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Eunoia in Isocrates or the Political Importance of Creating Good Will

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

Jacqueline de Romilly
Jacqueline de Romilly
Affiliation:
Paris
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Extract

Eunoia, in Greek, is something more than good will: it means approval, sympathy and readiness to help. Having such meanings, it soon came to be applied to politics in a number of ways, as describing one's feeling towards a person, or a party, or the city—or even another city. And this last instance which is connected with foreign politics, is what we shall here be dealing with. It is what Isocrates himself is most interested in, for out of sixty examples of the word about twenty-five refer specifically to the relations between one city and another city. And it is the meaning that deserves to be studied, particularly among people who like Thucydides. Whether it is φόβος or δέος, fear, in Thucydides, seems to dominate all relations between the cities of Hellas—and, to begin with, between Athens and other cities: well, eunoia, or good will, is the contrary of fear. That is to say, when Isocrates wants eunoia to rule political life, he wants things to be just the opposite of what they were in the world that Thucydides had described. Indeed, the position he adopts when discussing good will is part of an important controversy that was then being conducted about force and justice, might and right. And so, even if he is not himself a very thrilling writer nor a very intelligent man, it seemed worth while trying to find out how the idea arose both from recent experiments in Greece and from personal tendencies of Isocrates, and how he hoped the notion of eunoia could work in contemporary politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 78 , November 1958 , pp. 92 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1958

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References

1 A different view of this passage is suggested in Gomme, Commentary, ad loc.

2 Cf., for instance, Mathieu, G., Les idées politique d'Isocrate, Paris, 1925, p. 181.Google Scholar

3 Nicocles 14 and Areop. 21, to be compared with Rep. 558c. For the interpretation, see Wendland, , ‘Beiträge zu ath. Politik und Publicistik’, GGN, 1910, pp. 158–9Google Scholar n. 1 and Wilamowitz, , Arist. und Athen, i. p. 72Google Scholar n. 45 (and the keen remarks ibid., ii. 385 n. 6).

4 ‘Demosthenes und Isokrates’, WSt xxiii (1901), 209–12.

5 The second Olynthiac also resembles Plato's Republic, even in some similes (§21, compared with Rep. 556e).

6 Cf. recently, Merlan, Ph., ‘Isocrates, Aristotle and Alexander the Great’, Historia, iii (1954–1955), p. 60–81.Google Scholar

7 Isokrates, Seine Anschauungen im Lichte seiner Schriften, Helsinki, 1954.

8 Apart from 174, where eunoia and homonoia combine, the word εὔνους appears in 142, and that is all.

9 Cf. Paideia, iii. 128–9 (English edition).

10 Mathieu, , Philippe et Lettres à Philippe, à Alexandre et à Antipatros, Paris, 1924, p. 31.Google Scholar

11 About the limits of this late panhellenism in Isocrates (whatever it had been before), cf. Momigliano, A., Filippo il Macedone, Saggio sulla Storia greca del iv secolo A.C., Firenze, 1934, p. 191–2.Google Scholar

12 Cf. Chers. 27, the irony towards those who pretend to worry about Greek people in Asia. For the realism in his views, cf. also 25, where he mentions that the sums extorted from the cities were called εὔνοιαι.

13 For the influence of the idea among writers, 2. cf. Mühl, M., Die politische Idee des Isokrates und die Geschichtsschreibung, i, diss. Würtzburg, 1917Google Scholar, which shows Ephorus praising Philip and Alexander for having created good will.

14 The above paper was written for a lecture delivered in London University (May, 1957): I want to thank here both the Professors in this University for having invited me there and the editors of the JHS for having accepted it for publication. I feel particularly grateful to Professor A. W. Gomme who, very generously, spent much of his time making it less incorrect. The quotations of Isocrates in English are borrowed from G. Norlin's translation, in the Loeb Collection.