Isaeus (c. 420 B.C.E. - 350 B.C.E.) was one of the great orators of classical Greece. Today we tend to think of an orator as someone who writes and delivers speeches for politics or entertainment, but in the ancient Mediterranean, orators were more like what we would think of as lawyers. Orators would be hired to take a side in a dispute and to make a case for it; Isaeus in particular is known for his forensic mode of argumentation. Then as now, the law-courts were a place of much political wheeling and dealing as aristocratic men tried to ruin the reputations of their rivals. According to the historian Andrew Wolpert, in classical Athens, law was used as a way to pursue, rather than to end, conflicts.
The world of Athenian oratory was very small, and most of the orators from the fourth century knew one another. Isaeus was a student of Lysias and may have studied under Isocrates as well. His own fame was soon eclipsed by that of his student, Demosthenes.
According to pseudo-Plutarch, Isaeus wrote a book called the Art of Rhetoric and fifty speeches; fourteen others were attributed to Isaeus but pseudo-Plutarch did not think they were his. Though a large proportion of these speeches seem to have survived until the ninth century, only eleven full speeches and part of a twelfth are extant today. We know the titles of 42 others, whose texts do not survive.
Isaeus was best known, both in his own time and in ours, for his mastery of inheritance law. From the titles of his other works it seems that he also wrote speeches about marriage claims, property exchanges, slave ownership, and collecting on debts. As you can see, none of these topics is especially political. This makes Isaeus unusual among Greek orators, who tended to pursue their political ambitions through a life in the law-courts.
His surviving speeches, like most of the works of Greek oratory, are named after his clients. They are numbered in modern editions according to the following scheme.
- Cleonymus
- Menecles
- Pyrrhus, probably his most famous speech
- Nicostratus
- Dicaeogenes
- Philoctemon
- Apollodorus
- Ciron
- Astyphilus
- Aristarchus
- Hagnias
- Euphiletus
Therefore, if you see a reference to "Isaeus 6.15," then you know to look up the fifteenth chapter of the sixth speech (Philoctemon).
Further Information:
The speeches of Isaeus, in both Greek and English, can be found online at The Perseus Project: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu. Click on Classics and scroll down to Isaeus' name.
There is very little information about Isaeus himself on the web. There is an abysmally scanned article from the 1911 Encyclopędia Britannica at http://97.1911encyclopedia.org/I/IS/ISAEUS.htm, but trying to read it will probably give you a splitting headache.