had important things to say, some of which indicated that they understood better than many of their
contemporaries the direction in which Greek civilization was headed. Or, perhaps, they helped to
establish the direction in which Greek civilization was headed, by reminding the Greeks of their glorious
past, which Gorgias and Isocrates themselves creatively reconstructed, representing the Trojan War and
the Persian Wars as instances of superior Greek culture triumphing over hapless barbarians. At some time
around the start of the fourth century, Gorgias delivered a speech, which has not survived, to the visitors
who had come from all over Greece to celebrate the Olympic festival. In front of a suitably Panhellenic
audience, Gorgias urged the Greeks to end their continual warring against each other and to unite against
the Persians, who remained as a potential threat to the easternmost Greek poleis. Isocrates inherited this
Panhellenic sentiment from his teacher and spent much of his long life trying to persuade his fellow
Greeks to adopt a new way of thinking about themselves. For Isocrates, what was distinctive about the
Greeks was their shared Hellenic culture, which could best be preserved by creating concord among all
Greeks and by a program of education which Isocrates was himself prepared to implement. He opened a
school in Athens whose aim was to teach the principles of oratory and moral uprightness as a means of
effective and responsible political action. And he delivered a number of public oratorical displays
designed to recruit various political figures as leaders in the unification of the Greeks. Some of these
leaders were kings or tyrants on the fringes of the Greek world and included King Philip II of Macedon,
who succeeded, as we will see, in imposing a sort of unity on the Greeks just at the end of Isocrates’
lifetime.
Map 14 Map of Greece and Asia Minor.
Source: Reproduced from A. Erskine (ed.), A Companion to the Hellenistic World (Malden, MA 2003),
p. 136, figure 9.1.