IT will now be useful to look back on the whole development from Antiphon to Demosthenes, and to trace the main lines of its course.

The ground for an artistic Athenian oratory was prepared partly by the popular Dialectic of the eastern Sophists, partly by the Sicilian Rhetoric. Intermediate between these stood the earliest artist of oratorical prose, Gorgias; differing from the eastern Sophists in laying more stress on expression than on management of argument, and from the Sicilian Rhetoricians in cultivating his faculty empirically, not theoretically.

Two principal tendencies appear in the beginnings of Attic oratory. One of these sets out from the forensic Rhetoric of Sicily, in combination with the popular Dialectic of the Sophists, and is but slightly affected by Gorgias. It is represented by the writers of the ‘austere’ style, of whom Antiphon and Thucydides are the chief. From Thucydides to Demosthenes this manner is in abeyance, partly because it ¹ is in itself unsuited to forensic purposes, partly because its grave emphasis has come to seem archaic. The second tendency is purely Gorgian, and, after having had several obscure representatives, is taken up by Isokrates, who gives to it a corrected, a complete and a permanent form. From a compromise between this second tendency and the idiom of daily life arises the ‘plain’ style of Lysias. The transition from Lysias to a strenuous political oratory is marked by Isaeos. Then comes the matured political oratory, giving new combinations to types already developed, and, in its greatest representative, uniting them all.

Antiphon and Thucydides have been strongly ² influenced, as to arrangement and form of argument, by Dialectic and Rhetoric. In regard to expression, they have been influenced by the synonym-lore, such as that of Prodikos, but hardly at all by the oratory of Gorgias. In expression, they are essentially pioneers. Those things which they have in common are to a great extent the necessary traits of early Greek prose, before the language was a perfectly flexible material, when that prose was wrought by a vigorous and subtle mind. Such traits are, however, numerous enough and strong enough to justify us in holding that they constitute a style. The characteristics of this ‘austere’ style have been analysed in reference to Antiphon. Such a manner ³ could not possibly keep its place in the forensic field. Legal controversy, growing subtle, terse and eager, would become as uncongenial to the prose of Antiphon as to the prose of Milton. A conception of the general effect will be assisted, perhaps, by a rough English parallel. In 1626 the Judges were called in to assist the House of Lords regarding a claim to the earldom of Oxford, and Chief Justice Crewe delivered an address in which this passage occurred ⁴ :—

‘This great honour, this high and noble dignity, hath continued ever since in the remarkable surnaine of De Vere, by so many ages, descents, and generations, as no other kingdom can produce a peer in one of the self-same name and title. I find in all this length of time but two attainders of this noble family, and those in stormy and tempestuous times, when the government was unsettled and the kingdom in competition. I have laboured to make a covenant with myself that affection may not press upon judgment; for I suppose there is no man that hath any apprehension of gentry and nobleness, but his affection stands to the continuance of so noble a name and house, and would take hold of a twig or a twine-thread to uphold it. And yet Time hath its revolutions; there must be a period and an end to all temporal things— finis rerum, an end of names, and dignities, and whatsoever is terrene, and why not of De Vere? For where is Bohun? where is Mowbray? where is Mortimer? Nay, which is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality. And yet let the name and dignity of De Vere stand so long as it pleaseth God!’

The ‘austere’ manner is, in one respect, better represented by Thucydides than by Antiphon. Its αὐθάδεια, or haughty independence, finds a larger scope in the work of the philosophical historian. We are concerned here, not with the individual genius of Thucydides, but with the rhetorical prose-writer as influenced by his age: and for us, therefore, the ⁵ speeches are most significant. These are the essays of Thucydides himself in an oratory which is dramatic as regards the sentiment, but not as regards the form. They may be taken, then, as indicating his relation both to the practice and to the theory of his day. Out of forty-one speeches (excluding the two dialogues) one is panegyrical—the Epitaphios: thirtyeight are hortatory: and two are forensic—those, namely, of the Plataeans and the Thebans before ⁶ their Lacedaemonian judges ⁷ . The Epitaphios, the forensic speeches, and (e.g.) the deliberative speeches of Hermokrates and Athenagoras in Book VI., all bear the impress of the Sicilian Rhetoric in their conscious partition. Proem, prothesis, narrative, proof, epilogue succeed each other—with more or less completeness according to circumstances—as distinct parts. Figures, whether of thought or of language, are avoided even more than by Antiphon. The influence of Gorgias is seen only faintly and generally in attention to parallelism or symmetry: his distinctive ornaments—parison and the like—are eschewed. Nothing is more Thucydidean than the ⁸ determination to express each idea, or part of an idea, in the way that best suits it, regardless of what has gone before or what is coming: hence his changes of construction. His freer, though rougher, handling of the periodic style, as compared with Antiphon's, arises from his effort to present a complex idea as an organic whole. He will not make his sentence a bed of Prokrustes for his thought. This alone would explain the sympathy with Thucydides ⁹ felt by the intense Demosthenes, who saw that the ‘austere’ style had something more than an antiquarian interest—that it meant a certain set of capacities in the organ which he wished to perfect; and who studied these capacities, not in Antiphon, but in Thucydides.

Kritias and Andokides stand together as cultivated amateurs of the phase when this earlier manner of Antiphon and Thucydides was already felt to be too rigid for practical life, but when, nevertheless, an alternative manner had not yet been artistically shaped. Kritias, like Andokides, appears to have avoided the poetical diction as well as the figures of Gorgias; and is named along with Andokides as a witness to the currency of the idiom used by Lysias ¹⁰ .

Thrasymachos of Chalkedon gave a new turn to ¹¹ the progress of Attic prose. The modern world knows him best from the Phaedros, where he figures as a puerile pedant of the Sicilian Rhetoric. To Aristotle and Theophrastos, however, he was known less as a theorist than as an orator, and as an orator, moreover, of original and remarkable merits. These ¹² merits were chiefly three. First, he was the founder of a ‘middle’ style: intermediate, not between the Gorgian and the Lysian—for the Lysian had not yet arisen—but between the Gorgian, or poetical, and the colloquial. Secondly, he matured that terse, compact period ( στρογγύλη, συνεστραμμένη), fittest for real contests, which in Antiphon is still rude, but which is found in the more artistic speeches of Lysias. Thirdly, he corrected the Gorgian idea of rhythmical beauty ( εὐρυθμία) in prose, by moderating the effort to frame prose in the strict rhythms of verse, and, according to Aristotle—though the fragments of Thrasymachos do not illustrate that statement—by introducing the paeon ¹³ . The ¹⁴ significance of Thrasymachos is twofold. In respect to rhythm and to his conception of a middle style, he may be considered as the forerunner of Isokrates. In respect to his development of the terse period, to his training in the forensic Rhetoric, and to the practical bent of his work, he is the pioneer of Lysias and of those orators, whether forensic or deliberative, who are in contrast with the Gorgians and Isokratics.

Lysias now completes the reaction from the poeticism of Gorgias and the stateliness of Antiphon. He boldly takes as his material the diction of the private citizen who has had the ordinary Athenian education; and, being an artist of true genius, Lysias shapes out of this a singularly beautiful prose. The conception was fortunate; it was in essential harmony with the spirit of Attic Greek; and, if a Lysias had not arisen, the world would not have known some most delicate felicities of that idiom. It was a faculty of the language developed once for all, committed to an exquisite record, and thus secured against the possibility of being missed by anyone who hereafter should aim at mastery over all the resources of Attic speech. Nor was the lesson lost on Demosthenes and Hypereides any more than on the Augustan Atticists.

It might have seemed that a finished simplicity so congenial to the Attic spirit had for ever superseded the ideal of Gorgias. But, just as the influence of that ideal was declining, a pupil of Gorgias came forward to show that his master's theory, though deformed by extravagances, was grounded in truth. Isokrates proved that, without loss of ease and fluency, prose may be artistically ornate in the general sense of Gorgias, (that is, with the aid of certain embellishments proper to poetry,) if only these are rightly chosen and are temperately used. The great difference between the work of Lysias and ¹⁵ the work of Isokrates is this:—Lysias did perfectly what could be done to such perfection in pure Attic alone: Isokrates did excellently, though not faultlessly, a thing from which the finest instincts of Attic Greek were averse, but which, on the other hand, could be reproduced with fair success in any language that was sufficiently flexible and polished. Lysias traced the canon of Attic subtlety. Isokrates sent his influence from Greece into modern Europe ¹⁶ by founding a norm of literary prose.

Two circumstances especially favoured his aptitude for such a task. The first was that, until after the time of Aristotle, epideictic oratory, the branch of Isokrates, had a higher dignity in general ¹⁷ estimation than either the forensic or the deliberative. A forensic or a deliberative speech had served its purpose when it had been spoken; it might be published, for students or for statesmen; but it was not intrinsically a part of the national literature in the same sense as (for instance) the Panegyrikos. Aristotle, who had probably heard Demosthenes, notices him only cursorily. Theophrastos, in tracing the development of Attic prose, stopped at Isokrates. It was only later Greek critics who could see things in a more just perspective. Secondly, Isokrates is ¹⁸ the only considerable Attic writer who was also a popular teacher of composition. He could affirm that all the men formed in his school had the same stamp of style: and, so far as the statement can be tested, it seems to be strictly true. The Isokratic ¹⁹ prose was meant to be read rather than to be spoken. This is the basis of its character, distinguishing it from the earlier rhetorical prose, and fitting it to influence the literary prose of the modern world. To the conservative section of the Gorgian school this seemed, of course, an error. When Alkidamas ²⁰ attacked Isokrates in his essay against the composers of ‘written discourses’ ( γραπτοὺς λόγους),—meaning, by that phrase, discourses composed, not to be spoken, but to be read,—he was loyal to the genuine tradition of his master. The object of Gorgias was to cultivate the faculty of oral and extemporary eloquence. But Isokrates, moved partly by his own want of voice and nerve, partly by the desire of teaching all Greece and of doing permanent work, resolved that epideictic oratory should have a literary form. For these purposes, as he saw, the composition of Gorgias and Thrasymachos, with its short clauses, was not sufficiently copious: that of Thucydides was not too rough. He sought, then, to give speech a fuller flow and a softer tone: and he moderated the use of every ornament which disturbs this flow or violates this tone. The chief ²¹ marks of Isokratic prose are,—the avoidance of poetical diction; the ampler period; evenness, obtained especially by systematic care against the collision of vowels; and the sparing admission of anything like a declamatory or passionate strain. These essential characteristics, to judge from fragments and from notices, were common to the Isokratic school. Epideictic Rhetoric, in application to its old subjects, was doomed. The first generation of Isokratics already felt that it could not last out their time, and were led, therefore, to widen their range. The application of Epideictic Rhetoric to ²² History was a gain for Rhetoric, and, on the whole, a decided gain for the popular culture of that day: it was even so far a gain to History that much good work was done by men like Theopompos who, fifty years before, would have left nothing but a collection of panegyrical discourses. On the other hand, the vice of an origin from the Rhetoric of display became disastrously apparent when lesser men than Theopompos began to think that they must be accurate if they could, but brilliant at all costs. This evil tendency, however, did not fully set in until the style itself was declining: and it ought not to mislead us into underrating the value to literature of the Isokratic prose. Theopompos was a thoroughly ²³ Isokratic composer, but, as might be expected in the disciple who ‘needed the curb,’ had more force and passion. Ephoros, emulating the smooth copiousness ²⁴ of his master, was languid and diffuse. Such a contrast of personal temperaments and faculties is the best possible evidence to the definiteness of that common type which could still be recognised in both. The same type was equally clear in Theodektes, who ²⁵ seems to have had some dialectical training; and in Kephisodoros, who shared the orthodox hostility of ²⁶ his school to dialectic. In short, there was now a literary method, not to be obscured by individualities of culture or of aptitude, in virtue of which its possessor could be called Isokratic.

By 350 B. C. this method had no longer any ²⁷ serious rival in its claim to be considered as the normal prose. A writer like the so-called Antisthenes might popularise his dialectic in such a piece ²⁸ as the controversy between Ajax and Odysseus. Alkidamas might defend, and Lykophron illustrate, the principles of Gorgias. Polykrates and Zoilos might show that something of Lysian elegance could be carried into other fields than the forensic. But, for the general uses of literature, the Isokratic style had been accepted as the standard. This may be seen from the way in which its influence grew upon writers outside the school. Plato's style has no law ²⁹ but itself; it has its unique place in the border-land between poetry and prose, being, as a rule, at its highest when it is nearer to the former. For our present purpose, it would scarcely be profitable to dwell on the Menexenos. The general marks of its style are manifest; the easy, irregular structure of dialogue interferes with the management of the unwonted oratorical period; the ornament is in the immature manner of Gorgias, not at all in that of Isokrates or Lysias; the diction shows occasional redundance, and even what a modern reader can agree with ancient Greek criticism in regarding as of doubtful correctness; the habit of irony slips into a homeliness which, here, is grotesque; and a few phrases are ‘not far from dithyrambs.’ But then it might always be answered that, at worst, the Menexenos is an imperfectly elaborated joke. The influence of the new prose, in so far as it was felt by Plato, must be sought on a surer and broader ground. Two general characteristics of his later work seem to afford such ground. First: the later, as compared with the earlier, dialogues—e.g. the Laws, Timaeos, Kritias as compared with the Republic—have less of short question and answer, and more of continuous exposition. The style of oral dialogue is passing over into a finished literary prose. Secondly: the strongest single peculiarity of the new prose—avoidance of hiatus—becomes more and more marked the later down we go. The instances of hiatus in the Phaedros are not one half so numerous as in the Republic or the Symposium, and the rate of decrease is (approximately) progressive in the Laws, Philebos, Timaeos, Kritias, Sophistes, Politikos ³⁰ ; suggesting that an emendation which, in these dialogues, introduces hiatus is, so far, improbable a priori.

Xenophon was no trained rhetor. The natural eloquence which did good service in the Retreat was of the rough and ready kind; nor, in writing, did he consciously or systematically aim at art. If he had studied expression, he would probably have become Lysian: as it is, in his manner of neither seeking nor declining ornament, he is sometimes like Andokides. Xenophon, living away from Athens, did not come under the direct influence of the Isokratic school. But there are indications, which a sober criticism can scarcely reject, that in his later years he was strongly influenced as a writer by his fellow-demesman and early friend, whose works were then read throughout Greece. Xenophon was engaged on the Hellenika to the end of his life; and the Agesilaos, of which the genuineness seems certain, was one of his very latest writings. In both these there is a distinct dualism of style. The last five books of the Hellenika are decidedly smoother and more copious than their predecessors: they have something of the Isokratic manner which just then was coming into history. The Agesilaos is thoroughly Xenophontic in diction: the structure of the sentences is, on the whole, rather stiff and uniform: there are characteristic oddities—e.g., the frequency of γε μήν, ἀλλὰ μήν—as in the Hipparchikos and elsewhere. But the historical portion—a narrative of the hero's deeds, partly adapted from the Hellenika—is separate from the rest in its greater smoothness of flow.

Unquestionably it was more as a practical teacher ³¹ than as a theorist, and more as a writer than as a teacher, that Isokrates was important for Attic prose. Earlier contributors to the Art of Rhetoric had collected materials which Isokrates worked up into something like a system. Anaximenes, who, like Isokrates, conceived political Rhetoric as a culture, drew up the best practical treatise on Rhetoric which has come down to us in Greek; it would have been the best in Greek or Latin, if the Rhetorica ad Herennium were not extant. But, if a philosophical treatment is required, neither Anaximenes nor the writer to Herennius can be accepted. Aristotle stands alone. Yet the school of Aristotle—in which Rhetoric was both scientifically and assiduously taught—produced not a single orator of note except Demetrios Phalereus; the school of Isokrates produced a host. Why was this so? Clearly because Isokrates, though inferior in his grasp of principles, was greatly superior in the practical department of teaching. It was not mainly by his theory, τέχνη, it was rather by exercises, μελέται, for which his own writings furnished models, that he formed his pupils. At the same time, his theory, so far as it went, was definite. Aristotle's philosophy of Rhetoric proved comparatively barren, not at all because Rhetoric is incapable of profiting materially by such treatment, but because such treatment can be made fruitful only by laborious attention to the practical side of the discipline. Had Aristotle's Rhetoric been composed a century earlier, it would have been inestimable to oratory. As it was, the right thing was done too late.

In the political eloquence contemporary with ³² Demosthenes, earlier types are continued, combined and perfected. The Lysian tradition, which Isaeos had striven to ally with the frank strength of technical mastery, is joined by Hypereides to the Isokratic. The Isokratic manner is united, in Lykurgos, to that of the long neglected school of Antiphon. That same archaic style, studied in a greater master, Thucydides, reaches, in Demosthenes, a final harmony with both the Lysian and the Isokratic; while Aeschines, the clever and diligent amateur, shows, by his failures, how much patient science was needed to bring a faultless music out of all the tones which had now made themselves clear in Attic speech. But, among these various elements, one is dominant. ³³ The Isokratic style has become the basis of the rest. That style, in its essential characteristics of rhythm ³⁴ and period, passed into the prose of Cicero; modern prose has been modelled on the Roman; and thus, in forming the literary rhetoric of Attica, Isokrates founded that of all literatures.