A Commentary on Isocrates' Antidosis

How does one construct a role for oneself in the fourth-century democratic city? This commentary on Isocrates' Antidosis, which includes a full translation as well as an extensive introduction, demonstrates that a rhetorician may do so by assuming roles that subvert many of the conventions invoked by the genre. Yun Lee Too shows how the narrative of 'self' in the Antidosis is to be understood as a sophisticated amalgam of literary, rhetorical, philosophical, and legal discourses. She considers prior traditions and contemporary conventions for writing and speaking the 'self' in Greek literary texts, especially in legal texts, and the particular issue of how the literary intellectual might produce a role for himself in the classical polis following the trial of Socrates. Crucial to the question of self-characterization is how one can present a sympathetic persona through rhetoric, spoken or written, when rhetorical performance itself has derogatory connotations as a result of association with the professional speechmakers of classical Greece, the sophists.

Yun Lee Too was formerly Professor in the Department of Classics, Columbia University.