In his work, Isocrates the rhetorician gives vent to an exalted praise of his own intellectual and literary individuality ; but the latter ought to be put in relation with the singular position which he declares holding in the different spheres to which he belongs : in his school of rhetoric, at the heart of which he stands ; in the Athenian intellectual field, where he claims to hold a position half-way between judicial sycophancy and useless sophism ; in the Athenian City, where he presents himself as a " peaceful " citizen - apragmôn - totally aloof from political life ; in the Greek world, finally, where his ambition is to play a central role - which he already does, on a pedagogical level, in his group of disciples from all around Greece. It was at the junction of those different universes that the singular voice of Isocrates emerged.
