Isocrates’ Evagoras

This chapter discusses Isocrates’ Evagoras. One of many ancients to explore the genre of biography, the Athenian rhetorician Isocrates is reputed to be the first to have written a detailed account of a person’s life, in a form still recognizable today as biographical. By today’s standards, Isocrates’ biography of Evagoras—a lengthy exaltation of the recently deceased king of Cyprus—comes across as a verbose chronicle laden with exaggerated praise and magnified significance. However, to those interested in the origins of biography, this work provides a rare opportunity to witness this genre in the early process of its formation. In addition to being a rhetorician experimenting with a new genre, Isocrates was an educator, a teacher of rhetoric, who used his works as textbooks for his students’ learning. More than borrowing from his predecessors their practices of infusing biography into established forms of praise, he appropriated these practices for educational purposes and aligned them to his own pedagogical ends. The chapter then discusses the link between biography and education by exploring the process through which Isocrates developed this genre out of the rhetorical and poetic traditions of praise.