In the last period of his life, 351-338 B.C., Isocrates still continued to teach, and was also busily occupied in writing. He published the _Philippus_, which is one of his most important works, and one of the greatest in historical interest, in 346 B.C.; in 342 B.C. he began the lengthy _Panathenaicus_, which he had half finished when he was attacked by an illness, which made the work drag on for three years. It was finished in 339 B.C. In the following year, a few days after the battle of Chaeronea, he died. A report was current in antiquity that he committed suicide, by starving himself, in consequence of the news of this downfall of Greek liberty; the story is quite incredible when we consider that the result of the battle gave a possibility of the fulfilment of the hopes which Isocrates had been cherishing for half his life, the end to which he had been labouring for over forty years—the concentration of all power into the hands of one man, who might redeem Greece by giving her union and leading her to conquest in the East. His last letter, in fact, written after the battle of Chaeronea, congratulates Philip on his victory; and even if this letter is spurious, the probability, to judge from the tone of his earlier works, is that he would have hailed the Macedonian success as a victory for his imperial ideas. § 2. _Style_ Though Isocrates composed, in his youth, a few forensic speeches, it is not by such compositions that he must be judged; indeed he himself, far from claiming credit for his activity in that direction, in later life adopted an apologetic tone when speaking of his earlier work. As a teacher of rhetoric he won great renown, numbering, as he boasts, even kings among his pupils; and he had a complete mastery of all the technique of the rhetorical art. He was also a master of style, having theories of composition which he exemplified in practice with such skill that he must occupy a prominent place in any treatise on the development of Greek prose.