Since Isocrates gives a lot of unsolicited advice, his speeches often start with a kind of sales pitch that explains why the addressee – who might never even have heard of Isocrates before! – should still pay attention to what he’s got to say. This is one of my favorites:
“There are many things that educate private citizens, most of all that they do not live in luxury but have to take council every day about how to stay alive. Then there are the laws under which they happen to live, and finally the forthrightness and openness with which their friends may rebuke them and their enemies attack them over any wrong action. In addition to all these things, certain of the poets have left them treasuries of advice about how one should live. It’s reasonable that common people should turn out for the better through all these factors. None of them are available to tyrants, though, and these men – who ought more than anyone else to be educated – turn out, as soon as they take the throne, to be utterly brainless.” (Isocrates, To Nicocles 4)
The point is that Nicocles, who is himself a tyrant – tyrannos, not apparently a word that always carries negative connotations outside Athens – may have missed his chance at a moral education that everyone else gets for free. This is a lack that Isocrates promises to fill.
We come to find out what he fills it with over fifty more pages of prose that contain a few but not many surprises. I’m rather more interested the content of the “private citizen’s” education that Isocrates says is unavailable to tyrants. It’s not hard to understand how necessity, the laws, the poets and sharp-tongued friends could turn out to be teachers. But what is it – in a Greek or a modern context – that they teach? Will they teach the same, or complementary, or even incompatible lessons? Will their students turn out “good” in the same sense that the tyrant is good, or “good” in some other sense, one that makes them useful or noxious to the tyrant?
If, to make a long story short, we find the poets (e.g. Hesiod in the Works and Days) and the sharp-tongued friends (e.g. the anonymous praisers and blamers of the Nicomachean Ethics) saying more or less the same things as the laws – “live quietly and don’t seek profit unjustly” – then necessity, which makes men take council about preserving their own life, seems to speak against this chorus. The Greeks never invoke necessity except as an excuse or an explanation for an action that would otherwise have seemed just bad. Necessity teaches people to be strategic, but not scrupulous, in their pursuit of a living.
It’s difficult to square this with the lessons of Isocrates’ other “teachers of the masses,” unless we take Isocrates to have a thought in mind here that he articulates more clearly elsewhere – that a man should appear to behave justly, not through weakness and because he cannot do otherwise, but only out of respect for justice itself. In that case, necessity would be teaching a capacity to act strategically against justice, a capacity that then remains latent in good men but that renders their goodness meaningful by marking it as a choice. Socrates makes a similar argument in the Hippias Minor and in Xenophon’s Memorabilia – that the man who knows how to lie is “better” than someone who can only tell the truth.
His capacity for evil is, as we know, what makes man a dangerous animal, but it’s also what makes humans more than livestock. Supposing that such a capacity really is valuable, even necessary for validating good behavior as more than a confession of weakness, ethicists face their own version of the metaphysical question as to how a potential can be said to exist if it’s never realized. That is, a really good man has to have the capacity for evil; but, if he’s really good, he’ll never do evil, and so the very capacity that makes us call him good in the first place remains a mere postulation.
Isocrates has an interesting solution to this conundrum, one that in some ways seems characteristic of a shallow thinker but that in other ways accesses a truth about Athenian social life that has no place in the ethics of Plato or Aristotle. As far as I know, Isocrates is the only Athenian ethical writer – in a culture that gave us Phaedra and Oedipus! – who takes seriously the question of secrets. He almost seems to take it for granted that those who receive his advice will, nonetheless, keep on doing bad things. They should hide this, he says, if they can; but, if they need a friend’s advice about an evil deed, they should ask as though they were talking about some third party. We need only glance at one of Plato’s discussions of the relationship between being and seeming good to see the distinctiveness of Isocrates’ position, which I take to be this: that a man should indeed try to seem good, but that a certain amount of evil done in private is the only thing that can make this seeming worthwhile.