Isocrates: at the beginnings of the rhetorical ideal of education

In the second quarter of the 4th century Plato and Isocrates worked out two models of paideia meaning the education of a free man, organization of the development of his merits on the basis of culture comprehension. They grounded two humanistic (as Cicero stated) educational ideals. These educational ideals, traditionally meant as philosophical (Plato) and rhetorical (Isocrates), laid special stress on the development of the human mind. The difference between them is that the philosophical ideal aimed at forming conditions for understanding the highest truth by the man and the highest truth was understood as the basis of any knowledge and as the basis of the true morals, while the rhetoric ideal aimed at forming the ability to live in the world of human opinions by following the principles of worldly morality and being able to build relationships with people around you. Plato thought the main tool of intellectual education to be mathematics, while Isocrates considered it a word. Isocrates’ paideia aimed at making “human souls more rational, and their bodies more capable of acting”, it aimed at “bringing students to the condition when they are better than they used to be by educating and teaching them”. Isocrates was sure that “one mustn’t and shouldn’t teach somebody to speak well without teaching him to live properly. The essence of a word is inseparable from its verbal expression. And therefore there is a correlation between an idea and a word”. Isocrates’ rhetoric ideal of education was based on the wide classical culture, on the widely understood philosophy. Isocrates accentuated on the necessity of wide literary education filled with deep moral content, on the necessity of studying the glorious historic past of the Polis and its laws. Besides, he corroborated the reasonability of studying other sciences and arts.