ABSTRACT
The skills and experience acquired, in agora, theatre, or elsewhere by the citizens of Athens were diverse and did not in general conform to a fixed curriculum. Democratic Athens is a city of words, especially of spoken words, verbal performances. Writing was not embraced in democratic Athens without reservation. Identification of writing with despotism, secrecy, and avoidance of shared public space is an enduring strand in Athenian democratic rhetoric. Alcidamas' contemporary Isocrates developed a form of political discourse to which he gave the name of philosophia, and which he presented as essentially the distilled, refined and perfectly finished practical wisdom of the Athenian demos itself. In spite of the over-representation of texts from democratic Athens in surviving Greek literature, works discussing politics from any theoretical perspective come overwhelmingly from writers critical of, if not downright hostile to, democracy.
