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Isocrates

Isocrates

c. 436 BCE–c. 338 BCE · Athens

Isocrates (436 - 338 BCE) was an Athenian orator and teacher, counted among the canonical "Ten Attic Orators." Rather than speaking in the law courts or assembly himself, he ran an influential school and wrote polished essays and orations meant to be read, promoting a broad education in rhetoric as preparation for public life. He is also known for urging the often-warring Greek city-states to unite, and his ideas shaped both ancient education and later notions of the well-rounded citizen.

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Stop 1 of 1436 BCE–338 BCETaught

AthensAttica (Greece)

What they did here

Ran an influential school of rhetoric in Athens.

About Athens

The intellectual capital of the Greek world, where Socrates questioned in the agora and four great schools—Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa, and Epicurus' Garden—took root within a single square mile.

In Athens at the same time

Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Herodotus, Gorgias of Leontini, Euripides, Antiphon

See other sages who lived in Athens→

In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Isocrates’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Isocrates’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(30)