The Philosophy of Isocrates’s “Encomium of Helen”

• In Event: The Polis Examined: Aristotle and Isocrates

Abstract

Isocrates’s “Encomium of Helen” is usually regarded as an odd or even frivolous work. In it, Isocrates undertakes to outdo the writer of a previous “Encomium of Helen”—generally presumed to be Gorgias—by demonstrating in his own work how one must stick to the forms belonging to encomia as opposed to apologiai. Isocrates’s own encomium in fact praises Helen mostly indirectly: by praising Theseus. For the willingness of Theseus to go to such lengths as he did for Helen becomes a praise of Helen’s own beauty in light of Theseus’s exceptional virtue, which Isocrates extols and pits even against the virtue of Heracles.

What has most confused readers of this piece, however, is the apparent discontinuity between the thrust of its short introductory section and the main body of the work. For Isocrates chooses to begin his “Helen” with what seems to be a cantankerous rebuke of the sophists of Isocrates’s day and their students, who he alleges try to show off their cleverness by defending “paradoxical” theses (praising salt, defending the life of a beggar or an exile over that of a citizen, and so on). But that Helen was deserving of encomium was itself such a paradoxical thesis in Isocrates’s day. Why, then, does Isocrates engage in this exercise?

I contend that a careful parsing of Isocrates’s introductory section provides the key to reading the rest of his “Encomium of Helen.” The introduction stands out for its explicit and implicit references to pre-Socratic as well as Socratic philosophers, generally rare in the Isocratic corpus. No one yet, to my knowledge, has adequately grasped the fact that Isocrates here indicates that his “Encomium of Helen” will, in a suitably artful way, provide his own answer to the philosophic questions that consumed the pre-Socratics. The purpose of this essay, then, is to show how the “Encomium of Helen” lays out Isocrates’s own approach to the great questions of philosophy.

Author

• Ariel Helfer, Wayne State University