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When Isocrates was come to man’s estate, he meddled with nothing of state affairs, both because he had a very weak voice and because he was something timorous; and besides these two impediments, his estate was much impaired by the loss of a great part of his patrimony in the war with the Lacedaemonians. It is evident that he composed orations for others to use, but delivered only one, that concerning Exchange of Property. Having set up a school, he gave himself much to writing and the study of philosophy, and then he wrote his Panegyrical oration, and others which were used for advice, some of which he delivered himself, and others he gave to others to pronounce for him; aiming thereby to persuade the Greeks to the study and practice of such things as were of most immediate concern to them. But his endeavors in that way proving to no purpose, he gave those things over, and opened a school in Chios first, as some will have it, having for a beginning nine scholars; and when they came to him to pay him for their schooling, he weeping said, Now I see plainly that I am sold to my scholars. He admitted all into his acquaintance who desired it. He was the first that made a separation between wrangling pleas and political arguments, to which latter he rather addicted himself. He instituted a form of magistracy in Chios, much the same with that at Athens. No schoolmaster ever got so much; so that he maintained a galley at his own charge. He had more than a hundred scholars, and among others Timotheus the son of Conon was one, with whom he visited many cities, and composed the epistles which Timotheus sent to the Athenians; who for his pains gave him a talent out of that which he got at Samos. Theopompus likewise the Chian, Ephorus the Cumaean, Asclepiades who composed arguments for tragedies, and Theodectes of Phaselis, who afterwards wrote tragedies, were all Isocrates’s scholars. The last of these had a monument in the way to the shrine of Cyamites, as we go to Eleusis by the Sacred Way, of which now remains only rubbish. There also he set up with his own the statues of other famous poets, of all which only Homer’s is to be seen. Leodamas also the Athenian, and Lacritus who gave laws to the Athenians, were both his scholars; and some say, Hyperides and Isaeus too. They add likewise, that Demosthenes also was very desirous to learn of him, and because he could not give the full rate, which was a thousand drachms, he offered him two hundred, the fifth part, if he would teach him but the fifth part of his art proportionable: to whom Isocrates answered, We do not use, Demosthenes, to impart our skill by halves, but as men sell good fish whole, or altogether, so if thou hast a desire to learn, we will teach thee our full art, and not a piece of it. He died in the year when Charondas was chief magistrate,B.C. 338. when, being at Hippocrates’s public exercise, he received the news of the slaughter at Chaeronea; for he was the cause of his own death by a four days’ fast, which he then made, pronouncing just at his departure the three verses which begin three tragedies of Euripides Danaus, father of the fifty sisters,— Pelops, son of Tantalus, in quest of Pisa,— Cadmus, in time past, going from Sidon.
