It is hard to imagine that Isokrates couldn’t see what Philip would do with Greece once he had it. It is perhaps less surprising that he turned away from the idea of democracy and eventually toward one-man rule. He came from a wealthy family and studied under Gorgias. This puts him in a social class and circle that was always suspicious of the democracy as such and wanted a narrower franchise limited to the upper classes. Looking at all he lived through, it is easy to see why he might have grown disillusioned. He experienced the whole of the Peloponnesian Wars (starting as a small child, but old enough to at least pick up on the emotions of the adults around him) and then everything else down to Chaeronea. Small wonder if he grew increasingly bitter and disillusioned.

I traced part of the slippery slope of the pan-Hellenists in my last post on the Persian Wars thread. Isokrates led the way for most of that process, though he disapproved of the leadership of Thebes (he was an Athenian after all). He only started to consider the leadership of a single ruler around 360, at which point he was already in his 70s. Not to argue that he was growing senile – he had another 30 years of sound work ahead of him – but he may have become rather curmudgeonly. It also important to remember that, despite the Philippus, he never became a monarchist, but was always a supporter of a limited democracy.

The man was also an idealist and argued that the form of constitution was less important than the ethical make-up of those who make policy. Philip was supposed to lead the Greeks into Persia, nothing more. Isokrates may also have had the constitutionally limited monarchs of Sparta in mind, too. Philip wasn’t supposed to be a depot, just a fully empowered leader. Perhaps it is significant that Isokrates is supposed to have starved himself to death (at the ripe old age of 102) after Philip became the master of Greece at Chaeronea.