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This is the fourth volume in the Oratory of Classical Greece series. Planned for publication over several years, the series will present all of the surviving speeches from the late fifth and fourth centuries B.C. in new translations prepared by classical scholars who are at the forefront of the discipline. These translations are especially designed for the needs and interests of today's undergraduates, Greekless scholars in other disciplines, and the general public.

Classical oratory is an invaluable resource for the study of ancient Greek life and culture. The speeches offer evidence on Greek moral views, social and economic conditions, political and social ideology, and other aspects of Athenian culture that have been largely ignored: women and family life, slavery, and religion, to name just a few.

This volume contains works from the early, middle, and late career of the Athenian rhetorician Isocrates (436-338). Among the translated works are his legal speeches, pedagogical essays, and his lengthy autobiographical defense, Antidosis. In them, he seeks to distinguish himself and his work, which he characterizes as "philosophy," from that of the sophists and other intellectuals such as Plato. Isocrates' identity as a teacher was an important mode of political activity, through which he sought to instruct his students, foreign rulers, and his fellow Athenians. He was a controversial figure who championed a role for the written word in fourth-century politics and thought.

Aristotle of Stagirus (384 322 BCE), the great Greek philosopher, researcher, logician, and scholar, studied with Plato at Athens and taught in the Academy (367 347). Subsequently he spent three years in Asia Minor at the court of his former pupil Hermeias, where he married Pythias, one of Hermeias' relations. After some time at Mitylene, he was appointed in 343/2 by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip's death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of Peripatetics ), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander's death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died the following year.

"Problems," the third-longest work in the Aristotelian corpus, contains thirty-eight books covering more than 900 problems about living things, meteorology, ethical and intellectual virtues, parts of the human body, and miscellaneous questions. Although "Problems" is an accretion of multiple authorship over several centuries, it offers a fascinating technical view of Peripatetic method and thought. "Rhetoric to Alexander," which provides practical advice to orators, was likely composed during the period of Aristotle s tutorship of Alexander, perhaps by Anaximenes, another of Alexander s tutors. Both "Problems" and "Rhetoric to Alexander" replace the earlier Loeb edition by Hett and Rackham, with texts and translations incorporating the latest scholarship.