Mikalson’s The Essential Isocrates has him performing the dual role of curator and translator, arranging excerpts from Isocrates’ works, demonstrating what can be learnt from Isocrates’ perspective on numerous aspects of the classical Greek world. Any volume that attempts to assemble the “essential” thought of a given classical author will find itself open to criticism, so long as the critic is invested in the content and presentation of the curated compilation. Perhaps there is too much religious material, or too little economic? But would some chopping and changing of quotations really have made much difference to a compilation’s overall impact? The pressing question, then, is ‘who is this book for and what is its function?’ This we can answer swiftly enough: Mikalson has curated a card-index abridged translation of the Isocratean corpus, dividing it up thematically and giving just enough background to keep the student on track. He dances on the tightrope of the epitomizer, the lofty goal of gobbetization before him, the abyss of balkanization below.
Although Mikalson does not state this explicitly, the volume is well-suited for a Greek-less audience whose reading of the fourth-century political and rhetorical sources will be guided in small-group teaching. Having recently taught a first-year course using Isocrates as a guide for Athenian political and social life, I rather wish I had had this volume to hand. The tone is just about pitch perfect. Enthusiasm and humour leap from the page, as we learn how accessible and fun Isocrates can be. However, the book is not without some drawbacks, and students must use it with care. For all the playful humour, pedagogical naïvety is the book’s primary tone, as it offers little self-reflection concerning what kind of instructional purpose it is designed to serve.
Of the six main chapters, five present excerpts from the Isocratean corpus. We begin with ‘On Himself’ and ‘On Morality and Religion’, and end with paired chapters of ‘On Political Theory’ and ‘On Athenian and Greek History’. Each chapter begins with a short, clearly written introduction to the theme or historical situation, often accompanied by a choice quotation or two. Chapters are further divided into sub-themes (occasionally little more than ‘Some Additional Statements…’) with introductions. What mostly follows are translated sections from the Isocratean corpus of various length, or else occasional summaries for longer passages. Key Greek terms are either transliterated or given in the original, with neither option proving to be the standard choice. These chapters are accompanied by a series of excellent reference prefaces reminding us of Isocrates’ works with their approximate dates of composition (a welcome novelty in Isocratean studies), key terms, key persons, and a chronology of Isocrates and major events in Greek history. The Introduction is brief and wisely offers suggestions on how best to read Isocrates. Endnotes are not excessive (around two-thirds of them are devoted to the short first chapter), while the Bibliography, Further Reading sections, General Index and Index Locorum are everything one would wish for from a course book. Aside from a few notable exceptions, the Isocratean corpus alone makes up the quoted and cited ancient material. The translations show some acknowledged reliance on the University of Texas’s own translations of Isocrates made by Mirhady, Too, and Papillon.
What, then, are the student and instructor confronted with? In the first instance a durable, well-bound, clearly printed volume that feels ready for repeat consultation. This quality is reflected in the price point. The author’s intention is outlined most clearly in the Introduction, where he claims to present his account through Isocrates’ “own words or, less commonly, in paraphrases or summaries of them.” It is an effort, Mikalson claims, designed to let Isocrates “speak for himself.” This is a noble attempt at coordinated compilation, since fishing for material in the Isocratean corpus—where themes intertwine, overlap, and repeat (sometimes at considerable length)—can prove daunting for the neophyte. Indeed, Finley, for all his admiration of Isocrates, notes that “Isocrates was not a systematic thinker and one is driven to picking out statements here and there, not always consistent, and never more than vague on the ultimate goals.”[1] Isocrates’ corpus, then, resists easy categorization into Aristotle’s frequently cited division of rhetoric into forensic, epideictic, and deliberative.
Mikalson’s volume takes Finley’s observation fully on board, simplifying and easing the process through both material selection and commentary. It is, for example, very welcome that Mikalson explains the normality of self-contradiction in the classical texts, and in long-lived Isocrates in particular. Students can find Isocrates to be duplicitous or hypocritical, and Mikalson’s ‘How to Read Isocrates’, and the Introduction more broadly, provide students and instructors with a valuable corrective to that reaction.
It must be noted that the book presents the essential Isocrates, not the essential Isocratean corpus. Most of Isocrates’ early logographic career is absent, including, most egregiously, the Trapeziticus, so valuable to our understanding of Athenian banking.[2] Its appearance would have done much to fill the economic lacuna in the volume. Quotations from the courtroom speeches do occasionally appear, but only if and when Mikalson sees these precise words as operating consistently with broader Isocratean thought, their differing compositional context and precise forensic circumstances often deemed as details unworthy of sharing. Equally, those discourses that Isocrates wrote in ‘the guise of others’, such as the Nicocles, the Archidarmus and the Plataicus, are accepted as ciphers for Isocrates’ own voice with little consideration of the dynamics of presentation involved.[3] Furthermore, the literary qualities of Isocrates, as best perceived in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s writings on him, are not the focus of Mikalson’s renderings. We lose therefore a given oration’s variegated discursive flavour, including Isocrates’ most famed ones, as each fragments, dying a death by a thousand cuts.[4] Mikalson is in many ways replaying the Plato-Isocrates rivalry concerning their pedagogical and philosophical methods. Mikalson’s own apology coming by way of quotation, inference and fragmentation, supporting Isocrates as a Big Thinker, with the curated textbook format doing much of the heavy lifting. A more precise and considered defence, however ideologically formulated, would certainly have been very welcome, alerting readers more clearly to Mikalson’s particular agenda.
Mikalson also takes the sound approach of eliminating extraneous information, instead opting for material that will engage students and encourage discussion. Consider Chapter Two, on Isocrates’ life. Rather than a dry biography, we are presented with Ps.-Plutarch’s anecdote-heavy Life of Isocrates. It’s a firecracker of a text and an excellent way to draw students in. Other (but not all) ancient sources are mentioned, but it seems wise not to ask students to compare Ps.-Plutarch with Zosimos of Askalon, Photios, or Philostratos; certainly a thankless task given the status of Isocrates’ own Antidosis as Urtext. Elsewhere, the less-is-more approach does occasionally throw the reader: we are twice quoted Isocratean fragments from Mathieu and Brémond’s Budé edition without bibliographic citation or even mention of any fragmentary tradition.
The five remaining chapters are similar in dynamic, if not proportion. Chapter 6 on Greek History makes up fully half of the Isocratean material, and it is here that the pace begins to slacken. An able instructor will have to be ready to thread together the slightly discordant pieces and consider carefully what outlook on the classical world is presented in this volume. There remains the risk that this book will leave students with the impression that Isocrates was a clear-eyed sage: a reliable, discerning, and insightful witness to the Athens of his day and to the Greek past, since critical scepticism is restricted in favour of presenting Isocrates ‘on his own terms’. Just such an approach will be familiar from Mikalson’s other introductory volume on Greek Religion.[5]
Two key areas where Mikalson’s critical purview rubs against his methodology appear in his approach to adapting translations where matters of religion and constitutional thought are involved. As for the former, Mikalson acknowledges Isocrates’ moral stance is best represented by the discourses To Demonicus, Nicocles, and To Nicocles, before reducing these texts to gnomic maxims and, arguably, compressing the distance between ‘religion’ and ‘morality’ as the chapter progresses. Such foreshortening arises because translation (and indeed selection and curation) naturally involves a series of conscious and unconscious decisions on the part of translator. Mikalson, generally speaking, has little to say on the subject of translation. Mikalson elsewhere brings his life-long interest in Greek religion into play when it comes to religious terminology, sometimes intimating, sometimes explaining more fully, his preferred English terms whether that be eusebeia, doxa, or isotheoi. This approach is elsewhere compressed into subheadings alone (giving us asebeia as ‘lack of respect for the gods’ or hosiotēs as ‘religious correctness’). The foregrounding of theological terminology in chapter 3 gives a greater sense of a pious and god-fearing Isocrates than I had detected in reading the Isocratean corpus in toto.[6] Whether this was a long-needed corrective or a misrepresentation is debatable. Indeed, it would make for an interesting springboard for class discussion.
As for Athenian and Greek history and constitutional thought, it would be unreasonable to expect Mikalson to fully incorporate the wealth of scholarship over the last 20 years while still presenting a readable book. Mikalson opts to periodize Isocrates’ take on Greek history into five epochs. Despite a brief warning that Isocrates’ account “should always be seen in the context of his own contemporary time”, one is left feeling uncertain as to what to glean from these extended quotations and paraphrases, since the important context of critical contemporary comparative voices is not present. I would reserve my strongest criticism for the fifth chapter, which is devoted to Isocrates’ political thought. It is perhaps here that one most strongly feels the lack of context, and there is little here to place Isocrates into a contemporary debate. Mikalson sets up the chapter with a quotation on the three forms of constitution and returns to this theme at intervals in this chapter and in the following (the latter detailing historical examples). There is no interrogation as to the meaning and significance of the terms ‘monarchy’, ‘democracy’, and ‘oligarchy’, or their constitutional forms for the modern audience or for the contemporary Greek. An instructor using this sourcebook would be, I suggest, duty-bound to supplement with choice texts to support classroom discussion. Even something as basic as Herodotus’ constitutional debate would assist here in providing a little anchoring.
There is, then, a use and indeed a need for Mikalson’s volume in the teaching of Ancient History. As a sourcebook it is more than decent, but it should be used with a degree of caution, with a competent and knowledgeable instructor supplying further context and comparative classical textual material.
Bibliography
T. Blank 2022, ‘Methodical Remarks on the ‘Truthfulness’ of Oratorical Narrative’ in A. Kapellos (ed.) 2023, The Orators and Their Treatment of the Recent Past, 23-46.
C. Eucken 2003, ‘Zum Konzept der πολιτικοὶ λόγοι bei Isokrates,’ in W. Orth 2003 Isokrates: neue Ansätze zur Bewertung eines politischen Schriftstellers, 34-42.
M. Finley 1975, The Use and Abuse of History.
G. Mathieu & E. Brémond (eds.) 1962, Isocrate: Discours, IV.
D. C. Mirhady & Y. L. Too 2000, Isocrates I
T. L. Papillon 2004, Isocrates II
B. Zimmerman & A. Rengakos 2014, Handbuch der griechischen Literatur der Antike. vol. 2.
Notes
[1] Finley 1975:98. cf. Eucken 2003. Common Isocratean threads neatly summarized Zimmerman 2014:785.
Isocrates on his own inconsistencies: see Blank 2022:37.
[2] The inclusion of the To Demonicus appears at first controversial but is not; each camp regards its orthodoxy regarding authenticity as the communis opinio, though I would estimate substantially more favour authenticity. See Zimmerman 2014:785 on arguments against authenticity.
[3] Mikalson notes in chapter 5 that the Nicocles was a presented in the voice of Nicocles but written by Isocrates, but does not expand further. In the Introduction concerns of a given discourse’s persona are dismissed.
[4] Isocrates’ literary qualities are only briefly treated in chapter 4.
[5] See BMCR 2005.04.33.
[6] cf. Serafim 2021, Religious Discourse in Attic Oratory and Politics: 47-50, a neat compilation on Isocratean religious material pertaining to the religious discourse.