7 ISSN 0258-0802. LITERATŪRA 2011 53 (3) Straipsniai REFERENCES TO ISOCRATES IN ARISTOTLE’S ART OF RHETORIC 1 Tomas Veteikis Lecturer of the Department of Classical Philology, Vilnius University The connection between Isocrates and Aristotle, two outstanding educators and rhetorical theorists of the 4 th century BCE Athens, is a matter of interesting long- lasting discussion dating back to Greco- Roman antiquity. There is an opinion, based on doxography and anecdotes (cf. Philodemus II, 50, 21 (Sudhaus), 1 Cic. De oratore III, 141, Quintilianus III, 1, 13–14), that Aristotle, after he had arrived to Athens in circa 367 BCE, irst attended the school of Isocrates, but later, under the priority of stylistics, moved to Academy and started his pedagogical career by giv- ing public lectures on rhetoric; on the basis of these lectures the dialogue Gryllus (ca. 362 BCE, now lost) emerged, in which he supposedly attacked Isocrates 2 . About ten years later (ca. 350 BCE), Aristotle wrote Protrepticus in defense of the Academic concept of philosophy as a response to the Isocratean view presented in Antido- sis 3 . Biographical data recorded in ancient 1 The article is prepared on the basis of my paper presented at the international workshop “Translating and interpreting Aristotle‘s Rhetoric”, held on April 28–29, 2011 at University of Tartu. 2 See, e.g., Keith V. Erickson, “The lost rhetorics of Aristotle”, Landmark Essays on Aristotelian Rhetoric, ed. Richard Leo Enos and Lois Peters Agnew, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998, 3–6. 3 Jakob Bernays, Die Dialoge des Aristoteles in ihrem Verhältniss zu seinen übrigen Werken (Berlin, sources testify their competitive rivalry and perhaps certain enmity to each other 4 . The latter assumption occupies even more attention in recent studies of early Greek rhetoric and education, focusing on the similarities and dissimilarities between educational programs, ethical and political views, attitude towards rhetoric and theory of style 5 . Both of them are credited origi- 1863), 116 sqq.; Anton-Hermann Chroust, “A brief ac- “A brief ac- A brief ac- count of the reconstruction of Aristotle’s Protrepticus”, Classical Philology, Vol. 60, No. 4, 1965 (October), 229, 238 n. 42; Brad McAdon, “Reconsidering the intention or Purpose of Aristotle’s Rhetoric”, Rhetoric Review, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2004, 220, 227. A more detailed com- parison of the two works (Protrepticus and Antidosis) is presented by Doug S. Hutchinson and Monte Ransome Johnson in their document intended as a component of the forthcoming edition of Aristotle’s Protrepticus “The Antidosis of Isocrates and Aristotle’s Protrepticus” pub- lished in the web: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v& pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B432Ae6vnCJNZ DU5OTMxZjQtZjkyZS00Y2RmLThlNDUtZTE2YTFj ZDgxMmY1&hl=en_US 4 Beside the Aristotelian dictum “it is shameful to be silent, while allowing Isocrates to speak”, there is one more frequently cited evidence concerning their rivalry in Numenius’ fragment (fr. 25 Places; Euseb. Praep. evang. XIV, 6, 9–10) which mentions Cephisodorus, a student of Isocrates, who made an attempt to attack Ar- istotle for his critique towards Isocrates, but instead at- tacked Plato with whom he didn’t wish to quarrel at all. 5 The early stage of the research of the dichotomy of the Isocratean and Aristotelian rhetorical tradition is briely relected in Friedrich Solmsen’s several times reissued article “The Aristotelian tradition in ancient rhetoric” (irst published in American Journal of Phi-