The Rhetoric of Identity in Isocrates: Text, Power, Pedagogy

This book offers a sustained interpretation of the Isocratean corpus, showing that rhetoric is a language which the author uses to create a political identity for himself in fourth-century Athens. Dr Too examines how Isocrates’ discourse addresses anxieties surrounding the written word in a democratic culture which values the spoken word as the privileged means of political expression. Isocrates makes written culture the basis for a revisionary Athenian politics and of a rhetoric of Athenian hegemony. In addition, Isocrates takes issue with the popular image of the professional teacher in the age of the sophist, combatting the negative stereotype of the greedy sophist who corrupts the city’s youth in his portrait of himself as teacher of rhetoric. He daringly reinterprets the pedagogue as a figure who produces a discourse which articulates political authority.