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Updated: May 12, 2025
Yea furthermore, he did not only praise his own acts and deeds, but the orations also which he had written or pleaded, as if he should have contended against Isocrates, or Anaximenes, a master that taught rhetoric, and not to go about to reform the people of Rome. Which were both fierce and stout in arms, And fit to work their enemies harms.
Lysias, Thucydides, Plato, and Isocrates discover, all of them, the same partiality; which, though condemned by calm reason and reflection, appears so natural in the mind of man.
Such a verdict might have been taken as fatal for Wolf's scholarship and powers of criticism are acknowledged in spite of La Harpe, the French scholar and critic, who has named the Marcellus as a thing of excellence, comparing it with the eulogistic speeches of Isocrates.
His family influence enabled him to get an early introduction to public affairs, and he proceeded to train himself as a speaker, and a writer of speeches for others. He put himself under the teaching of a famous rhetorician, Iænus, and profited by the discourses of Plato and Isocrates then in the height of their fame.
It is true that Mill, between his fourth and eighth years, read in the original all Herodotus and a good part of Xenophon, Lucian, Isocrates, Diogenes Laertius, Plato, and the Annual Register, besides Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Miller, Mosheim, and other historians; while before the age of thirteen he had mastered the whole of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Sallust, Thucydides, Aristotle's Rhetoric and Logic, Tacitus, Juvenal, Quinctilian, parts of Ovid, Terence, Nepos, Cæsar, Livy, Lucretius, Cicero, Polybius, and many other authors, besides learning geometry, algebra, and the differential calculus.
He numbered among his pupils Isocrates, Lycurgus, Aristotle, and Demosthenes; and for eight years Alexander the Great was the pupil of Aristotle, while Demosthenes "Wielded at will that fierce Democratie, Shook the arsenal, and fulmined over Greece To Macedon, and Artaxerxes' throne."
This remark will be found to hold true, from the days of Lysias and Isocrates, of Plato and Aristotle, down to those of Plutarch and Epictetus, Suetonius, and Quintilian. To impose upon any man the necessity of teaching, year after year, in any particular branch of science seems in reality to be the most effectual method for rendering him completely master of it himself.
And let those men who are not fond of Isocrates allow me to remain in error in the company of Socrates and Plato. That then is a delightful kind of oratory, free, fluent, shrewd in its sentiments, sweet sounding in its periods, which is found in that demonstrative kind of speaking which we have mentioned.
Four minae were equal to thirteen pounds six shillings and eightpence; five minae to sixteen pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence. Something not less than the largest of those two sums, therefore, must at that time have been usually paid to the most eminent teachers at Athens. Isocrates himself demanded ten minae, or £ 33:6:8 from each scholar.
"Then," exclaimed Isocrates, "our young men did not waste their days in the gambling-house, nor with music-girls, nor in the assemblies, in which whole days are now consumed then did they shun the Agora, or, if they passed through its haunts, it was with modest and timorous forbearance then, to contradict an elder was a greater offence than nowadays to offend a parent then, not even a servant of honest repute would have been seen to eat or drink within a tavern!"
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