Many times have I wondered at those who first convoked the national assemblies and established the athletic games,Pan-Hellenic gatherings at the Olympic, Pythian, Nemean and Isthmian games, including also the Pan-atheniac festival at Athens. See Gardner and Jevons, pp. 269 ff. amazed that they should have thought the prowess of men's bodies to be deserving of so great bounties, while to those who had toiled in private for the public good and trained their own minds so as to be able to help also their fellow-men they apportioned no reward whatsoever,This is not quite exact (see Lys. 33.2), nor consistent with § 45 where he mentions contests of intellect and prizes for them. But the mild interest which these evoked served but to emphasize the excess of enthusiasm for athletics against which Isocrates here and elsewhere protests. Cf. Isoc. 15.250 and Isoc. Letter 8.5. The complaint is older than Isocrates. See Xenophanes, Fr. 19.

when, in all reason, they ought rather to have made provision for the latter; for if all the athletes should acquire twice the strength which they now possess, the rest of the world would be no better off; but let a single man attain to wisdom, and all men will reap the benefit who are willing to share his insight.

Yet I have not on this account lost heart nor chosen to abate my labors; on the contrary, believing that I shall have a sufficient reward in the approbation which my discourse will itself command, I have come before you to give my counsels on the war against the barbarians and on concord among ourselves. I am, in truth, not unaware that many of those who have claimed to be sophistsFor the meaning of the word “sophist” see General Introd. p. xii. The word is commonly translated “orator,” since the sophists concerned themselves mainly with exemplifying and teaching oratory; but the sophist speaks only on the lecture platform; the political orator is called a “rhetor” in Isocrates. Gorgias and Lysias in their Olympic orations had spoken on this theme, but it is hardly probable that Isocrates had them particularly in mind in this patronizing remark.

have rushed upon this theme, but I hope to rise so far superior to them that it will seem as if no word had ever been spoken by my rivals upon this subject; and, at the same time, I have singled out as the highest kind of oratoryCf. Lys. 33.3. For Isocrates, idea of the highest oratory see General Introd. p. xxiv. that which deals with the greatest affairs and, while best displaying the ability of those who speak, brings most profit to those who hear; and this oration is of that character.

In the next place, the moment for action has not yet gone by, and so made it now futile to bring up this question; for then, and only then, should we cease to speak, when the conditions have come to an end and there is no longer any need to deliberate about them, or when we see that the discussion of them is so complete that there is left to others no room to improve upon what has been said.

But so long as conditions go on as before, and what has been said about them is inadequate, is it not our duty to scan and study this question, the right decision of which will deliver us from our mutual warfare, our present confusion, and our greatest ills?

Furthermore, if it were possible to present the same subject matter in one form and in no other, one might have reason to think it gratuitous to weary one's hearers by speaking again in the same manner as his predecessors; but since oratory is of such a nature

that it is possible to discourse on the same subject matter in many different ways—to represent the great as lowly or invest the little with grandeur, to recount the things of old in a new manner or set forth events of recent date in an old fashionThe author of the treatise , 38, quotes this passage and condemns Isocrates' “puerility” in thus dwelling on the power of rhetoric when leading up to his praise of Athens, and so arousing distrust of his sincerity. But the objection loses its force if Isocrates is here using what had become a conventionalized statement of the power of oratory. This it probably was. Plut. Orat. 838f, attributes to Isocrates the definition of rhetoric as the means of making “small things great and great things small.” A similar view is attributed to the rhetoricians Tisias and Gorgias in Plat. Phaedrus 267a, who are credited with “making small things appear great and great things small, and with presenting new things in an old way and old themes in a modern fashion through the power of speech.” Cf. Isoc.11.4 and Isoc. 12.36; also Julian, Oration, i. 2 C.—it follows that one must not shun the subjects upon which others have spoken before, but must try to speak better than they.

For the deeds of the past are, indeed, an inheritance common to us all; but the ability to make proper use of them at the appropriate time, to conceive the right sentiments about them in each instance, and to set them forth in finished phrase, is the peculiar gift of the wise.