La verità supera la meraviglia: poesia e prosa a confronto nell’Evagora di Isocrate

When comparing prose to poetry within the Evagoras, Isocrates defines the peculiarity of his own prose style and contents. While the poetry is based on marvelling and astonishing the audience, the proper feature of prose is persuasion through reasoning. Focusing on the originality of his writing an eulogy for a contemporary person, Isocrates uses the methodology of historical inquiry to produce rhetorical arguments. As a consequence, he can affirm that his rhetorical discourse is ‘true’ and can provide a paradigmatic model of political behavior.