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He died in the archonship of Chaerondas338-337 b.c. after hearing in the palaestra of Hippocrates the news of the battle of Chaeroneia;This popular story of Isocrates’ death is given also by Lucian (?), Macrobioi 23, Pausanias, i. 18. 8, and Plutarch, 838 below. It is made famous by Milton in his tenth sonnet: as that dishonest victory At Chaeronea, fatal to liberty, Killed by report that old man eloquent But Isocrates himself, at the end of his third letter, writes to Philip: But I am grateful to old age for this thing only, that it has continued my life to this point, so that of the things which I meditated in my youth and undertook to write in my Panegyric Oration and in that which I sent to you, I now see some being accomplished through your deeds and hope that others will be accomplished. Apparently he was well pleased with Philip’s success. See Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit, 2nd ed., ii. p. 97. and he removed himself from life by abstaining from food for four days. Just before the end he declaimed the opening lines of three dramas of Euripides: Danaüs of fifty daughters fair the sire,From the Archelaüs; Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. p. 427, no. 228. Pelops the Tantalid to Pisa came, Iphigeneia in Tauris, 1. Once Sidon’s city Cadmus having left.From the Phrixus; Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. p. 627, no. 819. Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit, 2nd ed., ii. p. 97, thinks these lines enumerate three intrusions of foreigners into Greece. The fourth - not mentioned - would then be that of the Macedonians under Philip. He died at the age of ninety-eight or, as some say, one hundred years, for he could not endure the sight of Greece enslaved four times.Under the Athenian empire in the fifth century, by the Spartans after the Peloponnesian War, by the Thebans under Epameinondas, and by the Macedonians. All these Isocrates himself had seen. But see note d above. A year (or, as some say, four years) before his end he wrote the Panathenaic Oration;In L.C.L. Isocrates, vol. ii. pp. 368 ff. and for the composition of the Festival Oration he took ten (but some say fifteen) years. This, they say, he derived from the speeches of Gorgias of Leontini and Lysias. The speech on the Exchange of Property Ibid. pp. 181 ff. If anyone proposed that a certain man be obliged to perform one of the liturgies which were required of wealthy Athenians, the man of whom this was required could challenge the proposer to an exchange of properties, which might transfer the obligation. he wrote at the age of eighty-two years, and those against Philip shortly before his death. When he was an old man he adopted Aphareus, the youngest of the three sons of Plathanê, daughter of the orator Hippias. He acquired ample wealth, for he not only collected money from his pupils, but he also received from Nicocles, king of Cyprus, who was the son of Evagoras, twenty talents for the oration written in his honour. On account of his wealth he was envied and was proposed three times as trierarch. Twice he alleged illness and was exempted by petitions presented by his son, but the third time he undertook the duty and spent no small sum. To a father who said that he gave his son only a slave as companion he said, Go your ways, then, for you will have two slaves instead of one. He took part also in the competition offered by Artemisia in honour of Maussolus,Mausolus, ruler of Halicarnassus, died in 353 b.c. His widow, Artemisia, caused eulogies to be written in competition by Greek orators and completed the magnificent tomb which he had, apparently, begun. This magnificent building - the Mausoleum - was designed by Greek architects and decorated by famous Greek sculptors. The remains of the sculpture include portrait statues of Maussolus and Artemisia and are among the most highly prized possessions of the British Museum. but his Eulogy is not extant. He wrote also a Eulogy of Helen and a speech called the Areopagitic. He departed this life some say on the ninth day of his abstention from food, others on the fourth day at the time of the funeral of those who fell at Chaeroneia. His son Aphareus also wrote speeches. Isocrates was buried with his family near CynosargesCynosarges was a region in Athens in which was a great gymnasium. on the left side of the hill-he himself, his father Theodorus, and his mother; and her sister Anaco, the orator’s aunt, and his adopted son Aphareus, and his cousin Socrates, son of Anaco Isocrates’ mother’s sister, and his brother Theodorus who had the same name as his father, and his grandsons, the sons of his adopted son Aphareus, Aphareus and his father Theodorus, and the latter’s wife Plathanê, mother of the adopted son Aphareus. And over them there were six tablets which do not now exist. On the monument of Isocrates himself was a column thirty cubits high, on which was a siren seven cubits high as a symbol; but this exists no longer. There was also a tablet near by with poets and his instructors on it, among whom was Gorgias gazing into an astrological sphere and Isocrates standing beside him. There is also a bronze statue of him, dedicated by Timotheüs, son of Conon, at Eleusis in front of the vestibule. It bears this inscription: Here to the goddesses twain Timotheüs giveth this statue Tribute to friend and to sage, image of Isocrates. It is a work of Leochares.
