This chapter looks at approximately a millennium of ancient reception, from factors pertaining to the writing and early circulation of Gorgias to the commentary on the work by Olympiodorus in the sixth century of our era. The dialogue was not written for light-hearted entertainment but as a vehicle for serious philosophy. Early readers must have included Plato’s rival Isocrates, whose Against the Sophists criticizes material early in the work, while inspiring 519b-d. Aristotle made extensive use of it in the Rhetoric, but may have thought its ethics superceded. A range of allusions in the spurious Alcibiades II strongly suggests that Gorgias was well-known by the late fourth century. It was widely read thereafter, thanks to rhetoricians and grammarians. Commentaries emerged from the Platonist schools, from Taurus to Olympiodorus, and may be supplemented from other philosophic discussion. Dodds had a low regard for Olympiodorus, taking little account of the task faced by the Alexandrian commentator. Some examples show how this view caused him to overlook places where Olympiodorus’ offers assistance, or even to misreport what he says. I conclude with the value of studying the ancient reception for enhancing our view of Plato.

Chapter 3 analyzes freedom as doing “whatever one wishes” in fourth-century oratory. As several scholars have noted, doing “whatever one wishes” appears ambivalent in forensic speeches. They argue that, since Athens was not an anarchic state, extreme freedom could be glossed as a threat to sociopolitical stability. In contrast to prevailing scholarship, however, I argue that the most dominant principle, even in these texts, is the preservation of positive freedom as justification for the litigant’s position. While acting “however one wishes” may be presented as objectionable, the rhetoric of that assessment emphasizes who is doing “whatever they wish” and whom they affect by doing so. Bad characters, whether a criminals, oligarchs, or metics, can be rebuked as undeserving of positive freedom and abusing the power that attends it. The limitation of another citizen’s ability to do what he wishes can also condemn the action. Doing “what one wishes” is not a byword for antidemocratic action, but can have such a connotation because of the particular actors or victims of the actions. It is the misuse of the natural qualities of a citizen that leads to censure.

In 1981, when Nicole Loraux published The Invention of Athens, it still seemed possible to take Isocrates’s Panegyricus as evidence for the funeral oration because of his treatise’s explicit appropriation of this genre. At the time, Isocrates was seen as a simple pamphlet-writer, who reflected the popular morality of fourth-century Athens. Forty years later, however, Isocratesʼ ‘pamphlets’ are now seen as rhetorical declamations or even real philosophical works. This chapter reconsiders Isocrates’ relationship to the funeral oration in light of this new reading of his oeuvre. It demonstrates that Isocrates took a critical, if not hostile, stance towards the public funeral for the war dead. While he acknowledged myth’s value as a moral paradigm for contemporary politics, Isocrates repeatedly argued that history since the Persian Wars had all been a moral decline for both Athens and Sparta. Since the public funeral had always commemorated the Athenian war dead of this period, Isocrates described it as a display of Athens’s abject failure. While he did appropriate some aspects of the funeral oration for his own purposes, Isocrates’s breaking of the continuity between Athens’ mythical and historical exploits challenged a central contention of this prestigious genre.

The author checks the firmness of the foundations of the negative appraisal of the historian Ephorus. Topics include Ephorus’ Isocratean apprenticeship, the concept of rhetorical historiography, Ephorus and Diodorus, ancient judgements questioning Ephorus’ reliability as a historian, Ephorus’ ‘Cymocentrism’.

Fourth-century philosophy-aligned authors often present negative views of “sophistry” but more charitable views of those fifth-century individuals they call “Sophist” or include among “the Sophists.” This chapter attends to this often unacknowledged difference, giving evidence for it and offering several explanations. It reviews what fourth-century authors – Isocrates, Alcidamas, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle – said about the canonical fifth-century Sophists, Gorgias in particular but also Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, and Antiphon. It then assesses what they said about “sophistry,” which they usually presented atemporally, not specifically a phenomenon of a previous generation. Along the way, the chapter discusses how this later generation posited what is now seen as a “Sophistic movement,” the rise of a coherent group of paid teachers of rhetoric and civically valuable skills. Plato, long held responsible for this position, does play an important role, but for reasons connected to his dramatic presentation of Socrates.

In this opening chapter, I attempt to situate Plato’s philosophizing and literary production in its historical context. The evidence external to the dialogues that such an enterprise can rely on is either scrappy or suspect, or both. So what I offer here is a series of snapshots. They follow a chronological sequence, from Plato’s relationship with Socrates and the Athens that executed him; through his momentous first visit to Italy and Sicily and its impact on his thinking about politics and philosophy; to the founding of the Academy, Plato’s rivalry with Isocrates, and the birth of the theory of Forms; and ending with the worlds of the late dialogues.

Chapter 4 is primarily devoted to the influence of rhetoric on historiography. Here, too, the struggle for truth remains at the center, albeit in a dialectical relationship to the fictional, which Gorgias, the first great theoretician of rhetoric, was already aware of. Since the most important representatives of this new historiographical approach, Ephorus and Theopompus, have only survived in fragments, the first focus is on Isocrates, who was considered their teacher. His handling of history can be analyzed surprisingly clearly, and he shows a closeness to the rational-critical method, not least in his striving for truth and the awareness of the difficulties of searching for it. After a closer interpretation of the above-mentioned historians in this sense, the chapter treats another new tendency of historiography in the Hellenistic epoch. In the so-called tragic historiography, the representation of history again approaches the poetic. The striving for truth is now directed towards the most vivid representation of the real event, as if the recipient had been present at it.

The introduction offers a general background to, and a scholarly contextualization of, the ensuing investigation of the rhetorical tradition. By critically engaging with contemporary debates taking place around the concept of ‘tradition’, the Introduction sets the tone for the following examination of Lysias and Isocrates from Plato’s Phaedrus to the rhetorical writings of Dionysius of Halicarnassus.

Socrates presents particular challenges to reception studies for the obvious reason that he did not write anything and thus left no textual corpus for posterity to receive. It is instead his own body (corpus) that often becomes the focal point of reception. This chapter examines the reception of Socrates in the works of Isocrates. Unlike other Socratics who had direct access to Socrates and left careful portraits of the philosopher from a group of like-minded admirers, Isocrates offers an interesting insight into the way in which Socrates (both his physical presence and his turning into an imaginary model figure) was perceived to have shaped the cultural and philosophical landscape in Athens. Though sometimes also counted among Socrates’ admirers, this chapter argues that Isocrates’ works offer a fundamentally critical reflection on Socrates and his teacher role in Athens. This critical insight becomes a key motivation for Isocrates’ own work and there is indeed much at stake: according to Isocrates, Athens is need for a new teacher and philosopher figure (Isocrates himself) who would supplant the statuesque Socrates.

The first chapter of this book delineates the intellectual context in which Aristotle’s ideas on the concept of lexis developed, before focusing on his own definitions of the concept. The chapter is divided into four sections. The first threedeal with lexis in the works first of Plato,Isocrates and Aristotle respectively. The final section introduces the three levels into which lexis has been divided in this book.