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Philosophy,For “philosophy” in Isocrates see General Introd. p. xxvi, and Cicero’s definition, De orat. iii. 16, “omnis rerum optimarum cognitio, atque in iis exercitatio, philosophia.” moreover, which has helped to discover and establish all these institutions, which has educated us for public affairs and made us gentle towards each other, which has distinguished between the misfortunes that are due to ignorance and those which spring from necessity, and taught us to guard against the former and to bear the latter nobly—philosophy, I say, was given to the world by our city. And Athens it is that has honored eloquence,Cf. Isoc. 15.295-296; Plat. Laws 641e; and Milton: “mother of arts and eloquence.”
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which all men crave and envy in its possessors; for she realized that this is the one endowment of our nature which singles us out from all living creatures, and that by using this advantage we have risen above them in all other respects as well;For the power and function of λόγος see Isoc. 3.5-9; Isoc. 15.273; Xen. Mem. 4.3. she saw that in other activities the fortunes of life are so capricious that in them often the wise fail and the foolish succeed, whereas beautiful and artistic speech is never allotted to ordinary men, but is the work of an intelligent mind,
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and that it is in this respect that those who are accounted wise and ignorant present the strongest contrast; and she knew, furthermore, that whether men have been liberally educated from their earliest years is not to be determined by their courage or their wealth or such advantages, but is made manifest most of all by their speech, and that this has proved itself to be the surest sign of culture in every one of us, and that those who are skilled in speech are not only men of power in their own cities but are also held in honor in other states.
