_For Euphiletus_ (Or. xii.), a considerable fragment preserved by Dionysius, is the only specimen that we possess of a speech not connected with a will-case. It refers to an appeal by Euphiletus to a law-court against the decision of his fellow demes-men, who have struck him off the roll. The remaining fragments are hardly important except in so far as they provide us with the names of several lost speeches. One of them (frag. 23) contains several sentences repeated verbally from Or. viii. (_Ciron_), § 28. The fragment of the speech _For Eumathes_, preserved by Dionysius, has been referred to above (p. 118). CHAPTER VI ISOCRATES § 1. _Life_ Isocrates was born in 436 B.C., and lived to the remarkable age of ninety-seven in full possession of his faculties. His childhood and youth were passed amid the horrors of the Peloponnesian War; he was already of age when the failure of the Sicilian expedition turned the scale against Athens. In mature manhood he saw the ruin of his city by the capitulation to Lysander. He lived through the Spartan supremacy, saw the foundation of the new Athenian League in 378 B.C., and the rise and fall of the power of Thebes. At the time when Philip obtained the throne of Macedon he was already, by ordinary reckoning, an old man, but the laws of mortality were suspended in the case of this Athenian Nestor. Some of his most important works were composed after his eightieth year; the _Philippus_, which he wrote at the age of ninety, shows no diminution of his powers; he produced one of his longest works, the _Panathenaicus_, in his ninety-seventh year, and lived to congratulate Philip on his victory at Chaeronea in 338 B.C. In a life of such extent and such remarkable variety of experience we should expect to find many changes of outlook and modifications, from time to time, of earlier views. But Isocrates was a man of singularly fixed ideas. With regard to education, he formulated in the discourse against the Sophists (391 B.C.) views which are practically identical with what he expressed nearly forty years later in the _Antidosis_, views which he maintains in his last work of all, the _Panathenaicus_ (339 B.C.). With regard to Greek politics, he held till the close of his life the opinions propounded in the _Panegyricus_ of 380 B.C. His aims were unchanged, though of necessity he modified the means by which he hoped to carry them out. We have little information about the orator’s early life. He tells us himself that his patrimony was dissipated by the Peloponnesian War,[181] so that he was forced to adopt a profession to make a living.