The central theme of these readings seems to be pathos vs. logos. The first verbal sparring match we see is between Agamemnon and Achilles, which is super-charged with emotions: anger, pride, etc., and this argument is—essentially—settled by Athena. It is understandable why Achilles, a brilliant warrior, would take offense. However, Achilles does not handle the situation very well and behaves like a petulant child: "if you won’t play fair with me, I’m going to take my toys and go home!" One of the ways that Diodotus approaches his audience in The Peloponnesian War is by appealing to their sense of intelligence and self-preservation. If Achilles had handled his dispute with Agamemnon in this way, he might have yielded better results. As Diodotus says, “The two things most opposed to good counsel are haste and passion” (Matsen 25).
Though war is rarely the stage on which reason and cool-headed thinking prevail over blood-thirst and anger, there are those (such as Odysseus) who are able to keep their heads, and it is the thinkers who tend to come out on top: Achilles is killed in battle, Agamemnon is killed in a tub and Odysseus saves the day with an idea and gets to live a long and interesting life.
The same problem of emotional irrationality can be applied to Cleon. His speech is choked by emotion. I think that while passion can rile people up and get them to move, it can easily dissipate, so what Diodotus proposes is more logical. He would like for the Athenians to consider the fact that revenge, and the erroneous idea that the death penalty curbs violence, is not a good enough reason to put a great deal of people to death.
Cleon, on the other hand, is too much the warrior and not enough the thinker. His inability to grasp the possible results of bloody actions makes him unreliable and, thus, makes his speech less effective than that of Diodotus. In leaving out the possible (and logical) outcome of a mass execution, Cleon fails to comprehend that his proposed actions, as Diodotus points out, will hurt rather than help the state.
Isocrates faced the same dilemma, though he seemed to be on the losing side of the battle. His accusers were ruled by self-interest, and nothing rules self-interest like emotions. Isocrates’s arguments, on the other hand, seemed entirely logical. First off, when a perfectly good boat goes out to sea and gets torn to bits, whom do you blame? It’s not the boat maker, for heaven’s sake. It could be the captain or the crewmembers, Poseidon, the Fates, but the not boat maker. People can twist anything good into something rotten by allowing their emotions to bleed into their logic.
Second, he brings up the problem that, apparently, is age-old. If children do not choose to discipline themselves and apply themselves to getting an education, it does not matter how good the teacher is, the child will fail.
A larger aspect of what I think Isocrates and a lot of other teachers faced (and still face) is fear. For some reason (and this is just my own observation), people tend to be more afraid of those who are mentally acute than anything else. If a person is financially superior, they are despised, if a person is morally superior, they are revered, if a person is physically superior, they are praised (and paid disgusting amounts of money), but if a person is mentally superior they get beat up on the playground. Isocrates points out that people are encouraged to exercise their bodies in order to be healthy, and yet exercising their minds (through philosophy) is disdained. This goes back to what Diodotus said, “[If a man] realizes that while he cannot speak well in a bad cause, he can at least slander well and thus intimidate both his opponents and his hearers” (Matsen 25). If people cannot match a man intelligently, they'll go straight for the petty insults.
