Abstract

This dissertation reconstructs the politics of the fourth-century B.C. scholastic circles formed by Plato and Isocrates without reducing intellectuals' specialized interests in politics to conventional factional allegiance. This field, whose import has not been previously recognized, had its own subgroups, audiences, internal politics, and affiliations with the larger political scene. ;I first explore Plato and Isocrates' efforts to create a discourse and social space wherein political questions could be given specifically philosophical answers. When in Crito and Euthyphro Plato grappled with the profoundly irrational basis of human social life , he announced a central concern with the practicalities through which human beings are created, nurtured, and fulfilled as civic creatures that would endure throughout his career. Isocrates offered an education culminating in intuitively responsive political instincts, but he insisted that these be redefined on a foundation of systematic knowledge, and his students, like Plato's, became intellectuals more often than politicians. Plato, in a tribute to his fellow scholarch at the end of Phaedrus, recognized that the Isocratean movement was related to his own in its political import, namely, its potential to sculpt "philosophical" speech in the irrational medium of political life. ;I further explain how Plato and Isocrates' students, still joined to each other through contacts, conspiracies, and conversations of all kinds, later found themselves in fierce competition to have their prestige as intellectuals recognized in the wider arena of status that now focused on the Macedonian court. For example, Plato's successor Speusippus addressed to Philip a vicious attack on Isocrates and his student Theopompus, who was countering Platonic influence at court; meanwhile Theopompus in his own Letter to Philip waged a campaign against Aristotle's friend Hermias and his circle of Platonizers. The remarkable continuity of the scholastic structures created by Plato and Isocrates allows us better to appreciate both the political nature of the original schools during the lives of their founders, and the unlikely place of later-fourth-century polemicists in the history of philosophy, raising new questions about how ancient Greek intellectuals' specialized field of activity fit into the larger fabric of the life of the community