ABSTRACT
Because frankness is a value, it is available as a rhetorical strategy for self-positioning in relation to structures of power. Frank speaking is closely identified in later Greece with philosophy, in accordance with a schema that envisions philosophers challenging imperial power from outside, while sophists are understood as insiders to these power structures. But while Isocrates suggests that the power differential between a ruler and his subjects is an insurmountable obstacle to frankness, in the very act of conveying this lesson he offers himself as the advisor who can fill that impossible position, prefiguring the paradoxes of frankness in the imperial era. Beyond the fundamental contradiction of a non-rhetorical rhetoric, a related paradox lies at the heart of frankness and its place in post-classical socio-political relations. The efficacy of parrhesiastic self-presentation depends on the acceptance of frankness as a value shared between speaker and audience.
