Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeos

The silence which surrounds the life of Isaeos, in contrast with the reputation of his work, has a meaning of its own. Dionysios, in setting forth those few and barren facts which the Augustan age could discover to his search, unconsciously indicates the chief cause of their scantiness. ‘I cannot tell, ’ he says, ‘what were the politics of Isaeos,—or whether he had any politics at all.’ Unlike Antiphon or Andokides, unlike even Lysias or Isokrates, Isaeos, so far as is known, had no definite relation, literary or active, with the affairs of Athens. Nothing could better illustrate the workings of that deep change which was passing over the life of Athens and of Greece. Half a century earlier, a citizen with the like powers could not have failed to find his place in the history of the city; and a resident who, like Lysias, did not possess the citizenship, would at least have left some evidence of his interest in Athenian or Panhellenic affairs, even if it had not been his fortune to impeach an Eratosthenes or to address the Greeks at Olympia. But, with the progressive divergence of Society from the State, the separation of the man from the citizen naturally expressed itself, not merely in apathy or in organized frivolity, but also, and with a graver meaning, in the clearer definition of all those pursuits which could be called professional. ‘Let the ekklesia be the care of the statesmen—my profession is to write for the courts’;—this is what the life of Isaeos, by the fact that it is almost hidden, declares.