Abstract

320 RHETORICA attuali, esse non valgono certamente per il libro che Emmanuelle Danblon ci ha regalato: una ricerca coraggiosa, ricca di ipotesi originali ed innovative, all'altezza delle sfide che la modernità pone ad una disciplina che da Aristotele in poi non ha mai smesso di nutriré la cultura occidentale. Mauro Serra, Fisciano (Salerno) Tarik Wareh, The Theory and Practice of Life: Isocrates and the Philoso­ phers. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2012, viii + 236 pp. ISBN 9780674067134 The perennial contest between rhetoric and philosophy expresses itself, among other ways, in the expulsion from the potted stories these disciplines tell about themselves of authors who in their own day were thickly intertwi­ ned. The granddaddy of such expulsions is the erasure of Isocrates from the story of ancient philosophy. I blithely suppose that most teachers of Greek philosophy know who Isocrates was, if only because Plato and Aristotle both mention him (Phaedrus 279a; Rhetoric, fifteen loci). They may also know that these mentions allude to the rivalry between Academics and Isocrateans , who established competing schools in 4th century Athens. When he was young Aristotle effectively hawked the wares of the Academy in public performances that were long appreciated, by Cicero among others, for their eloquence. But no sooner do historians of philosophy mention these facts than we hear that Isocrates's advertisement of himself as a teacher of philosophia was little more than a pretentious way of differentiating himself from (other) sophists and of cutting into the Academics's (and later the Lyceum's) market. By contrast, Tarik Wareh's The Theory and Practice of Life: Isocrates and the Philosophers builds on growing appreciation of the way in which Aristotle took Isocrates's philosophia (general education achieved by imita­ tion with a view to public success in oratory and so in politics) seriously enough to incorporate Isocratean themes into his own philosophy of human things (ta anthropopina): ethics, politics, rhetoric, and poetics. The question is how deeply Aristotle transformed these themes in appropriating them. In addressing this issue Wareh is encouraged by the appearance of yet another reconstruction (from a lacunose array of fragments and testimonial of Aristotle's Protrepticus, a speech inviting prospective students to frame their lives around the love of wisdom as Academics conceived it and solicit­ ing the powers that be to support (or at least tolerate) the Academic approach to education. D. S. Hutchinson's and M. R. Johnson's edition of the Protrepticus frames the issues that divided Isocrateans and Academics by reconstructing the fragments as a dialogue-well, a set of rival speeches, anyway-between 'Isocrates,' 'Aristotle,' and a Pythagorean named 'Heraclides ' (http://www.protrepticus.info). 'Heraclides' adopts the apolitical, indeed anti-political, view of a sub-sect of Pythagoreans whom 'Aristotle' Reviews 321 identifies as 'nnithematici.' "The human creature is nothing/' he says, "and nothing is secure in human affairs ... All the things that seem great to peo­ ple are an optical illusion." From this sour perspective there is little or no difference between external goods such as wealth, health, beauty, and power and the ends of political life. Isocrates's philosophia inscribed just this difference into rhetorical practice by inducing reflective understanding of the big picture as a way of responding in a timely way to issues closer to hand. 'Aristotle's row was harder to hoe. The Academic curriculum fea­ tured high-end mathematics as propaedeutic to other studies. That is because Plato and the mathematician Eudoxus, co-founder of the Academy, regarded mathematical sciences as valuable, while, like the aristocrats they were or sympathized with, despising their practical and technical applica­ tions. They thereby seemed to ask citizens to waste their time on useless subjects that by their very nature depreciate civic life. According to Wareh, 'Aristotle' distinguishes himself from 'Heraclites' by repeating the Acade­ my's party line only' after having "stronglv assured us that his vision is inclusive of everything moral and intelligent that would generally have been credited to the Isocratean approach" (44). 'Aristotle' does recognize techne and praxis as successively developed forms of knowledge that have been nurtured by and contribute to polis life. He also realizes that the...