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The best course, therefore, that I can take under all these conditions is to set before you what I think about the last attempts1 to arouse prejudice against me and then proceed to speak on the subject which I had in mind from the first. For I think that if I succeed by my writing in bringing out and making clear what my views are about education and about the poets, I shall stop my enemies from fabricating false charges and speaking utterly at random.
1 Obviously he resents bitterly some attack upon him in recent years. Possibly it came from the “Eristics,” to the value of whose teaching he makes a condescending concession in Isoc. 12.26. These are not the “Eristics” mentioned in Against the Sophists （see Isoc. 13.1-8 and notes）, who belong to an earlier period, but those referred to in Isoc. 15.258 and Isoc. Letter 5.3 ff.—namely Aristotle and his followers who had been hard on Isocrates （see Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit ii. p. 65）. This is supported by the fact that the critics here referred to frequented the Lyceum. Blass, however （ii. pp. 68, 69）, thinks that Isocrates has here in mind especially Speusippus.
Isocrates. Isocrates with an English Translation in three volumes, by George Norlin, Ph.D., LL.D. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1980.
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