ISOC'RATES (Lat.. from Grk.'keKpdt-nr, Isok rates). Though one of the ten Attic orators of the Alexandrian Canon. Isoerates was rather a publicist and a pamphleteer than an orator. This long life (n.c. 436-33S). as De Quineey interest in
did as much as the Academy of Plato to make the Athens of the fourth century the sehoobnis tiess of Greece. Dissertations have been written about his pupils. From that school, says Cicero, as from the Trojan horse, a company of naught but chieftains issued forth. (3) lsocrates, though not himself a great writer, holds a great place in the evolution of European prose. Ile was a pupil of the hrilliant Sophist Gorgias, who freely em ployed as ornaments of prose jingling assonance, alliteration, balanced antithesis of thought and expression. striking, metaphor. and other rhetori cal features of Greek poetry. Isoerates tem pered the excess of these `Co•gian figures,' hut retained them so far as consonant with the genius of ornate but not extravagant prose. He also practiced and taught the smooth organic structure of the long rhythmical period. the avoidance of hiatus, the conscious variation of phrase and selection of synonym. These and many other traits of style employed by him in a mechanical and monotonous way Were studied in him by the world's three great masters of prose, Plato. Demosthenes, and later. Cicero. And Cicero has made them the common property of all educated men in theory, if not in practice.
lsoerates's twenty-one orations and ten pos sibly genuine letters fill two small volumes of the Telltale]. texts. They were translated into English by and Young ( London, 1752), but are dull in any but their Greek dress. There is an ample analysis and account of all of them in Jebb. tile Orators, vol. ii. (London. 1S76). That work and Blass, A ttisehe Tiered samkeit (Leipzig, 1868•S0; 2d ed., ISS7-93), will meet all the needs of the student. There is a good English annotated edition of the Pune gyricas by Sandys, and selected orations have been edited with German notes by Rauchenstein Reinhardt (Berlin).