This book is a study of the literary strategies which the first professional philosophers used to market their respective disciplines. Philosophers of fourth-century BCE Athens developed the emerging genre of the "protreptic" (literally, "turning" or "converting"). Simply put, protreptic discourse uses a rhetoric of conversion that urges a young person to adopt a specific philosophy in order to live a good life. The author argues that the fourth-century philosophers used protreptic discourses to market philosophical practices and to define and legitimize a new cultural institution: the school of higher learning (the first in Western history). Specifically, the book investigates how competing educators in the fourth century produced protreptic discourses by borrowing and transforming traditional and contemporary "voices" in the cultural marketplace. They aimed to introduce and promote their new schools and define the new professionalized discipline of "philosophy." While scholars have typically examined the discourses and practices of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle in isolation from one another, this study rather combines philosophy, narratology, genre theory, and new historicism to focus on the discursive interaction between the three philosophers: each incorporates the discourse of his competitors into his protreptics. Appropriating and transforming the discourses of their competition, these intellectuals created literary texts that introduced their respective disciplines to potential students.

Table of ContentsIntroduction1. Protreptic and the "rhetoric of conversion"2. Earlier protreptic configurations3. Genre theory and ???????????? ?????4. The rhetorical situation and objective of ???????????? ?????Part I. Platonic ProtrepticChapter I. Levels of discourse in Plato's dialoguesChapter II. Narrative between Sokrates and Krito1. Krito and his agenda2. Sokrates the story-tellerChapter III. From narrative to drama: inside the intradiegetic level1. Characters on stage: Sophists, Sokrates, Kleinias, Ktesippos2. Dramatic elements: staging, cheering, seating3. Apotreptic in protreptic discourse4. Formal features of the protreptic ??????????Chapter IV. Return to the extradiegetic level: metalepsis, protreptic, and apotreptic1. From spectator to judge to interlocutor: Krito's "Turn" in Scene IV2. Isokratean apotreptic and private program3. Sokrates' apotreptic of the apotrepticChapter V. Creating consumers and consensus in the Protagoras1. Staging a contest among converts2. Preparing consumers for the marketplace of ideas3. Protreptic that builds consensus4. Clitophon and after the protreptic stingPart II. Isokratean ProtrepticIsokratean Philosophy, Pragmatism, and ProtrepticChapter VI. 'Professional' protreptic: Against the Sophists1. Challenging the instructor's pledge2. Apotreptically revealing a professionChapter VII. Parainetic protreptic: ?? ?????? and exhorting young tyrants1. Protreptic discourse as secondary genre2. Circumscribing the competition3. Making, using, becoming examplesChapter VIII. Judging protreptic: Antidosis, Panathenaicus1. Cultivating critics of protreptic2. Collaborating with competitors: protreptics and "pro-paideia"Epilogue. Aristotelian Protreptic and a Stabilized GenreEpilogue. Aristotelian Protreptic and a Stabilized Genre