Historical Rhetorics/A Little Aristotle and the Other Socrates/Papillion, Terry. "Mixed Unities in the Antidosis of Isocrates."

Antidosis is not the rambling, disjointed plea for vindication of an old man, but rather a skillfully designed, unified speech modeled upon Plato’s Apology. Isocrates uses the word miktos (mixed) to refer to the speech. Miktos does not occur frequently in Greek texts of this era. Papillon interprets it as "appropriate mixture." Papillon believes that Isocrates designed the Antidosis to have two contrasting sections; the first relates Isocrates’ effects on the state and the second explores the means by which Isocrates produced these accomplishments. These two sections roughly correspond to Isocrates’ public life and to his private life.

Papillon identifies two genres which comprise the speech; parts of the speech resemble nothing more than a judicial defense; “it has a proem, a partition and proof…, an ethical digression, and a peroration” (57). The second genre “consists of making the speech, which is in response to questions about his teaching, an example of his teaching” (57). Isocrates’ public and private lives inhered so closely that he could not help but see an attack on the one as a call to defense of the other. “Thus the private issue of the antidosis became for him the public issue of his value to Athens” (58), because “he saw no real distinction between the public and the private” (58) in his own life and thought.