The controversies and contests of the Isocratean period left their mark, directly and indirectly, on later European culture. In the immediate, Hellenistic, wake of this period, we may well wonder whether the names “Isocrates,” “Plato,” and “Aristotle” still carried with them traces of their significance in the highly interested struggles—sometimes collaborative, sometimes polemical—of earlier fourth-century intellectuals. For how many Hellenistic Greek readers and writers (or adherents of schools with their own positions on these debates) did these contentious texts complicate the reception of Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates as mere literary or philosophical classics, as they did for the later authors who conveyed their titles and concerns to us, and so provided the evidence for much of the present study?

Rhetorical and philosophical paideia continued to help define the horizons of intellectual, literary, and political culture. Cicero defined the philosophical inheritance in terms of eloquence, necessitating an important place for Isocrates. This same framework can be applied before and after his time, in antiquity and beyond, yielding a partial but compelling vision of the practical wisdom tradition. By way of conclusion I will make this point by assaying the remarkable vitality of the Isocratean project in the Renaissance. This follows naturally from the previous chapter’s exploration of the dynamics of Isocrates’ princely addresses, a field in which we can see the reception of Isocrates in his truest colors, in an area where he was comfortably preeminent. Isocrates’ easy acceptance among Renaissance writers can remind us that the same urgent issues of the fourth century BC that dominated Isocrates’ career and defined his claim to be in the mainstream of “philosophy”—virtuous self-formation and public political performance—were perennially relevant through later antiquity and beyond. Even when the anxiety about this courtly doctrine’s place vis-à-vis “pure philosophy” returns—as in one of Isocrates’ most attentive students, Castiglione—it is against the backdrop of an essentially Isocratean model of political culture.

Isocrates’ princely didactics became newly interesting to the generation of Erasmus (The Education of a Christian Prince, or Institutio principis christiani, 1516), Machiavelli (The Prince, 1513, published 1532), and Castiglione (The Book of the Courtier, 1528). Erasmus had presented his Latin translation of Plutarch’s How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend in manuscript to Henry VIII of England in 1513. [1] From this area of attention grew The Education of a Christian Prince, published in Basel in 1516, dedicated to the future Holy Roman emperor Charles V, and bound together with an expanded set of four appropriate Plutarchan essays [2] and a reprint of Erasmus’ Panegyricus to Archduke Philip of Austria. Completing the volume, and placed at its opening, was a Latin translation of Isocrates’ To Nicocles (Isocratis praecepta de regno administrando ad Nicoclem regem). Thus the book was a compendium of ancient and modern truth-telling to princes and a reassertion of the venerable genre of the mirror for princes, or speculum principis, with Isocrates at its head. [3] Erasmus’ dedicatory letter makes clear the close connection between the privileged ancient work and its modern counterpart: “We have presented Isocrates’ precepts on administering a kingdom, in emulation with which we have added our own.” [4] The whole stood as “a manifesto for the crucial role of a ‘philosopher’ (or professional educator) in the administration of a properly run state,” a role to be closely identified with the capacities of Erasmus himself. [5]

When Erasmus’ volume was published, Machiavelli had composed The Prince but had likely not yet written its dedication to Lorenzo II de’ Medici. [6] Although To Nicocles and some other Isocratean works had been known in Latin before this time, [7] Erasmus’ modern and Christian contribution to the genre in rivalry with the pagan classic gave it a heightened relevance to Machiavelli’s project, and it is notable that the dedication is the most certain and conspicuous locus in The Prince of Isocratean imitation. [8] The opening words of To Nicocles set a model that Machiavelli will follow closely in his dedication:

To Nicocles 1f. (trans. Mirhady and Too 2000)

It is a frequent custom for those who seek the favor of a prince to make him presents of those things they value most highly or which they know are most pleasing to him. Hence one often sees gifts consisting of horses, weapons, cloth of gold, precious stones, and similar ornaments suitable for men of noble rank. I too would like to commend myself to Your Magnificence with some token of my readiness to serve you; and I have not found among my belongings anything I prize so much or value so highly as my knowledge of the actions of great men, acquired through long experience of contemporary affairs and extended reading in antiquity.

Machiavelli, The Prince, dedicatory epistle (trans. Robert M. Adams)

Isocrates’ confidence in the princely-didactic role, which never left him, stands out in clear relief against the exile’s humbler assertion of his doctrine’s value. The verbal echoes are close and striking. Both authors begin their texts by contrasting their own approach to the prince with the courtiers’ being “accustomed” to offer costly but superficial gifts. [10] Both declare their own most precious gift to be their authoritative judgment (“define,” “knowledge”) about kingly “actions” or “activities.” [11] Machiavelli also sounds an Isocratean note in his defense of his book’s unornamented style:

This work of mine I have not adorned or loaded down with swelling phrases or with bombastic and magnificent words or any kind of meretricious charm or extrinsic ornament, with which many writers dress up their products, because I desire either that nothing shall beautify it, or that merely its unusual matter and the weight of its subject shall make it pleasing.

dedicatory epistle (trans. Allan Gilbert)

Here Machiavelli is less apologetic for the severity of his style than Isocrates (who blames his old age). Burd, despite his caution and general rejection of arguments for Machiavelli’s unproven knowledge of Greek, accepted this as an imitation of Isocrates’ Philip 27f., [12] a work not known to have existed in Latin translation until Lonicer’s Orationes (1529). I was independently struck by the resemblance in thought between Machiavelli’s words and this passage. [13] Isocrates makes the same points in the same order as Machiavelli: no measured cadences or richly embroidered surface (eurhuthmiais kai poikiliais kekosmēkamen), despite the gratifying effects of such devices in the hands of those who learned them from the younger Isocrates (tous logous hēdious an … poioien), but rather a strict attention to the facts (praxeis) worthy of his royal addressee’s attention. When Machiavelli goes on to excuse the presumption of his laying down rules for princes (presunzione se un uomo di basso ed infimo stato ardisce discorrere e regolare i governi dei principi), he perhaps echoes Erasmus’ preemptive answer to charges of fawning or impertinence (adulationis vel procacitatis) on the grounds of his sixteen-year-old dedicatee’s youth and relative inexperience (admodum adolescens, et nuper inauguratus imperio), and both are grappling with the problems of princely didactics on which they could take so many lessons from Isocrates: the pitfalls and vulnerabilities of such speech, set against its nobility and high opportunities.

In Castiglione’s seminal dialogue on Renaissance courtliness, The Book of the Courtier, the prince’s subordinate attendants have come into their own: their teaching of princes is of interest, but their fashioning of themselves is of no less interest, and this process of courtly self-realization, self-empowerment, [14] and performance is at the center of the Courtier (though, just as oratory was no “ordered art” for Isocrates, Castiglione too denies that courtliness could be taught through precepts [15] ). Castiglione’s attention to abito (Latin habitus) also depends upon the idea of virtue as a state (hexis, habitus) in Aristotle’s ethics, so that some of the connections I have suggested between Isocrates and Aristotle in chapter 1 may have seemed evident to him. While Castiglione certainly took great interest in the publication of Erasmus’ 1516 collection and paraphrased the Education of a Christian Prince and the accompanying Plutarchan essays at several points as he developed the 1513–1516 draft version of the Courtier into its finished form, [16] it seems likely that Castiglione had also encountered Isocrates in the original Greek on more intimate terms.

Castiglione’s father Cristoforo’s library (largely bequeathed to his son [17] ) had been overwhelmingly devoted to the Greek and Latin classics, and he sent his son in 1494 to Milan to be given an education in Latin and Greek by the eminent humanists Giorgio Merula and Demetrius Chalcondyles. [18] Chalcondyles’ editio princeps of Isocrates had just been published in 1493. Evidence from Baldassare Castiglione’s library, which focused on Latin and Greek to the exclusion of vernacular literature, indicates that he “probably continued to keep up and improve his [Greek] reading skills until the end of his life” with an assiduity “by no means common, even among men of letters.” [19] Isocrates, then, may well have had a significant place in Castiglione’s childhood education and lifelong study, and is one of the possible backgrounds for the courtier’s education and performance in the Cortegiano.

Why, though, should the school of Isocrates serve Castiglione as the type of the court of Urbino? The true answer must be sought in the Isocratean coloration in Castiglione’s picture of the ideal courtier as “his prince’s instructor” (IV 47), a major topic of the final book he has introduced with the Isocratean Trojan horse. [22] When Castiglione constructs Plato and Aristotle as “courtiers,” he may be combining his direct knowledge of Isocrates (whose texts provided a far clearer example of courtly address than anything to be found in the works of Plato and Aristotle) with the same Ciceronian testimony I have made use of for its striking picture of a confrontation between Isocrates and Aristotle around the intersection of eloquence and wisdom. Castiglione, for whom Isocrates was no cipher, would have been better equipped than many to read Cicero deeply in this way.

Castiglione paid close attention to Isocrates’ remarks in To Nicocles about the monarch’s difficulty in gaining the benefit of his subjects’ frank speech (parrhēsia). Ottaviano announces the princely-didactic subject of book IV by insisting that “the aim of the perfect Courtier” is to seek the truth without fear of the prince’s displeasure and “when he sees the mind of his prince inclined to a wrong action … to oppose him and in a gentle manner avail himself of the favor acquired by his good accomplishments” (IV 5). [23] This topic draws inspiration from the proem to To Nicocles (specifically, from the passage that immediately follows the opening quoted as the model of Machiavelli’s dedication). The imitation is most closely literal in Ottaviano’s statement of the problem that “among their friends there are few who have free access to them, and those few are wary of reprehending them for their faults as freely as they would private persons, and, in order to win grace and favor often think of nothing save how to suggest things that can delight or please their fancy” (IV 6). This is directly modeled on Isocrates’ assertion that “The majority of people do not come near them [=turannoi], and those who do have intercourse with them do so with a view to winning favor” (οἱ μὲν γὰρ πλεῖστοι τῶν ἀνθρώπων αὐτοῖς οὐ πλησιάζουσιν, οἱ δὲ συνόντες πρὸς χάριν ὁμιλοῦσιν, To Nicocles 4). [24] Of course, in each case the speaker has the ready solution to this difficulty: not only that the courtier, in the mold of Isocrates, stand fearlessly ready to use his authority in service of the truth, [25] but also that the prince submit graciously to instruction. As Isocrates proceeds to elaborate upon the tasks and qualities that belong to the ruler, so Ottaviano continues to diagnose the fault of princes who in their erroneous efforts to establish their authority render themselves unable to be schooled (IV 7).

From this beginning, book IV of the Courtier leads up to Ottaviano’s conclusion that “we might perhaps say that to become his prince’s instructor was the goal of the Courtier” (IV 47). This is supported with copious ancient exempla derived from Cicero’s De oratore on the marriage of oratory and philosophy, as for example Phoenix’s job of making Achilles a “speaker of words and a doer of deeds” (Iliad 9.443 in De oratore 3.57). [26] For Cicero this leads towards the example of Aristotle as Isocrates’ rival and model of wisdom-cum-eloquence (3.141), which we have considered at length. This must be in Castiglione’s mind as Ottaviano continues, “Nor do I think that Aristotle and Plato would have scorned the name of perfect Courtier, for we clearly see that they performed the works of Courtiership to this same end—the one with Alexander the Great, the other with the Kings of Sicily” (IV 47, cf. I 25). [27] These examples are in De oratore 3.139–141, together with Isocrates as the teacher of Timotheus. Given the suppression of Isocrates’ name where it was clearly in focus in the Trojan Horse simile, Castiglione’s omission of Isocrates here may be part of a pattern. [28] Yet despite Castiglione’s deployment of the superior prestige of philosophy at this point, [29] it is hard not to notice how Isocrates’ addressees—Timotheus in Epistle 7 [30] or Philip in Philip—serve so much more concretely and effectively as examples of the essence of the courtier as Castiglione is defining it. There is perhaps a hint of the mismatch between Aristotelian philosophy (as ordinarily and less imaginatively known to Castiglione and to us) and perfect courtliness in the counterexample of Callisthenes:

And Aristotle was the author of these deeds of Alexander, employing the methods of a good Courtier: which is something that Callisthenes did not know how to do, even though Aristotle showed him; for he wished to be a pure philosopher and an austere minister of naked truth, without blending in Courtiership; and he lost his life and brought infamy instead of help to Alexander.

Courtier IV 47

The same could not be said of those students who issued forth from Isocrates’ Trojan horse! Looking just below the surface, we find Castiglione celebrating the Ciceronian (and Isocratean) idea of the unity of rhetoric and philosophy, as he inquires into human matters whose truths cannot be had by dividing the two.

In the following generation, Isocrates’ relevance to the modern world was discovered in England, in terms largely dependent on these European appropriations. [31] Sir Thomas Elyot had already alluded to To Nicocles in his Boke named the Governour (as I have quoted for an epigraph in the previous chapter [32] ), and he translated this Isocratean work in its entirety and published it as The Doctrinall of Princis in 1533. Castiglione also became popular in sixteenth-century England, both through Sir Thomas Hoby’s English translation of 1561 and through Bartholomew Clerke’s Latin translation, commissioned by Thomas Sackville (De Curiali sive Aulico, 1571).

In a 1550 letter to Johannes Sturm, Roger Ascham reports that he has served as Queen Elizabeth’s tutor in Greek and Latin for the previous two years. Isocrates not only occupies a leading position in the queen’s studies but does so because of his relevance to her royal responsibilities: “She used to give the morning of the day to the Greek Testament, and afterwards read select orations of Isocrates and the tragedies of Sophocles. For I thought that from these sources she might gain purity of style, and her mind derive instruction that would be of value to her to meet every contingency of life.” [33] Ascham’s The Schoolmaster gives further information about how Elizabeth would have engaged in double translation from Greek to Latin and back into Greek, a method whose success she proves: [34]

And a better and nearer example herein may be our most noble Queen Elizabeth, who never took yet Greek nor Latin Grammar in her hand after the first declining of a noun and a verb, but only by this double translating of Demosthenes and Isocrates daily without missing every forenoon, and likewise some part of Tully every afternoon, for the space of a year or two, has attained to such a perfect understanding in both the tongues, and to such a ready utterance of the Latin and that with such a judgement as they be few in number in both the universities, or elsewhere in England, that be in both tongues comparable with her Majesty. And to conclude in a short room, the commodities of double translation …

The historian John Bale’s catalogue, contemporary with Elizabeth, recorded the Latin incipits of translations in the queen’s hand of both To Nicocles and Nicocles. [35]