Twentieth-century reading of Isocrates has tended to concentrate on his achievements or shortcomings as a ‘thinker’ rather than on his pedagogy, but he has a long-established image as one of antiquity's supreme pedagogues. In Cicero's dialogue De Oratore, Antonius speaks of Isocrates' school ‘from which, as from the Trojan horse, all who emerged were leaders’. In the Italian Renaissance, Isocrates' works were popular objects of translation, especially the speech To Nicocles which instructs Isocrates' pupil, the young King Nicocles, on the ideals of kingship. The passage from De Oratore was echoed in a funeral oration for Guarino Guarini, revered as the ‘father of humanists’: Guarino was to be seen as a new Isocrates. The self-proclaimed arch-pedagogue Erasmus presented a translation of To Nicocles, along with his own Panegyricus and Institutio christiani principis, to his royal patron Emperor Charles V. And if Isocrates is invoked as a model by the humanists, humanism in turn provides a paradigm for incorporating Isocrates into a continuous narrative of Western culture: H.-I. Marrou's history of ancient education discusses Isocrates' ‘ethical rhetoric’ in a section entitled ‘Le humanisme d' Isocrate’, and a famous essay by the historian Moses Finley calls Isocrates to account for the whole tradition of belles lettres in education. In short, Isocrates has been an important link in attempted genealogies of classical pedagogy.