While the biographical tradition associates Isocrates’ intellectual formation most frequently with Gorgias, Prodicus and Theramenes, there is also another, much later and more dubious, tradition that connects Isocrates to Socrates. Despite the confident claim in the Anonymous Life of Isocrates, which states that Isocrates μαθητὴς δ᾽ἐγένετο φιλοσόφου μὲν Σωκράτους (‘became the student of Socrates the philosopher’),Footnote ¹ and a couple of anecdotes, describing Isocrates utterly distressed about the death of Socrates to the extent of wearing mourning clothes for a year, the association between Socrates and Isocrates is of late origin and of little plausibility.Footnote ² However, the suggestion that there was some sort of intellectual association between the two men seems to carry irresistible attraction and it has never ceased to have prominent supporters.Footnote ³

Their association surely owes much to the reading of Isocrates’ Antidosis together with Plato’s Phaedrus and to noticing Isocrates’ only mention of Socrates in his Busiris. Whether or not the two actually met is a wild speculation and in itself not a very relevant question for this inquiry. It is surely true, however, that Socrates’ trial and execution had a long-lasting impact on Athens and it is highly probable that devising a career in education and laying claims to philosophy just immediately after such a watershed moment must have forced Isocrates to think hard about the role of teachers and intellectuals in Athenian society. Although it was held among many (if not most) contemporaries that Socrates’ death was unfair and undeserved – and therefore it was (and perhaps still is) probably unwise to criticize Socrates for an educated audience – Socrates’ behavior at the trial and his (lack of?) ability to defend himself have nevertheless been a subject of debate and interpretation.Footnote ⁴ I believe that we should look at Isocrates, though clearly a non-Socratic thinker, also in this particular context. While most scholars regard Isocrates as a staunch rival of Plato, Aristotle and other Socratics,Footnote ⁵ it is productive to regard Isocrates together with his contemporaries as trying to negotiate the Socratic legacy while developing his own unique approach to education and philosophy.Footnote ⁶ This perspective will show that Isocrates’ reflection of Socrates was more combative and critical than what has thus far been proposed.

Before Isocrates opens his school in early fourth-century Athens, we hear from another philosophy school in Athens that is active in 423 bce – Socrates’ ‘Thinkery’ (or Phrontistêrion) from Aristophanes’ Clouds. Granted that this is a comedy and not an actual school (nor actual Socrates) that is portrayed in the play, this idea of Socrates as school master and student magnet seems to have resonated well after his death.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, it is curious that of all the philosophical schools in Athens that we know emerged from the early fourth century onwards, Isocrates’ was the only one not tracing its origins back to Socrates.Footnote ⁸ This tells us two things: first, Socrates’ influence on his followers seems to have been such that it inspired later schools to be founded with a focus specifically on professionalization of philosophy, politics and education.Footnote ⁹ Second, as far as we can tell, Isocrates was the only advocate for professional schools who shows us another way of conceiving higher education in Athens. It is plausible, then, that when Isocrates discusses/critiques philosophers and the philosophical tradition, Socrates (rather than any individual Socratic) is the overwhelming and underlying ‘martyr’ of philosophy and education that he needs to grapple with. Why indeed did he not, unlike all other heads of philosophy schools, become a Socratic?

It is an understatement to say that Isocrates disagreed with Socrates and with Socrates-inspired philosophical schools. The tradition itself was in development and Isocrates proposed, as discussed above, a fundamentally different kind of concept for a philosophical school. This school was predicated upon the principles of sophisticated rhetoric, persuasion and advantage (discussed above). The urgency with which Isocrates attacks Socratic philosophers and the courage he had to challenge Socrates as the fountainhead of what had started to become a standard conception of philosophy schools are best understood as political. While Isocrates promoted in his work public life and preparation for political participation in the city’s governance, often specifically drawing attention to students who had excelled in relevant fields, Socratic dialogues underscore the importance of self-knowledge and promote a private study of true virtues in life. Isocrates’ Antidosis is a good test case for their relationship.

It has been occasionally noted that Isocrates’ Antidosis is much indebted to Plato’s Apology.Footnote ¹⁰ A careful reader will quickly notice, however, that in this work Isocrates subtly constructs an image of himself as an educator who is more effective and useful for Athens than Socrates had been. In one section, Isocrates discusses the role of education in shaping successful newer-generation politicians and orators in Athens and subtly draws attention to the work he himself is doing at his school. When he warns the jurors to not make a wrong decision of convicting him, he says that he has surpassed everyone else in providing Athens an education in intellect (φρόνησις) and speech (λόγος) – the two important cornerstones in the Athenian way of life that have brought the city its international renown and success (Ant. 291–5). In other words, Isocrates’ hard work in his school has enabled Athens to stand out internationally as the teacher of the rest of the world.Footnote ¹¹

While Socrates of the Socratic dialogues revealed the underlying ignorance and complacency of his fellow Athenians – that they actually do not know what they profess to know – Isocrates takes a different path and praises his fellow Athenians for already having outdone other Greeks in education. Athenians are the leaders of the world in education and this is due to the work teachers in Athens have been doing so successfully. There could not be a starker contrast. The Socratics and Plato in particular tell a story of Socrates’ encounters with the polis as one of attempts and failures, some more, some less ridiculous, but altogether it seems fair to say that Socrates’ interlocutors (at least in our extant Socratic dialogues) are shown to be full of confidence, even though deeper conversations reveal them to be ignorant and incapable of dealing with criticism. Socrates keeps throughout the dialogues a distance from his interlocutors and thus a distance from Athens and its institutions.Footnote ¹² This distance is predicated on freedom that Socrates seems to enjoy, a freedom to scrutinize and criticize institutions and people who do not live up to their own convictions. We are not allowed to forget, however, that it was also this city that ended up executing Socrates.

Isocrates paints a rather different image of his fellow Athenians. Even though there are problems in the jurisprudential system that Isocrates addresses in the first pages of his Antidosis, Athenians are generally cast as wiser than the rest of Greece, better educated and with appreciation for culture and education. There are some malicious characters who have brought the charges against Isocrates (‘some sophists’, Lysimachus Antidosis 2, 14), but rather than being pervasive in Athenian society these are the outliers. There is of course a hidden suggestion behind this portrayal of Athens, namely that Isocrates himself had an important role in shaping this superior Athens, that his school had in no small way contributed to the outstanding success of Athens. Furthermore, Isocrates seems to assimilate his own image as a successful teacher and a head of school with the international reputation of Athens as a teacher (διδάσκαλος) of the Greek world. Isocrates and Athens have started to look alike – Isocrates has become Athens.

Another point of difference between Isocrates and Socrates is, obviously, philosophy itself and how one ought to practice it. In what counts perhaps as the most programmatic passage in the Isocratean corpus, Antidosis 261–9 argues that astronomy, geometry and eristic dialogues are in themselves not harmful and as such benefit students as any training of the mind would (266), but they should not be called philosophy and they are useless as a preparation for real life. Therefore, these disciplines should not be practised too long nor be taken too seriously. This argument resembles another similar claim made by Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias,Footnote ¹³ except that Isocrates seems far less concerned with the personal fates of individuals than with the future of Athens more generally.Footnote ¹⁴ According to Isocrates, the Socratic quest for knowledge turns the youth from acting towards the wellbeing of the city towards prioritizing individual contemplation of personal virtues and happiness, thus depriving the city of educated and bright leaders. Isocrates’ concern for the usefulness of philosophy to Athens constitutes one of the pervading themes of Antidosis and this theme will also be, as shown below, his primary departure from Socrates and his followers.

Isocrates talks about success and worldly rewards of his profession in the Antidosis (281–5) where he lists advantage or gain (πλεονεξία) as one of the cornerstones of his philosophy. Isocrates argues that there is a general misconception in Athens with regard to language and terminology used to denote certain activities and people. Meanings have been turned upside-down, Isocrates claims, and buffoons capable of mocking and mimicking rather than men of excellence are called ‘gifted’ (εὐφυεῖς, 285). Tracing these changes back to the so-called ancient sophists enables Isocrates to suggest that it is not really the general public, but rather the so-called ‘philosophers’ who have unhelpfully discredited the idea of advantage, which used to function as a positive term in the context of any intellectual activity. Most importantly, Isocrates is upset that wealth has recently, among his contemporaries, fallen into disrepute (Antidosis 159–60), and unfairly so.

I believe we arrive here at what appears to be an explicit confrontation with Socrates and his image as a teacher and philosopher. It is a central characteristic of Socratic teaching to closely scrutinize one’s reliance on, and appreciation of, external characteristics such as wealth and reputation and challenge these as goals in themselves.Footnote ¹⁵ Socrates’ search for definitions often challenged the original or common meaning of a notion and aimed to demonstrate that things (or hopes, beliefs, desires) are not always what they appear on the surface or what the tradition handed down to us has had us believe. Through his critical lens on the political and social structures at place in Athens, Socrates has built a distance between the observer and the object so as to better contemplate matters at hand and reach a more objective and timeless decision.Footnote ¹⁶ The move is away from the moment and political context towards contemplating important questions of ethics in a timeless space.Footnote ¹⁷ The philosopher who is capable of following this quest ought to be independent and free from pressures from society in order to live that kind of critical life prescribed by Socrates. This intellectual freedom is an important reason why Socrates never charged fees.Footnote ¹⁸ As Blank notices, the distinction between sophists and philosophers tended to be made on the basis of whether or not they charged fees for their activity.Footnote ¹⁹ Otherwise, Socrates argues, he would have to talk to those who pay him and would therefore not be free to pursue his path of questioning as he chooses to.Footnote ²⁰

Isocrates sees things differently.Footnote ²¹ According to him, everyone does everything for the sake of either pleasure, gain or honor.Footnote ²² This, he says, is a fact and teachers who are preparing students to become leaders in the city or to simply manage their affairs cannot and should not downplay the importance of these three motivations. In other words, Isocrates seems to regard these three as legitimate and justified goals for one’s actions. He himself talks often about his reputation, thus giving the idea that to be well regarded by one’s fellow Athenians is of great importance to him and thus also a valid concern for any Athenian. Unlike Socrates, who discourages his interlocutors from following the so-called external motivations, urging them to continuously search for truth and happiness, Isocrates acknowledges the relevance of pleasure, gain and honor in the existing political and economic system and is determined to highlight the potential of higher education as a direct path to achieving these goals. Coming after Socrates and reflecting on his provocative views of education, Isocrates might appear as a conservative advocating for traditional societal norms.Footnote ²³ As such, he may not seem to bring much new to the ongoing discussion. As someone, however, trying to introduce (for the first time) institutionalized professional higher education to the intellectual and political landscape of Athens, his emphasis on demands for schools to cultivate the political elite of the city makes Isocrates’ position stand out from the rest. By making financial demands, Isocrates reminds his students that his school participates in the economy of the city, that it is not an autonomous self-absorbed entity somewhere in the outskirts of Athens,Footnote ²⁴ but rather an integral part of the city’s ongoing development.

Given the potential costs of running a professionalized institution of higher education, managing such an enterprise must require fees higher than what we hear were asked by the itinerant sophists. It is no surprise, then, that Isocrates comes back to the issue of money again and again throughout his writings.Footnote ²⁵ One of the most direct engagements with this topic is in his Antidosis, where after discussing the wealth (or lack thereof) of Gorgias, Isocrates turns to discussing the changing intellectual climate when it comes to charging fees for one’s professional activity (159–60). Isocrates explains that when he started out his business he was full of hope to recover the lost fortunes of his heritage and gain prominence through his hard work and education. Now, however, he finds himself surprisingly in a position where his foreign students who have brought him much financial support are continuously holding him in high honor, whereas Athenians on whom Isocrates has spent his resources are the ones to bring him on trial on the charge of being (too) wealthy.Footnote ²⁶ These references to the financial side of the ‘education business’ (and there are many more scattered around his works) are certainly indicative of Isocrates’ vision of the field: money and fame matter, they reveal the place one occupies in the real economy of the city and it would be at the peril of dooming education and philosophy to irrelevance to deny that. Holding such a position sets Isocrates in direct conflict with Socrates and his followers, and thus the entire mainstream of philosophical schools that trace themselves back to Socrates.

Despite his explicitly critical reception of Socrates, Isocrates never explicitly confronts Socrates, though he does mention him once. In the Busiris Isocrates criticizes the work of Polycrates who had written two paradoxical discourses: a praise of Busiris and an accusation speech against Socrates. Even though Isocrates then goes on to rewrite the praise for Busiris,Footnote ²⁷ he argues against Polycrates not because one ought not to accuse Socrates, but rather because his accusation speech looked more like praise.

Niall Livingstone has argued that Polycrates wrote the accusation speech against Socrates primarily because he regarded Socrates as a hero of his profession and therefore someone very hard for any educator to attack.Footnote ²⁸ Given that in this work Isocrates clearly conveys a very negative opinion of Polycrates, it might look obvious to assume that Isocrates is defending Socrates and, thus, that his relationship to him is one of admiration.Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, he chooses to offer a proper praise of Busiris rather than a ‘correct’ accusation of Socrates! However, it is also plausible that attacks such as those leveled against Socrates by Anytus, Meletus and Polycrates (even though all on different levels and probably with different motivations) were in Isocrates’ view so serious attacks against the position of intellectuals and teachers in Athens that regardless of the individual differences and disagreements, it was a matter of urgency that they be refuted tout court.Footnote ³⁰ But more specifically, it is striking that Isocrates’ criticism of Polycrates revolved around the figure of Alcibiades: Isocrates claims that Polycrates has falsely given the ever-talented Alcibiades to be a student of Socrates. Most Socratic philosophers thought long and hard about how to distance Alcibiades from Socrates and how best to address the claim that Socrates was responsible for the damage that Alcibiades inflicted on Athens. Isocrates instead embraces the excellence of Alcibiades and claims that Socrates was never his teacher in the first place, thus effectively belittling the influence Socrates as a teacher had on Athenian politics.Footnote ³¹ Isocrates’ claim might be best understood as a twist on the paradoxical subject itself,Footnote ³² but either way it is hardly supportive of Socrates as a venerated teacher and role model.

As suggested before, Socrates’ trial plays a fundamental role for our understanding of Isocrates’ Antidosis, which is arguably one of the most multilayered fourth-century engagements with Socrates’ trial that we have. This work is clearly set in competitive dialogue with many other contemporary literary-philosophical works that reflect on this watershed moment, but more than anything else, it seems that the Antidosis is imbued with a competitive attitude towards Socrates and his philosophical/educational heritage.Footnote ³³ Isocrates had also participated in a court trial that he – similarly to Socrates – lost.Footnote ³⁴ As Socrates in Plato’s Apology, Isocrates imagines the real reason behind his failure at the trial to lie in fundamental misunderstandings that have arisen around his school and his personality. Yet, it would be dangerous for Isocrates to sound too much like Socrates, to suggest that his influence in the city has been primarily negative, that he has not made any political impact and – above all – that engaging in higher education inevitably means taking distance from the political life of the city. The pervading ideas of the Antidosis are, therefore, inspired by the desire to demonstrate the relevance of his school and philosophy to Athens and, thereby, implicitly criticize the core of what Socrates – the head of school – was standing for. Thus we see Isocrates who is hopeful that the jury will eventually recognize the truth about him (28, 169–70), confirm his importance to the cultural milieu of Athens and pay their due respect.Footnote ³⁵ It is curious that Isocrates had explicitly decided to side with his audience and listeners, being confident that his words will make a difference. This is yet another instance where Isocrates consciously adopts an opposite view to Socrates, envisioning himself to be an effective teacher and educator in Athens in contrast to Socrates. Indeed, Socrates may have been a teacher of sorts in Athens, but he was not a teacher of Athenians nor useful for the city. Isocrates, instead, aims to be both.

Finally, there may also have been some urgency in Isocrates’ perceived need for a new vision for higher education and its role in the city. As some studies point out, there were hesitant attitudes towards wealthy aristocratic Athenians after the Peloponnesian war that seem to have resulted in the continuous decrease of active political elite running the city.Footnote ³⁶ By the end of the fourth century bce, Aristotle’s Politics and the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians both describe contemporary Athens as the most radical form of democracy, arguing that citizens and decrees rather than laws rule the city.Footnote ³⁷ Further, Claire Taylor has drawn attention to comparative evidence from the fifth and fourth centuries that suggests that the participation and influence of wealthy elite in Athens had significantly declined in the fourth century bce.Footnote ³⁸ In this context, we might look at Isocrates’ political discourses as aiming at popularizing his school among the upper-middle- and high-class Athenian citizens and, no less importantly, as attempts to cultivate their preparation for a political career.

If indeed there was a perception that the political elite had lost its influence and importance in Athenian politics, Isocrates’ discourses seem to suggest two things: first, by challenging Socrates as the fountainhead of contemporary philosophical schools that promote the pursuit of knowledge and truth in isolation from active day-to-day life in the city, Isocrates is drawing attention to the increased danger that this kind of philosophical education will turn Athenian leadership even more apathetic to contemporary politics and thus further reduce the influence of the elite and educated leadership in Athens. In other words, Athenian educated elite should look to Isocrates rather than Socrates for a proper guidance in reaching a truly accomplished civic life.Footnote ³⁹ Secondly, Athens in her complex political context of the fourth century bce cannot really afford to lose the voice of the educated (upper-class) Athenian and therefore other philosophical schools should be held to the task of preparing and advocating political careers for the educated (and wealthy) Athenians.Footnote ⁴⁰ Therefore, Isocrates’ challenge of Socrates as the paragon citizen and exemplary teacher of Athenians might not have been motivated simply by hopes for personal glory (though that should not be ruled out in the case of Isocrates), but was also – or even primarily – seen as a result of contemporary political necessity for anyone who cared for the future of the stability of the Athenian polis.