippus, 90; cp. Panegyr. 149).

[8] Philippus, 346 B.C.; Epist. ii. end of 342 B.C. (?).

[9] The views of several modern critics on the tradition of the suicide are brought together in the Attic Orators, ii. (1893) p. 31, note 1.

[10] Isocrates, a loyal and genuine Hellene, can yet conceive of Hellenic 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 Epameinondas and Timotheus in the political (History of Greece, v. 116, 204, tr. Ward).

[11] τὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων γένος ... δυνάμενον ἄρχειν, μιᾶς τυγχάνον πολιτείας (Polit. iv. [vii.] 6, 7).

[12] De Alex. virt. i. 6.

[13] The word φιλοσοφία seems to have come into Athenian use not much before the time of Socrates; and, till long after the time of Isocrates, it was commonly used, not in the sense of “philosophy,” but in that of “literary taste and study—culture generally” (see Thompson on Phaedrus, 278 D). Aristeides, ii. 407 φιλοκαλία τις καὶ διατριβὴ περὶ λόγους, καὶ οὐχ ὁ νῦν τρόπος οὗτος, ἀλλὰ παιδεία κοινῶς. And so writers of the 4th century B.C. use φιλοσοφεῖν as simply = “to study”; as e.g. an invalid “studies” the means of relief from pain, Lys. Or. xxiv. 10; cf. Isocr. Or. iv. 6, &c.

[14] Plato, Gorg. p. 463; Euthyd. 304-306.

[15] These allusions are discussed in the Attic Orators, vol. ii. ch. 13.

[16] Isocr. Or. xv. 271.

[17] A. Cartelier, Le Discours d’Isocrate sur lui-même, p. lxii. (1862).

[18] Totum Isocratis μυροθήκιον atque omnes ejus discipulorum arculas (Ad Att. ii. 1).

[19] Idque princeps Isocrates instituisse fertur, ... ut inconditam antiquorum dicendi consuetudinem ... numeris astringeret (De or. iii. 44, 173).

[20] The dates here given differ to some extent from those in F. Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit (2nd ed., 1887-1898).

[21] Some authorities consider the Ad Demonicum spurious.

[22] This was shown by R. C. Jebb in a paper on “The Sixth Letter of Isocrates,” Journal of Philology, v. 266 (1874). The fact that Thebe, widow of Alexander of Pherae, was the daughter of Jason is incidentally noticed by Plutarch in his life of Pelopidas, c. 28. It is this fact which gives the clue to the occasion of the letter; cf. Diod. Sic. xvi. 14.

ISODYNAMIC LINES (Gr. ἰσοδύναμος, equal in power), lines connecting those parts of the earth’s surface where the magnetic force has the same intensity (see [Magnetism, Terrestrial]).

ISOGONIC LINES (Gr. ἰσογώνιος, equiangular), lines connecting those parts of the earth’s surface where the magnetic declination is the same in amount (see [Magnetism, Terrestrial]).