Eidos/idea in Isocrates

Author(s): Robert G. Sullivan

Source: Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2001), pp. 79-92
Published by: Penn State University Press
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Eidos/idea in Isoc rates

Robert G. Sullivan

For modern readers, the career and literary output of the Attic rhetorician
Isocrates is uncomfortably situated at the boundary between what we con-
ceive as technical rhetoric and professional philosophy. Much of this con-
fusion may be due to Isocrates' famous description of his programas being
a philosophia (Panegyricus 10, 47; Evagoras 8, 81; Panathenaicus 9;
Against the Sophists 1, 11-18, 21; Antidosis 30, 42-50, 162, 176, 181-
x
92). Over the years, the issue has exercised a large number of scholars
who have tried to specify what Isocrates meant by the term and what mat-
ters he considered to be within his purview.2 Recently, the idea has been
advanced that Isocrates and Plato consciously struggled over the use of the
term (Nehamas 1990, 4; Timmerman 1998, 145). In Nehamas's very useful
formulation, Isocrates thought philosophy to be "the ability to speak well,
which in turn reflects and is the product of thinking well and shrewdly
about practical affairs" (1990, 4). Timmerman'sreview of the relevant lit-
erature shows how Isocrates' conflation of philosophia and he ton logon
paideia has hurt his reputation among modern disciplinary philosophers:
"This confusion and resultantdevaluation of Isocrates' philosophy is predi-
cated on a platonically colored view of what constitutes philosophy" (1998,
147). More recently, others have made efforts to recover Isocrates for phi-
losophy by concentrating on those parts of his program that are of interest
to philosophers of our era.3
As a result, there has been a long-standing critical misapprehension
regarding how best to interprethis works. Simply put, a question arises as
to whether we should interpretthem as being, in broad feature, philosophi-
cal works delivered by means of rhetorical vehicles or whether we should
imagine Isocrates' program as being more centrally concerned with mat-
ters of technical rhetoric, granting, of course, that philosophical, or at least
ethical, subject matters appear often in his discourses.4

Philosophyand Rhetoric,Vol. 34, No. 1, 2001. Copyright© 2001 The PennsylvaniaState

University,UniversityPark,PA.
79

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80 ROBERTG. SULLIVAN

One register of this tendency can be found in the decisions recent

translators have made in regards to the meaning of key terms of the
Isocratean vocabulary. This can be most clearly seen in critical treatments
of the word idea. Though it has long been understood that the word idea is
an important term in the Isocratean rhetorical vocabulary, there remains
widespread disagreement on its meaning. Systematic studies of the term
have yielded greatly varying results.5 Some scholars have argued that the
term is not a rhetorical reference, others that idea in the larger number of
uses references the materia of speech rather than matters of composition
(Schlatter 1972, Lidov 1983). I examine the nineteen uses of the word idea
in Isocrates' discourses, as well as the four uses of its synonym eidos, in an
attempt to determine more closely whether, and how, these terms might
function in the Isocratean vocabulary.
We can begin with a bit about the words themselves. He idea and to
eidos are, respectively, feminine and neuter nouns derived from different
moods of the same verb, eidon, meaning "to see." So, both he idea and to
eidos express a range of concepts that can be gathered under the rubric of
"things that can be perceived" or "the outward features of a thing." The
meanings of these words are notoriously Protean. You will find transla-
tions of either term as "form," "shape," "figure," as well as metaphorical
extensions such as, "type," "kind,""class," "species," and the like. And, of
course, in Plato and later philosophical terminology, they are employed as
the vocabulary by which the concept of 'form' is expressed.
Isocrates used both terms with a fair regularity throughouthis career
(Preuss 1963). Eidos is used four times in the corpus, twice in Antidosis,
once in Against the Sophists, and once in Evagoras. Idea is used nineteen
times; the word occurs four times in Helen and four times in Antidosis;
twice in Panathenaicus, twice in To Nicocles, and twice in Nicocles\ and
once in Panegyricus, once in To Philip, once in Busiris, once in Against
the Sophists, and once in The Letter to the Children of Jason. Every use in
Isocrates conforms, as one would expect, to some sense of "form"or "idea,"
but such general renderings disguise the distinct variability that emerges
out of the context in which the terms appear. I argue in this paper that six
clusters of meaning can be discerned, four of which are technical terms in
Isocrates' rhetorical vocabulary.
The poles of meaning suggested by this study include "category,"in
the sense of genre or kind of speech; "figure," in the sense of a schema or
figure of speech; "structure,"in the sense of topical developments, or blocks
of ideas; and a more indeterminate quantity, "elements," which may refer

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 EIDOS/IDEAIN ISOCRATES 81

either to stylistic figures or structural ideas or some combination of the

two. There are also two sorts of meanings that I will not attend to in this
study, since they seem not to be technical terms: idea as "fashion" or man-
ner (Nicocles 44) and as "trait"or characteristic (Helen 54, 58; ToNicocles
34; Nicocles 30).
It is important to understand that I am not arguing that these four
English words are the best terms by which to render Isocrates' Greek in
every case. I have my preferences, of course, but my main intent here is to
suggest interpretive frames that are more congruent with Isocrates' rhe-
torical doctrines. For instance, my suggestion that some of Isocrates' uses
of idea should be placed within the pole of meaning that I call "category"
does not mean that I think that a translatorshould use that English word for
each of these cases. What it does mean is that Isocrates' uses of idea can
differ rather dramatically according to context, and if we wish to gain a
greater purchase on Isocrates' rhetorical theory, we are going to have to
develop a more precise ear for his nuances.

1. Idea/eidos - "forms" as the categories of discourse

The first level of distinction that I intend to draw is between uses of idea
that refer to "forms" of speeches, as opposed to the "forms" that rhetori-
cians draw upon when composing a speech. The use of idea or eidos as
"sort," "type," or "kind"of something is common enough in writers con-
temporary with Isocrates to make it uncontroversial. For instance,
Thucydides often uses the term to distinguish "kindsof wars" (3.81), "kinds
of deaths" (1.109), and so on. These are informal distinctions that should
not be confused with rigid taxonomies, such as genus or species in the
modern sense. We see the same treatmentof terms twice in Isocrates where
there is no rhetorical theory at stake. In Panathenaicus, Isocrates describes
"three kinds (ideas) of constitution" (132), and in Antidosis he makes rec-
'
ommendations as to the use of "every kind (eidos) of proof (280). In both
of these cases, it is absolutely clear that these words refer to a type, or
kind, or sort of something, and in fact, it doesn't pressure the meaning
overmuch to suggest category.
But we also see Isocrates using the term in a more secure sense as an
element of his rhetorical vocabulary- and here "category" seems to do
much the same work as our word genre. In Antidosis, for instance, he at-
tempts to distance his work from that of other Athenian intellectuals, and

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82 ROBERTG. SULLIVAN

by this to remove the stigma that is attached generally to the works of all
Sophists, saying to his readers, "you ought to know that there are no fewer
sorts of prose (tropoi ton logon) than those composed to metre" (45). These
categories are such things as various as genealogies of the demigods, stud-
ies of the poets, historical accounts of wars, and dialogues. So numerous
are they, Isocrates says, that "it would be no small task if one were to at-
tempt to enumerateall of the kinds (pasas tas ideas ton logon) of discourse"
(46). Here the ideai ton logon are categories of discourse, directly equiva-
lent to the usage tropoi ton logon discussed just above, genres of prose as
dissimilar as histories, myths, literary criticism, and dialogues. Similarly,
at Panathenaicus 1, tropoi or ideai is surely to be supplied in the phrase
Neôteros men on proêroumên graphein ton logon, after which Isocrates
goes on to list the prose forms that he chose not to write, myths, histories
of wars, and collections of forensic commonplaces.6
In otherplaces, Isocrates uses idea in the singularto describe speeches
as being of a type or kind in much the same way we understand the term
genre, as representing a discursive structureof a common type. In Busiris,
for instance, Isocrates criticizes Polycrates' Encomium to Busiris as being
utterly inept. He points out that Polycrates has employed ideas or themes
more appropriate to a speech of reproach than to one of praise, and by
doing so has "gone astray from the whole form (tes ideas holes) by which
one ought to make a eulogy" (Busiris 33). Isocrates says that in encomia
"good things are said about one" while Polycrates has employed themes of
better use to revilers. These materials, being inappropriateto the eulogy,
ruin the "whole form" of the speech. The context here makes it clear that
here idea can only mean "form" in the sense of genre. That "form" is a
particular thing, the form of the speech of praise, what we would call its
generic structure.
In a similar spirit, in Panegyricus, Isocrates criticizes the other pan-
egyrists who have given patriotic harangues at the Olympic festival, de-
scribing Sophists who have "rushed to this subject" of Panhellenism (3).
He, however, intends to surpass them both in ideas and in approach,choos-
ing the noblest of the sorts of discourse (toutous kallistous einai ton logon).
He is sure that the time is still ripe for his effort and that his competitors
have not exhausted the capacity of speech to express his ideas, for, as
Isocrates has it, "if one were in no other ways able to expound these mat-
ters, than by means of a single 'form' (dia mias ideas)," then he would
have nothing to contribute (7). But, of course, Isocrates can and does.
Now the temptation here is to treat mias ideas in the most general
sense, that is, as "one way," or "single fashion." But what Isocrates is ar-

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 EIDOS/IDEAIN ISOCRATES 83

guing is that the Panhellenic theme has been treated in the same way by
many Sophists and the form by which they have approachedtheir work has
been through the vague and impractical platitudes of a patriotic speech, a
standardpanegyric. Isocrates, however, famously used the Panegyricus to
achieve an advisory, or symbouleutic, purpose, announcing hêkô sym-
bouleusôn {Panegyricus 3; cf. 170-71). As his rivals have produced overly
general harangues, their speeches are nothing more than epideixeis, or dis-
plays. In his speech, he will change the form of the panegyric so that it
includes direct, concrete political counsel.
We find much the same sort of distinction made in Helen where he
accuses his competitors of clichéd attachments to approaches to discourse:
"Forthere is only a single approach(hodos) for compositions such as these,
which is not difficult to discover, learn, or imitate; but speeches of com-
mon concern, and persuasive ones, and those that are similar to these, are
invented and expressed by means of many forms (pollôn ideôn) and com-
plex contingencies, and their composition is therefore more difficult" (11).
Again, the temptation would be to think of the ideai as "elements," or "ma-
terials" of speech, but I would argue that what is being contrasted is the
single manner or approach of Sophistic demonstrations, the mia hodos,
with the greatly various Isocratean prose genres, the pollôn ideôn. So, here
again, idea seems to mean genre or category of speech.
Finally, in Against the Sophists, there is a use of idea, the precise
meaning of which is, frankly, difficult to determine. In Against the Soph-
ists, Isocrates once again distinguishes himself from his Sophistic com-
petitors (17). They, he says, teach useless wrangling and sterile rules of
composition and claim that they can teach the art to anyone. Isocrates ar-
gues that a student must have the correct aptitude in order to succeed and
that the master must have control over the materials of the art: "For I say
<that to grasp the knowledgo of the 'elements' (ton ideôn) from which we
compose and express all speeches is not difficult" if one places themselves
in the hands of one who knows them (16). He then continues to specify the
rhetorical activity as the judicious choice from among these "elements,"
theirjoining and arrangement,their being made consonant with the kairos,
the use of appropriateenthymemes, and the embroideryof the whole speech
with rhythmic and even musical phrasing. So, the ideai here are more than
figures certainly, they are all of the materials, or "elements," of speech, a
meaning of idea to which we will returnlater. But, Isocrates continues, the
student must take pains and have a bold and inquisitive spirit. Not only
must one have this nature, but also one must "learn the forms of discourse
(ta eidê ton logon) and be exercised in their uses" (Against the Sophists

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84 ROBERTG. SULLIVAN

17). The determination of meaning here is a bit tricky. Ta eidê could, for
instance, simply continue the sense of tas ideas, from above, and mean
such compositional devices as are referenced there, and this idea has some
attraction.But, I believe, a strongercase is that it means "types,"or "kinds,"
of speeches. The ideai from which discourses are made are clearly the "el-
ements" or compositional devices of speech. But if these eidê are forms,
they are forms "of speeches," "kinds of speeches." Clearly, the use of idea
at Against the Sophists 16 has a technical value, in the term he is gathering
the elements from which one constructs speeches; why then shift to eidos
at 17? It seems that the two are being distinguished in some way, and so
that eidos would not refer to stylistic devices but to something like "genre."
Isocrates does occasionally use other terms by which he makes ref-
erence to forms of discourse in a way similar to the uses of idea and eidos.
Ho hodos has seven uses in Isocrates. Six of them are common usages of
the term, either as it indicates a "road" {To Philip 66, 132), a "journey"
(Panegyricus 148), or as the "way"or "course"of a person's life (Demonicus
5, 19; To Nicocles 35). In Helen, however, we get a metaphorical use in
reference to composition. Criticizing the paradoxical encomia of the Soph-
ists, he says, "For such compositions as these are of a single type (mia tis
hodos) which is not difficult to invent, learn, or imitate" (11). Here the
"way" is the whole approach, or treatment of speeches by the Sophists,
which can be compared with the many forms and contingencies of the
Isocratean logoL And, as noted above, in Antidosis, Isocrates has it that
there the reader must know that there are no fewer tropoi ton logon than
species of verse (45).

2. Idea/eidos - "forms" as the materials from which

discourses are made

Figures

A second set of meanings for idea or eidos refer to "forms" of a different

sort. These are the stylistic "forms"exploited by a rhetorician in their com-
position of a speech. There seem to be three separate notions within this
pole of meaning. To begin with the most specific usage, we can turn to an
important passage in Panathenaicus, where, once again, Isocrates distin-

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 E/D0S//DE4 IN ISOCRATES 85

guishes his practice from his rivals on both substantialand stylistic grounds.
He argues that he has counseled the city and the Greeks on pressing mat-
ters in a style "laden with enthymemes, no small number of antitheses and
balancedclauses and the other 'forms' (ton allôn ideôn) which shine through
in speeches and force the approval and roar of the audience" (2). In this
passage, the ideai are clearly particular elements of embellishment,
enthymemes, antitheses, balanced clauses, forms that we would call the
figures of speech or thought, forms that give a speech brilliance and finish.
The same sense is apparent in a passage from Antidosis, where he
speaks of those, including himself, who have chosen to write Hellenic,
political, and panegyric discourses, instead of private disputes. All would
agree, he says, that these are more like poetry than speeches in court. Such
discourses display their matterin a more ornamentedand embellished style
and seek to make use of weighty and original enthymemes; in addition,
they make use, throughout the speech, of a great number of other more
distinctive "forms" (tais allais ideais). Here, again, the ideai are "forms"
that can be ordered into a speech in order to give the discourse a more or
less distinguished character.They are stylistic features, not ideas, per se,
but modes of auxesis. Here, again, "figure" seems right.
This same level of specificity seems appropriate to a use of eidos
from Evagoras. Here he complains (an Isocrateancharacterflaw, perhaps?)
that the task of making an encomium in prose is more difficult than doing
the same in poetry. The poet is said to have many advantages- they have
many "ornaments," or "embellishments" (polloi kosmoi) given to them
(Evagoras 9). These kosmoi include devices such as depicting the gods
conversing with men or helping them in battle. Moreover, they can express
these things not only by agreed upon, or "appointed,"words (tetagmenois
onomasin), but also by foreign words, unique coinages, metaphors, and
otherwise "ornamenttheir poem by every figure" (eidesu 9). Orators can,
of course, use none of these devices. They must use only common terms,
and ones relevant to a case; they may not use meter, and so on. So here, ta
eidê seems synonymous with kosmoi, and "figure" seems the best sense of
the word, as neologisms, metaphors, or exotic words, might be described
as "figures" of thought or speech.
The devices specified as ideai in this sense are worth a moment's
examination. Isocrates speaks of metaphors, antitheses, parison, "orna-
ments" generally, exotic words, neologisms, and especially of enthymemes
as being ideai. Enthumêmahas five uses in Isocrates, and in each enthymeme
is associated with idea in its sense as "figure."As noted above, in Evagoras

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86 ROBERTG. SULLIVAN

Isocrates notes that orators are "strictly compelled to make use only of the
words of the citizens (common Attic vocabulary) and enthymemes in ref-
erence to their actions" (10). Poets, in contrast, can "bewitch their listeners
by rhythms and harmonies, even though both their style and their
enthymemes might be deficient" (10). Similarly, in Against the Sophists,
Isocrates describes the task of the orator "to choose the ideai as are appro-
priate for an issue and then to mix them together and arrange them cor-
rectly, and not to miss the opportunity but to both appropriatelyembroider
the whole speech with enthymemes, and to speak it rhythmically and musi-
cally" (16). There are two uses in which enthymemes are identified spe-
cifically as ideai, and in which a bit more meat is put into the definition. At
Antidosis 47, Isocrates discusses those who write "political discourses,"
including, prominently, himself, whose writings are more akin to poetry
than to speeches written for court. Such as these display material in a more
ornamented style, seek to use weightier and more original enthymemes,
and seek to distribute throughout the whole speech many other more dis-
tinguished ideai. And at Panathenaicus 2, he defends his career, saying
that he advised the city and the Greeks with discourses "full of enthymemes,
no small number of balanced clauses and antitheses, and the other figures
(ton allôn ideôn) which add brilliance to speeches." Enthymemes, then,
for Isocrates are stylistic quantities, materials that can be chosen, but not
"words," per se, or the substantial issues or ideas at stake in a speech. It
would seem that enthymemes are "thoughts," perhaps "maxims," or
"gnomai," stylistic devices in the same category as the Gorgianic figures
of parison and antithesis.7

Structure

Idea in the uses mentioned above describes a particular quantity of style,

figures of thought or speech, but Isocrates uses the same word to refer to
larger, structural, units of discourses, independent blocks of material that
can be worked into a speech. The clearest example of such a usage will be
found in Antidosis. In his prologue to that discourse, Isocrates complains
of the difficulty of the task. "Now, to conceive of such a long speech, and
to gather and harmonize together so many scattered "forms'(ideas), is not
easy" (11). We might keep in mind what these "forms" are that Isocrates
gathers and harmonizes in the Antidosis. They are large portions of his
other speeches, forty-eight sections of the Panegyricus, forty-four sections

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 EIDOS/IDEAIN ISOCRATES 87

from two parts (both the proofs and conclusion) of On the Peace, twenty-
five sections from To Nicocles, and four sections of Against the Sophists,
which he has edited and compiled to act as his "witnesses" in his fictional
apologia, "For it would be foolish if I," he says, "seeing others make use
of my (words), alone should refrain from using those things I said previ-
ously in my (speeches), and especially now that I have chosen to use for
you not only small parts (mikrois meresin) but whole 'structures' (holois
eidesih)" Here eidos cannot mean "sorts"of speeches, nor can it mean the
more specific "figures" of speech, nor is it something as basic as an "idea"
or theme, nor can it refer to the parts of a speech. The materials produced
are big chunks of argument drawn from a variety of speech parts.
Isocrates uses idea to refer to large, independent, blocks of material
in three other places. In To Philip, he argues to Philip's vanity, saying that
if the Macedonian king wars against the barbarians,he will win great re-
nown. Indeed, he says, eulogists will compare Philip's glory with that of
the heroes of the mythic past. He gives a few hints of this and then stops
with false modesty to say, "I have however chosen to avoid such a 'thing'
(tes toiautês ideas)" Now, the "thing," the idea here, is a comparison, or
syncresis, of Philip and heroes from the past. As such, syncresis is an ele-
ment of discourse, but a determinantone, a building block, not so much a
figure as a structure of discourse. Comparisons can be found in many of
the Isocratean speeches. Some of the more memorable are that of Thesesus
and Heracles in Helen (23-28), the long comparisons of Athens and Sparta
that make up the greater parts of Panegyricus and Panathenaicus, those
between the current and ancient polity in Areopagiticus and between the
imperium and Athens' past foreign policies in On The Peace. Aristotle
(Rhetoric 1.9.38) criticizes Isocrates for making comparisons in his foren-
sic speeches where Aristotle sees them as irrelevant. These comparisons
are often quite long and function not so much as striking figures of speech,
but as independent themes of their own (Race 1978).
We get the same sense in a use in the Helen, where Isocrates criti-
cizes the encomium that Gorgias has written for Helen as being a defense
of her actions, rather than the praise of her that the encomia requires.
Isocrates intends to correct Gorgias by producing an encomium composed
of the materials appropriate to this form. Gorgias's speech cannot be an
encomium, he says, because "this speech is not of the same materials (ek
ton autôn ideôn) nor concerning the same actions" (Helen 15). Here he is
speaking of a prose form, the encomium, which is composed out of a num-
ber of elements that aim at amplifying the praiseworthy acts and character-

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88 ROBERTG. SULLIVAN

istics of a person, for instance, praise of ancestry and military prowess and
comparisons with living and mythical figures.8 In the case of Isocrates'
Helen, these encomiastic elements are specified in the prethesis as praises
of Helen's beauty, birth, and repute (14).
The last use of idea in this sense is found in To Nicocles. There we
find Isocrates railing against the bad taste of readers who prefer spectacu-
lar tales to useful literature. The poets and tragedians have noted this, he
complains, and load their works with "battles and contests" (agônas kai
hamillas, 48). Being astute observers of human nature, they have "made
full use of both of these very devices (amphoterais tais ideais) in their
poems." The descriptionsof "battlesand contests" are particularideai, struc-
tural units of composition that can be loaded into fiction to make it more
pleasurable for the readers. More than a figure, and not so much a thought
or consideration, per se, this is a particular compositional device, and it
conforms to a notion of what we would call a theme or structure.
It would be a mistake to think that these structures are utterly inde-
terminate, or that the usage here is overly general. In fact, the "structures"
referred to in these uses are identifiable units of composition, particular
things thatcan be composed into a speech, such as comparisons,protrepseis,
and free-standing units of praise and blame. Isocrates seems to have used
these ideai as building blocks of discourse. The units could almost be writ-
ten independently of each other and placed in reserve. When composition
began, the ideai were layered like brickwork and joined by the mortar of
Isocrates' parenthetical narration.

Elements

The remainder of the rhetorical uses of idea and eidos also refer to the
materials a rhetorician draws upon in composition, but either their nature
is of a more general type or Isocrates' usage is looser and has less particu-
lar reference. In some passages, Isocrates uses the terms as if he could be
referring to either a "figure" or to a topical "structure"or perhaps even to
the form of a speech, but there is no way of distinguishing the level of
particularityat which he is speaking. In these cases, it seems safest to fol-
low what has become the standard usage and employ the translation of
"elements" (Gaines 1990, 165 . 2).
The paradigm usage of idea in this sense is a very importantpassage
on rhetorical composition found in Against the Sophists. The Sophists,
Isocrates says, misunderstand the nature of rhetoric, believing that it can

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 EIDOS/IDEAIN ISOCRATES 89

be taught as if it were a settled art like that of "letters" (12-13). Who, he

asks, except these Sophists, does not know that while "letters" always re-
main the same and unchanging, and we order them in the same way every
time we use them, the opposite is true of discourses? A speech must be
appropriatelyframed to meet the demands of the occasion:

For I say that to grasp the knowledge of the "elements" {ton ideôn) from which
we synthesize and express all discourses is not terribly difficult- as long as
one does not go to those who make light promises, but to those with some
knowledge of these things; but to choose among these and mix them and ar-
range them properly, yet not to miss the occasion, but to embroider the whole
of the speech with appropriate enthymemes and to speak with rhythmic and
musical words; these take great discipline and are the work of a manly and
imaginative mind. (16)

There are a couple of things to note here. The ideai in this passage
seem to be the atomic structureof speech, enthymemes, elements by which
a speech is embroidered, what we would call figures, and its molecular
level, its structure.They are not "figures"alone, but everything from which
discourse is made, the material from which all speeches are both composed
and given verbal expression. One can have a true knowledge of these and,
if one goes to the right teacher, it can be gotten rathereasily. It is the judi-
cious and appropriatechoice, synthesis, and composition of the elements,
and their rhythmic and musical expression, that marks the artist.
There is a similar, and similarly important, use of idea in The Letter
to the Children of Jason. In this passage, Isocrates prepares his readers for
the fact that some of what they will hear will be familiar to them. He says
that he would be a fool indeed if he alone were to abstain from using his
words, as competitors kept poaching his best thoughts He says that they
must be preparedbecause the very first "offering" has become a common-
place. "I am accustomed," he claims, "to say to my students of philosophy,
that first it is necessary to ask this- what is to be accomplished by the
speech and the parts of the speech- and then when we have discovered
and determined these things precisely, I say it is necessary to seek out the
'elements' {tas ideas) by means of which the exact thing we set upon is
worked out and accomplished" {Ep. 6 8). By way of explanation, this proce-
dure of speech composition is then made analogous with practices in life
generally. Setting goals becomes the strategy to which tactics are applied.
Speeches, and their parts, the larger generic features of discourse, are stra-
tegic and respond to the inquiry into what is to be accomplished while the
ideai are the tactics by which the goals are accomplished.

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90 ROBERTG. SULLIVAN

Now, we do know that, in this passage, the ideai are smaller units
than the speech genres or the parts of a speech. But we have no way of
clearly distinguishing whether Isocrates is discussing "structures"or "fig-
ures." It could be either, or it could be both. The idea that a speech is ca-
pable of being elaborated or worked out to perfection might hint at figure,
but the accomplishment of the goal of a speech seems to point to a more
general matter of composition. "Generalelements" here is safest, though it
surely points to features that are teachable and knowable, and within the
art. The procedure of composition is to determine, first, what a speech and
its parts are to accomplish and, then, the application of various elements
by which this goal is to be met. The inquiry into the question of what is to
be accomplished yields the goal, and then various elements are applied to
its achievement.
A final use of this sort of idea is found in Antidosis. There, Isocrates
famously posits a parallel between the components of human nature, the
mind and the body. Both can be augmented by art, gymnastic for the body
and philosophy for the mind. Masters of the art can train the mind to be
more intelligent and the body to be more serviceable by the use of similar
courses of instruction, exercise, and discipline: "When they take their stu-
dents, the teachers of gymnastic teach the students the postures (schem-
tfta=gestures, stances) which have been devised for combat, while the
'philosophers' work through for their students all of the 'forms' (tas ideas
hapasas) by which speech is made" (Antidosis 183). The exact meaning of
idea is indeterminate here; it could refer to any of the elements of the art
that could be taught by Isocrates, genre, figures, or thematic development.
Later in the speech, Isocrates extends the metaphor and points out that the
forms of both the gymnast and the rhetorician must be brought to bear on
particularcircumstances in a coordinated and appropriatefashion. There-
fore, gymnastics and rhetoricdepend not on science, but on theories, doxeis,
that must be realized in practice. The master, however, does have a store of
knowledge, epistêmê, and these are the ideai. It would seem that these
"forms"could also be the more global sort of rhetorical"forms,"such things
as the types of discourses. I suspect that a reading of "elements" as that in
The Letter to the Children of Jason is the safer choice, and there is no
reason why we cannot take it to include all of the meanings we have sug-
gested,even those with the sense of category,figure,and structure.

In conclusion, in virtually every use in the corpus, when Isocrates uses the
terms idea or eidos, he is making reference to quantities of speech compo-

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 EIDOS/IDEAIN ISOCRATES 91

sition, either to generic indicators or to units of composition, and not to

such things as "ideas" or the topical matters of discourse, or to some vari-
ant of philosophical form. For Isocrates, these terms are surely key terms
of technical rhetorical doctrine, not what we might think of as a properly
philosophical vocabulary.

Department of Speech Communication

Ithaca College

Notes
1. References to the Isocratean texts are drawn from Mathieu and Bremond's Isocrate.
Discours (1956-62).
2. The basic bibliography would include Wilcox's "Criticisms of Isocrates and his
" (1943a) and "Isocrates' Fellow Rhetoricians" (1943b), Jaeger's Paidea (1943),
Morrison's "The Origin of Plato's Philosopher-Statesman" (1958), and Wersdörfer's "Die
des Isokrates im Spiegel ihrer Terminologie, Untersuchungen zur fruattischen
Rhetorik und Stullehre" (1945).
3. Too's The Rhetoric of Identity in Isocrates (1995), Takis Poulakos's Speaking for the
Polis (1997), and the treatment in John Poulakos's Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece
(1995) are only three of the more recent books to examine the position of Isocrates in the
Sophistic milieu. See also Cahn's "Reading Rhetoric Rhetorically" (1989) and Goggin and
Lang's "A Tincture of Philosophy, a Tincture of Hope" (1993).
4. The use of the term rhetoric is provisional and a matter of convenience. Schiappa's
point is well taken here (Schiappa 1992). Isocrates did not use the term rhêtorikê, nor did he
describe himself as a "rhetorician."His term for his theory was, as noted above, philosophia
or he ton logon paideia, and he described his discourses as being a species of logos politikos.
This philosophia was, however, as Nehamas (1990) points out, overwhelmingly concerned
with the cultivation and use of discourse in the political world. We also have much evidence
that Isocrates was an innovator in and theorist of prose composition put to these political
purposes. For no other reason than to avoid overuse of the cumbersome, and equally anach-
ronistic, formulae of "composition theorist," or "theory of discourse," I will employ rhetori-
cian and rhetorical theory.
5. The bibliography on this term is not inconsiderable. The fundamental work remains
Taylor's "The Words EÎÔoç/Iôea in Pre-Socratic Literature"(1911). A more focused study
will be found in Lidov's "The Meaning of in Isocrates" (1983). Lidov's treatment of
the term is strongly colored by his belief that Isocrates' great project as a rhetorical educator
was to collapse the distinction between subject and treatment, what the Roman rhetoricians
would later call res and verba. Under this condition, lôéa is handled by Lidov almost exclu-
sively as "idea," that is, the materia of discourse itself. Much the same position is pursued
by Schlatter (1972). The word has also been examined by scholars with a greater sensitivity
to Isocrates' technical vocabulary, for which see Gaines's "Isocrates, £p.6\8" (1990).
6. On this passage, see Wilcox's "Isocrates Genera of Prose" (1943c).
7. Conley (1984, 172) points out how completely the Isocratean conception of the
enthymeme diverges from that of Aristotle.
8. On the material development of the Isocratean encomium, and its relationship to the
poetic tradition, see Race's "PindaricEncomium and Isokrates'Evagoras"(1987).

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