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The rise of prose as a literary *#tlzqm4 art was destined to have a deep influence on Western literature and education. The mens nike air max shoes grey ancient prophet of humanism Iso- crates (436-338 B.C.), in the shadow of Plato, his eloquent opponent, has received less than his due. His style "survives" in his speeches for Helen and Palamedes. But Plato's dazzling portrayal of Ideas and Absolutes has left us impatient with the prosaic arts of persuasion, the techniques of commu- nity that Isocrates practiced, taught, and defended. Yet the arts of rhetoric, the improvement of the arts of persuasion, would become the basis of humanistic education in the West for the next millennia.While Plato and his Academy aimed to produce philosophers, Isocrates and his schools looked for the statesmen needed in his turbulent age. Theninety-seven years of Isocrates' life stretched from the decline of the Peri- clean empire to the rise of the empire of Philip of Macedon. In 430 B.C. when, for the cheap nike air max 95 shoes first time in many years, Pericles was not reelected to the board of ten generals, he lost the power base from which he had led Athens. His death in 429 B.C. and the collapse of the old empire left Athens in politicallimbo. Isocrates then grew up in the trying years of the Peloponne- sian War (431-404 B.c.), a time of plague in which two of Pericles' sons died and the population was decimated, a time ofbroken peace treaties and bitter naval defeats. Athens's domestic disorders ended in the seizure of power by the Thirty Tyrants, and their removal by a fragile democracy. After ten years as a speech writer, about 393 B.C. Isocrates opened his own school of rhetoric. He would have preferred to call it a school for statesmen. Some biographers see his new career as a kind of conversion, based on Isocrates' belief that rhetoric, the cheap nike air max 95 shoes art of oratory, was the best preparation for statesmen. In 353 he summed up his philosophy of rhetoric: While Isocrates' school, unlike Plato's Academy, was not an elite sect, it was open only to those who could pay in advance the fee of a thousand drachmas for the three- nike air max shoes 2012 or four-year course. Finally his school had taught almost a hundred pupils, but not more than nine at a time. From these fees and from the gifts of wealthy and successful pupils, Isocrates became one of the twelve hundred richest men in Athens. He was called on to perform a "liturgy," a public service of the wealthiest citizens, who were to provide a chorus for one of the dramatic contests, to recruit and train one of the ten teams for the torch race, to underwrite one of the embassies to one of the Panhellenic festivals, or to host a banquet at one of the festivals. An extraordinary liturgy in wartime required the citizen to equip a warship.