To some extent only: for Isocrates, at least in so far as we possess his work, is a rhetorician on the applied sides, which commended themselves so especially to the Greeks, not on the pure side. The legend of his death, at least, fits the political interests of his life; his rhetoric is mostly judicial rhetoric; little as he is of a philosopher, he attacks the sophists as philosophers were in duty bound to do. His purely literary allusions (and they are little more) have a touch of that amusing, that slightly irritating, that wholly important and characteristic patronage and disdain which meets us throughout this period. He was at least believed to have written a formal _Rhetoric_, but it is doubtful whether we should find much purely literary criticism in it if we had it. His own style, if not exactly gaudy, is pretentious and artificial: we can hardly say that the somewhat vaguely favourable prophecy which Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates about him at the end of the _Phædrus_ was very conspicuously fulfilled. And his critical impulses cannot have been very imperative, seeing that though he lived till nearly a hundred, he never found the “happy moment”[32] to write about poetry spoken of in the 12th section of the Panathenaic with a scornful reference to those who “rhapsodised and chattered” in the Lyceum about Homer and Hesiod and other poets. Most of his actual literary references are, as usual, ethical, not literary. In the 12th and 13th section of the oration-epistle to Nicocles[33] he upbraids mankind for praising Hesiod and Theognis and Phocylides as admirable counsellors in life, but preferring to hear the most trumpery of comedies; and himself declares Homer[34] and the great tragic masters worthy of admiration because of their mastery of human nature. In the _Busiris_[35] he takes quite a Platonic tone about the blasphemies of poets against the gods. There is, indeed, a curious and interesting passage in the _Evagoras_[36] about the difficulties of panegyric in prose, and the advantages possessed by verse-writers. They have greater liberty of handling their subject; they may use new words and foreign words and metaphors; they can bewitch the soul with rhythm and metre till even bad diction and thought pass unnoticed. For if (says the rhetor naïvely enough) you leave the most celebrated poets their words and meaning, but strip them of their metre, they will cut a much shabbier figure than they do now. But this does not take us very far, and with Isocrates we get no further. Footnote 32: εὐκαιρίαν. Ed. Benseler (Leipsic, 1877), ii. 21. Footnote 33: Ibid., i. 23. Footnote 34: Ibid., i. 24. Footnote 35: Section 16. Ibid., ii. 9, 10. Footnote 36: Section 3. Ibid., i. 207, 208.