Thus the Isocratean school claimed to be, and was, a school of morals: it was also a school of good style and composition. The boys’ essays had to be written in a particular style, grandiloquent and ornate, to suit their themes. “For it is absurd to suppose that the matter and manner of ordinary conversation or of forensic oratory are suitable to Pan-Hellenic themes; on the contrary, in this kind of speech the thoughts must be more original and more lofty, the style more striking, and the diction more poetical and elaborate.”[544] Style, diction, and matter must, in fact, be that which Isokrates worked out in his own speeches. That style[545] I do not mean to discuss here. The fact that he wrote in a study and never spoke in public, has made him exaggerate the merits of the artistic prose-style of which he was the first really great exponent; but of its popularity with an Hellenic audience there can be no question. The pupils of Isokrates became the most eminent politicians and the most eminent prose-writers of the time; his house, as Cicero puts it, was the school of Hellas and the manufactory of eloquence.
To acquire this kind of oratory, there was need both of natural ability and of diligent study. Isokrates professes to supply, first an exact science of all the rhetorical devices and the various forms which speech can take, and then practice in the right employment and arrangement of these several parts. To learn the technique of rhetoric is comparatively easy, if the aspirant applies to the right man; but the right use of the technique can never be brought under any set of rules, or taught by one man to another: it can only be learnt by experience. The future orator must try the effect of each arrangement and combination of technique on the audience, and so draw up his own system.[546] The requisite audience for these experiments will be provided by the other pupils of the school, with the master as chief critic. A good master is essential. By his personal influence he will be able to communicate those finer elements of style which cannot be communicated in formal teaching. If he is worth his salt, all his pupils will bear the stamp of his own manner, and will easily be distinguished from every one else by the similarity of their style to his and to one another’s.[547] Education in rhetoric at Isokrates’ school seems to have begun with the study of his own works. In the _Panathenaikos_ he describes himself as reading the speech over with two or three of his regular pupils; they revise and criticise it as they go along. This would give Isokrates the opportunity of expounding his own views of technique, with his own works before him as illustrations. It may be inferred from the beginning of the _Bousiris_ that the written speeches of other Sophists were also studied, and their faults, or aberrations from Isocratean canons, pointed out, in order that they might be avoided in future. At any rate, Isokrates complains that other professors of the same sort of Rhetoric at Athens made use of his writings for teaching their own pupils, though, of course, according to him, they did so in order to show the boys what to admire, not what to avoid. When this technique had been fully mastered Isokrates set his pupils to write speeches on their own account, choosing for them some great and improving theme: in these speeches they had to apply the rules which they had learnt, and the subtler influences which they had imbibed, from their teacher. But they had also to think out the subject-matter, and in this lies much of the merit of the whole system. For, as Isokrates observes, the essayist who writes upon such themes will have to think noble thoughts, and select noble deeds as his instances and illustrations. This contemplation of what is noble will be a greater incentive to virtue than any so-called science of ethics:[548] for there is no science which can create goodness in wicked natures, but exhortation and persuasion can work wonders. Moreover, since the orator’s best argument is, after all, a good reputation, the young orator will see that his conduct and character are as excellent as possible.[548] And the practice of weighing just what thoughts and actions are suitable to the speech involves that faculty of sound deliberation which is necessary for the formation of right judgments. In fact, Isocratean “Philosophy” does more to form character than it does to produce eloquence.[549]