and follower of Socrates. An important source for knowledge of fourth-century Greece, Isocrates was an orator and teacher of rhetoric, and known mainly as a historian, commentator on current affairs, educationalist, and adviser to one and all. He is praised, perhaps ironically, as a rhetorician by Plato at the end of the Phaedrus, but his own down-to-earth prescriptions for education, avoiding unnecessary speculative flights, suggest that he was more of a political realist than Plato himself.