Isokrates was born five years before the beginning of the Peloponnesian War and died just after the battle of Chaeroneia. It might have been expected that such a life, touching both limits of such a century, would have been in its written records the vivid image of that century itself, with all its vicissitudes of struggle, with all its variety of impressive contrasts. One whose youth had known the intense and desperate energy of that war in which Imperial Athens was fighting for existence, whose early manhood had witnessed the terrible and moving drama of her overthrow, whose middle age had been passed under the dominion of Sparta now changed from the deliverer into the despot, whose later days had seen the restoration of Athens to the headship of a great Confederacy, the rise of Epameinondas—a second, though a Theban, Perikles for Greece—and his death before his national patriotism could give a new coherence to the nation, then the space of hopeless quarrelling and confusion, with the voice of Demosthenes heard above it all, but heard in vain, till Philip came in and struck his blow—surely, it might have been thought, a political essayist with such a compass of personal experience must be of almost unique value for the comparison of period with period. Isokrates in one sense disappoints any such hope.