Isocrates

(463 BC - 338 BC)

An orator and rhetorician born shortly before the Peloponnesian War, Isocrates was fourteen years old when the Athenian assembly voted to punish the city of Scione, a former ally, by executing its adult men and enslaving its women and children. “I did not have a voice sufficiently strong nor self-assurance to enable me to cope with the mob,” he later wrote, “to be reviled and to abuse those who parade on the speaker’s platform.” Rather than participate directly in politics, he advocated for Panhellenic peace by way of treatises.