United States or Grenada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
For in the last page of the Phaedrus, we find Socrates thus expressing himself; 'Now, indeed, my dear Phaedrus, said he, 'Isocrates is but a youth: but I will discover to you what I think of him. 'And what is that? replied the other. 'He appears to me, said the Philosopher, 'to have too elevated a genius to be placed on a level with the arid speeches of Lysias.
The "old man eloquent" is Isocrates, the Athenian orator, whose patriotism made him refuse to survive the defeat of the Athenians and Thebans by Philip of Macedon at Chaeroncia, This comparison of the lady's father to the famous Greek is perhaps the most poetical turn in the Sonnet. For the rest, it tells us something about the lady herself.
Plato, in his latest work, the 'Laws, wishes his model city to be not too near the sea, the proximity of which 'fills the streets with merchants and shopkeepers, and begets dishonesty in the souls of men. On the other side Isocrates, the most far-seeing of Athenian politicians, realised that the day of small city-states was over, and that the limited, 'self-sufficient' community would not long maintain its independence.
The same is true of his oratorical authorship; he ridiculed Isocrates, but he tried to learn from Thucydides and Demosthenes. His encyclopaedia is essentially the result of his study of Greek literature.
Shiel's speech in Kent was a fine oration; and the boobies who taunted him for having got it by rote, were not aware that in doing so he only wisely followed the example of Pericles, Demosthenes, Lysias, Isocrates, Hortensius, Cicero, Cæsar, and every great orator of antiquity.
"The whole of life, O Socrates," said Glauco, "is, with the wise the measure of hearing such discourses as these." What a price he sets on the feats of talent, on the powers of Pericles, of Isocrates, of Parmenides! What price, above price on the talents themselves! He called the several faculties, gods, in his beautiful personation.
So let Isocrates, the 'old man eloquent, let a many-worded not unpeculant patriotic Demosthenes who knew nothing of the God-world attend to an Athens wherein the Gods were no longer greatly interested; the great Star Plato should rise up into mid-heaven, and shine not in, but high over Athens and quite apart from her; drawing from her indeed the external elements of his culture, but the light and substance from that which was potent in her no longer.
Isocrates, the senior contemporary of Aristotle, says that the Carthaginians had an oligarchical government at home, but a monarchical government in the field; and thus the office of the Carthaginian general may be correctly described by Roman writers as a dictatorship, although the gerusiasts attached to him must have practically at least restricted his power and, after he had laid down his office, a regular official reckoning unknown among the Romans awaited him.
Or Isocrates, that was so cowhearted that he dared never attempt it?
For there is a deep philosophy implanted by nature in this man's mind." This was the augury which Socrates forms of him while a young man. But Plato writes it of him when he has become an old man, and when he is his contemporary, and a sort of attacker of all the rhetoricians. And Isocrates is the only one whom he admires.
Word Of The Day