24
But neither would anyone, I am sure, advise me to neglect this subject and, breaking off in the midst of it, to go on and finish the discourse which I elected to write in my desire to prove that our city had been the cause of more blessings to the Hellenes than the city of the Lacedaemonians. For if I should now proceed to do this without bringing what I have written to any conclusion and without joining the beginning of what is to be said to the end of what has been spoken, I should be thought to be no better than those who speak in a random, slovenly, and scattering manner whatever comes into their heads to say. And this I must guard against.
25
The best course, therefore, that I can take under all these conditions is to set before you what I think about the last attemptsObviously he resents bitterly some attack upon him in recent years. Possibly it came from the “Eristics,” to the value of whose teaching he makes a condescending concession in Isoc. 12.26. These are not the “Eristics” mentioned in Against the Sophists (see Isoc. 13.1-8 and notes), who belong to an earlier period, but those referred to in Isoc. 15.258 and Isoc. Letter 5.3 ff.—namely Aristotle and his followers who had been hard on Isocrates (see Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit ii. p. 65). This is supported by the fact that the critics here referred to frequented the Lyceum. Blass, however (ii. pp. 68, 69), thinks that Isocrates has here in mind especially Speusippus. to arouse prejudice against me and then proceed to speak on the subject which I had in mind from the first. For I think that if I succeed by my writing in bringing out and making clear what my views are about education and about the poets, I shall stop my enemies from fabricating false charges and speaking utterly at random.