and this reading aloud gives the clue to the rules about



PROSE STYLE IN THE 'ORATORS' 331

rhythm and hiatus, just as it explains many details in the
system of punctuation — for instance, the dash below the
Hne which warns you beforehand of the approach of the
end of the sentence. We are but little sensible to rhythm
and less to hiatus or the clashing of two vowel-sounds
without a dividing consonant ; we are keenly alive to
rhyme. The Greeks generally did not notice rhyme, but
felt rhythm strongly, and abhorred hiatus. In poetry
hiatus was absolutely forbidden. In careful prose it was
avoided in varying degrees by most writers after about
380 B.C. Isocrates is credited with introducing the fashion.
He was followed by all the historians and philosophers
and writers of belles lettres, and even, in their old age, by
Plato and Xenophon.^ The orators who 'published'
generally felt bound to preserve the prevailing habit.
In the real debates of the Assembly, of course, such
refinement would scarcely be either attainable or notice-
able, but a published speech had to have its literary
polish. A written speech, however, was an exceptional
thing. The ordinary orators — Callistratus, Thrasybulus,
Leodamas — were content simply to speak. Even
Demosthenes must have spoken ten times as much as
he wrote.

The speeches we possess are roughly of three kinds.
First, there are the bought speeches preserved by the
client for whom they were written : such are ox? seven

* There is indeed some dou^* ;!juut this avoidance of hiatus. Our earliest
papyri give texts wbAc*" :-w.nit hiatus freely. The funeral speech of Hyperides,
for instance, abounds in harsh instances, and the pre-Alexandrian papyri of
Plato have more hiatus than our ordinary MSS. Does- this mean that the
Alexandrian scholars deliberately doctored their classical texts and removed
hiatus ? Or does it mean that our pre-Alexandrian remains are generally in-
accurate ? The former view must be dismissed as flatly impossible, though
there are some difficulties in the latter.



332 LITERATURE OE ANCIENT GREECE

speeches For Apollodorus in the Demosthenic collection,
those of Hyperides For Lycophron and Against A thenogenes,
and most of the will cases of Isaeus. Very similar is
the case of Lysias, viii., in which some person unnamed
renounces the society of his companions — resigns from
his club, as we should say — on the ground that they
have spoken ill of him, have accused him of intruding
upon them, and have persuaded him to buy a bad horse.
There were doubtless other versions of the affair in
existence, and the motive for having the protest copied
and circulated is obvious. Another Lysian fragment
has a somewhat similar origin. The second part of
the speech for Polystratus (§ ii to the end) is not a
defence of Polystratus at all, but a moral rehabilitation
of the speaker himself, the defendant's son.

Again, there are the orators' own publications — some-
times mere pamphlets never spoken, sometimes actual
speeches reissued in permanent form as an appeal to
the widest possible circle. Andocides's publication On
the Mysteries is a defence of his career, without which
he could scarcely have lived safely in Athens. It was the
same with the rival speeches On the Crown. ^■Eschines
had lost his case and his reputation ; in self-defence he
published a revised and improved version of his speech,
answering points which he had missed at the actual
trial. This compelled Demosthenes, who at the time
had almost entirely ceased writing, to revise and publish
his reply. Most of our political speeches, however,
such as the Olynthiacs and Philippics, seem to have
been circulated to advocate a definite policy ; and it
is noteworthy that publication is almost always the
resort of the Opposition, not condescended to by the
men in power.



REASONS FOR PUBLISHING SPEECHES 333

There remain a few cases where the object of publi-
cation was merely literary or educational. The alleged
remains of Gorgias, two speeches of Alkidamas, and
two of Isocrates are 'mere literature.' The tetralogies
of Antiphon are educational exercises with a political
object. The great Epideictic ' Logoi ' — 'speeches of
display' — really deserve a better name. They express
the drift of the pan-Hellenic sentiment of the time, and
are only unpractical in the sense that internationalism
has no executive power. Gorgias, in his Olympiacus * of
408, urged a definite pan-Hellenic policy against Persia.
Lysias in 388 compromised the Athenian Democracy by
a generous but wild onslaught on Dionysius of Syra-
cuse. Two Olympiads later Isocrates gave the world a
masterpiece of political criticism, the Panegyricus. The
funeral speeches which were delivered yearly on those
slain in war, were religious sermons of a somewhat formal
type, and were seldom published. Our only genuine
example has a practical interest as giving Hyperides's
defence of his war policy in 323. And doubtless the
lost Funeral Speech of Demosthenes contained a similar
justification of Chaeronea.

The publication of a speech, then, depended chiefly on
practical considerations, very little on the artistic value
of the speech itself. The preservation of what was
published was very largely a matter of accident. The
movement for preserving and collectuig books may be
roughly dated from the founding of Aristotle's school
in 335 B.C. The Peripatetics formed the beginning of
the scholarly or Alexandrian movement in antiquity.
They sought out remarkable books as they sought out
facts of history and nature, to catalogue and understand
them. And though it is not probable that Aristotle
23



334 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

attached much value to the works of Demosthenes and
Hyperides, or even Lysias, the tendency he had set
going secured to some extent the preservation of every
manuscript current under a distinguished name. The
very idea of the great hbraries of the next century
would never have been conceived had there not already
existed a number of small libraries and a wide-spread
spirit of book-preserving.



Lives of the Orators

Up to Isocrates

A canonic list of uncertain origin — it appears in
Caecilius of Cale-Acte, but not in his contemporary
Dionysius — gives us ten Attic orators par excellence:
Antiphon, Andocides, Lysias, Isocrates, Isaeus, Lycurgus,
-^schines, Hyperides, Demosthenes, Deinarchus. Arbi-
trary as it is, this list determined what orators should
be read for educational purposes from the first century
onward, and has, of course, controlled our tradition.
Outside of it we possess only one important fragment by
Alkidamas, on " The Sophists, or Those who compose Written
Speediest' and some rather suspicious '•eux d'esprit —
speeches of Odysseus by the same Alkidamas, of Ajax and
Odysseus by Antisthenes the cynic, a Praise of Helen and
a speech of Palavicdes by Gorgias. The genuineness
of these is on the whole probable, out Ihey have little
more than an antiquarian value. Happily sortie speeches
by other writers have been preserved by being errone-
ously ascribed to one of the canonical ten. In the
Demosthenic collection, for instance, the accusation of



ANTIPHON 33 5

Neaera is the work of some able and well-informed
Athenian, and the speech On the Halonnese is perhaps
by Hegesippus.

Of Antiphox little is known beyond the narrative of
Thucydides mentioned above (p. 198). He had worked
all his life preparing for the revolution of 411. He led
it and died for it, and made what Thucydides considered
the greatest speech in the world in defence of his action
in promoting it. We possess three real speeches of
Antiphon, and three tetralogies. These latter are exer-
cises in speech-craft, and show us the champion of the
oppressed aristocrats training his friends for legal prac-
tice, as Thucydides tells us he did. He takes an imagi-
nary case, with as little positive or detailed evidence as
possible, and gives us two skeleton speeches — they are
not more — for the accusation, and two for the defence.
Considering the difficulty of the game, it is well played.
The arguments are necessarily inconclusive and often
sophistical, but they could not be otherwise when real
evidence was against the rules. Minute legal argument
is also debarred. In fact the law contemplated in the
tetralogies is not Attic, but a kind of common-sense
system. It may be that Antiphon, like many of his
party, was really trying to train the aristocrats of the
subject states more than his compatriots. The real
speeches are all on murder cases, the finest being the
defence of Euxitheus (?) the Mitylenean on the charge
of having murdered his shipmate Herodes. The first
speech. On a Charge of Poisoning, deals with a singularly
tragic story. A slave-girl was about to be sold by a
ruffianly master, with whom she was in love ; a woman
who wished to be rid of her own husband, induced the
girl to give the two men, at a dinner which they had



336 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

together in a Piraiiis tavern, something which she
alleged to be a love-philtre. Both men died. The
girl confessed forthwith, and was executed ; proceedings
now being taken against the real culprit.

Andocides, son of Leogoras, of the family of the
Sacred Heralds, comes to us as a tough, enterprising
man, embittered by persecution. In the extraordinary
panic which followed the mutilation of the figures of
Hermes in 415, Andocides was among the three hundred
persons denounced by the informer Diocleides, and, un-
like most of the rest, was in a sense privy to the outrage.
It was merely a freak on the part of some young sceptics
in his own club, who probably thought the Hermae both
ridiculous and indecent. To stop the general panic
and prevent possible executions of the innocent, he
gave information under a promise of indemnity. It is
one of those acts which are never quite forgiven. In
spite of the indemnity, he was driven into banishment
by a special decree excluding from public and sacred
places *' those who had committed impiety and confessed
it." His next twelve years were spent in adventurous
trading, and were ruled by a constant effort to procure
his return. The first attempt was in 411, after he
had obtained rights of timber-cutting from Archelaus
of Macedon, and sold the timber at cost price to the
Athenian fleet. He was promptly re-expelled. The
second return was the occasion of the speech About
Returning Hojne, and took place after 410, when he had
used his influence at Cyprus to have corn-ships sent to
relieve the scarcity at Athens. He returned finally with
Thucydides and all the other exiles, political and crimi-
nal, after the amnesty in 403 (see p. 338). He spent his
money lavishly on public objects, and escaped prosecu-



ANDOCIDES. LYSIAS 337

tion till 399, when the notorious Meletus, among others,
charged him with impiety, raking up the old scandal
of 415, and accusing him further of having profaned the
Mysteries. Andocides was acquitted. His speech has
its name from the accusation, but its main object is
really to give the speaker's own version of that youthful
act for which he had been so long persecuted. The
third speech, advocating the peace with Lacedaemon
in 390, failed in its purpose, and was apparently pub-
lished afterwards as a justification of the writer's policy.

Lysias was a Syracusan, born probably about 450,
though his extant work lies entirely between 403 and
380. His father Kephalus, known to us from the
charming portrait in Plato's Republic, was invited to
Athens by Pericles. He owned several houses and a
large shield-factory in the Piraeus. Lysias went to
Thurii at the age of fifteen, and had his first oppor-
tunity of suffering for the Athenian Democracy in 412,
after the defeat of the Sicilian Expedition. Expelled
from South Italy, he returned to Athens, and continued
his father's business in partnership with his brother
Polemarchus. He composed speeches for amusement,
and possibly gave lectures on rhetoric. We hear that
he was not successful as a teacher compared with
Theodorus and Isocrates ; which is not surprising if
either the Eroticus attributed to him by Plato in the
Phcsdrus, or the Epitaphms extant in his remains, is a
genuine type of his epideictic style.

In 404 things changed with Lysias. The Thirty Tyrants
took to plundering the rich * Metoikoi ' or resident aliens.
The two brothers were arrested. Lysias escaped, Pole-
marchus was put to death, and what could be found
of the property was confiscated. Evidently not all ; for



3 38 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

Lysias, throwing himself with vigour into the demo-
cratic cause, was able to supply the army with 200
shields, 2000 drachmaj in money, and large indirect
assistance as well. On the return of the Demos, Lysias
was accepted as a full citizen on the proposal of Thrasy-
bulus himself. He made his one extant * Demegoria '
or Parliamentary speech (34) in protest against the
proposal of one Phormisius to limit the franchise to
house or land holders.^ Phormisius's policy would
have been that of Thucydides, Isocrates, Theramenes,
and, of course, that of Plato and Aristotle. But Lysias
was an unabashed ' ochlocrat.' He was at this time
poor, and his citizenship was shown to be illegal almost
as soon as it was granted. It was annulled on the
motion of Archinus, a democrat who had fought with
Thrasybulus but favoured the moderates. Lysias was
debarred from direct political ambition, but repaired
his fortunes and worked well for his party by ceaseless
activity in the law-courts. On the expulsion of the
tyrants in 403, when the various factions were ignorant
of their comparative strength and tired of strife, an
amnesty had been passed, including all except the actual
tyrants, and allowing even these either to leave the
country unmolested, or to be tried individually on their
personal acts. When the extreme democrats realised
their strength, they regretted this amnesty, and some
of the chief speeches of Lysias are attempts to make it
nugatory. Thus in the speech Against Eratosthenes, who
had been one of the tyrants, but claimed to be tried,
according to the amnesty, for his personal acts only,
Lysias insists on the solidarity of the whole body of
tyrants. The man had been implicated in the arrest

^ Cf. W. M. Aristotles uud Athen, ii. 226.



POLITICS OF LYSIAS 339

of Polemarchus, though not in his condemnation to
death. There was nothing else against him, and he seems
to have been acquitted.

The speech Against Agordtus takes a curious ground
about the amnesty. Agoratus had practised as an in-
former in 405 and 404, and falsely claimed the reward
for slaying Phrynichus. This shows, argues Lysias, that
he was a democrat. The amnesty was only made- by the
Demos with the oligarchs, and does not apply between
two democrats ! In" a similar partisan spirit Lysias
persecutes the younger Alcibiades. His offence was that
he served in the cavalry instead of the heavy infantry.
He claims that he had special permission, and it would
be hard to imagine a more venial offence. But the
father's memory stank in the nostrils of the radicals,
and the act savoured of aristocratic assumption. Lysias
indicts him in two separate speeches — first, for desertion,
and secondly, for failure to serve in the army, invoking
the severest possible penalty ! After these speeches, and
that Against the Corn-Dealers^ and the markedly unfair
special pleading Against Enandros, it is difficult to reject
other documents in the Lysian collection on the ground
of their 'sycophantic tone.'

Lysias is especially praised in antiquity for his power
of entering into the character of every different client
and making his speech sound ' natural,' not bought.
His catholicity of sympathy may even seem unscrupu-
lous, but it has Hmits. He cannot really conceive an
honest oligarch. When he has to speak for one, as in
25, he makes him frankly cynical : " / used to be an
oligarch because it suited my interests ; now it suits me to be
a democrat. Every one acts on the same principle. The
important point is that I have not broken the lai<"!'



340 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

He speaks well for the clients of the moderate
party, like Mantitheos, who had trouble from sycophants,
and especially well against the hunger for confiscation
of property which marked the worst type of extremist
(i8, 19), The speech For the Incapable Man, a cripple
pauper whose right to state relief had been disputed, is
good-natured and democratic. The pauper cannot have
paid for the speech ; and, even if some one else did, the
care taken with it shows real sympathy. On the whole,
considering that we have thirty-four more or less com-
plete speeches of Lysias — the ancients had 425, of which
233 were thought genuine ! — and some considerable
fragments; considering, too, that he was a professional
lawyer writing steadily for some twenty-five years — he
comes out of his severe ordeal rather well. It is no
wonder that Plato disliked him. He was a type of the
adroit practical man. He was an intemperate democrat.
Above all, he had handled the Socratic ^schines (frag, i)
very roughly. That philosopher had tried to live as a
moneyless sage like his master, his simple needs sup-
ported by the willing gifts of friends and disciples.
Unfortunately he fell on hard times. His friends did not
appreciate his gospel ; his neighbours fled from their
houses to avoid him. At last they prosecuted him for
debt, and the unfortunate priest of poverty had to marry
the septuagenarian widow of a pomatum-seller, and run
the business himself ! The jest may have been pleasing
to the court; but not to Plato. And still less can he have
liked the turbulent success of the Olympian oration, when
Lysias took his revenge for the enslavement of his native
city by calling Hellas to unite and sail against Dionysius
— which Hellas never thought of attempting — and inciting
the crowd to burn and pillage the tents of the tyrant's lega-



CHARACTER OF LYSIAS. IS^US 341

tion, which the crowd proceeded to do. The act must
have lowered Athens in the eyes of Greece. It is valu-
able to us as showing that there was a real Lysias capable
of passion and indiscretion beneath that cloak of infinite
tact and good temper, and "remoteness from the possi-
bility of making a mistake," which is preserved to us in
the speeches.

Is^us of Chalkis was, like Lysias, a foreigner, but,
unlike him, accepted frankly his exclusion from political
life. We possess ten complete speeches of his, and large
fragments of two more. All are about inheritances, and
all effective ; though the ancient judgment is true, which
says that while Lysias preserves an air of candour when
his processes are most questionable, Isaeus hammers so
minutely at his arguments that he generally rouses dis-
trust. His extant speeches fall between 390 and 340 B.C.



ISOCRATES, SON OF ThEODORUS, FROM ERCHIA
(436-338 B.C.).

ISOCRATES's century of life reaches through the most
eventful century of Greek history, from Pericles to
Alexander. He was the son of a rich flute-maker, and
held the views of the cultivated middle class. He was
in close relation with the great orator and statesman
of the moderates, Theramenes, and his successor Archi-
nus, the disfranchiser of Lysias. He was an enthusiast
for education. He heard Protagoras, Prodicus, and
Socrates. In his old age he speaks with pride of his
school-days, and in a sense he spent all his life in school
as learner and teacher. He never looked to a public
career. His views were unpopular. He was scrupulous



342 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

and sensitive ; even in later life his shyness was an
amusement to his pupils. However, towards the end
of the war, when his father was dead, and every one
alike in straits for money, Isocrates had to support
himself by his wits. As soon as peace was made
and he was free to leave Athens, he went to
Thessaly and learned from the great Gorgias — a singular
step for a poor man, if we accept the current
myth of the 'grasping sophists.' But doubtless the old
man was ready to help a promising pupil without
a fee.

He was back in Athens by 400, a professional speech-
writer and teacher of rhetoric. The latter profession
cannot have paid under the circumstances, but the
former did. Aristotle says that the booksellers in his
time had * rolls and rolls ' of legal speeches bearing the
name of Isocrates. He himself disliked and ignored
this period of 'doll-making' in contrast to the 'noble
sculpture' of his later life,^ and his pupils sometimes
denied its existence altogether. It was at Chios, not
Athens, that he first set up a formal school of rhetoric,
probably in 393, when, in consequence of Conon's
victories, Chios returned to the Athenian alliance.
Conon was a friend of Isocrates, and may have given
him some administrative post there. The island had
long been famous for its good laws and peaceful life.
Speech-writing for courts of law was obviously not
permissible in an administrator ; even for an Athenian
politician it was considered questionable. But there
could be no objection to his teaching rhetoric if he
wished. Isocrates had nine pupils in Chios, and founded
his reputation as a singularly gifted teacher. When

^ Dionys. Isocr. i8, Antid. 2.



'PHILOSOPP^Y' OF ISOCRATES 343

he returned to Athens (391 ?) he did no more law-
court work. He established a school, not of mere
rhetoric, but of what he called philosophy.

He is at great pains to explain himself, both in the
fragment Against the Sophists, which formed a sort of
prospectus of his system, and afterwards in the elaborate
defence of his life and pursuits, which goes by the name
of the Speech on the Exchange of Property. His philo-
sophy is not what is sometimes so called — paradoxical
metaphysics, barren logomachies, or that absolutely
certain knowledge a priori about all the world, which
certain persons offer for sale at extremely reasonable
prices, but which nobody ever seems to possess. Nor,
again, is it the mere knack of composing speeches for
the law-courts, like Lysias, or of making improvisations,
like Alkidamas. Isocrates means by philosophy what
Protagoras and Gorgias meant — a practical culture of
the whole mind, strengthening the character, forming
a power of 'generally right judgment,' and developing
to the highest degree the highest of human powers.
Language. He requires in his would-be ' philosopher ' a
broad amateur knowledge of many subjects — of history,
of dialectics and mathematics, of the present political
condition of all Greece, and of literature. He is far
more philosophic and cultured than the average orator,
far more practical and sensible than the philosophers.
It is a source of lifelong annoyance to him that both
philosophers and practical men despise his middle
course, and that the general public refuses to under-
stand him. Plato in two passages criticises the position
very lucidly. In the Phcedrus (see above, p. 305) he
expresses his sympathy with Isocrates as compared
with the ordinary speech-writers. In the epilogue to



344 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

the EutJiydcviHs^ Crito mentions the criticisms of a
certain n imeless person upon Socrates: — "What sort
of man was the critic?" — "Not a philosopher, not a
speaker." Crito doubts if he has ever been into a law-
court; but he understands the art of speech, and writes
wonderfully. — *M//," answers Socrates, ^^ he is what Pro-
dicus used to call a Boundary Stone, half philosopher and
half practical states ma Ji. The Botmdary Stones believe
themselves to be the wisest people in the world ; but probably
are not so. For practical statesmanship may be the right
thing, or philosophy may be the right thing, or conceivably
both may be good, though different. But in none of these
cases can that which is half one and half the other be
superior to both. Perhaps in our friend's eyes both are
positively bad?" The likeness to Isocrates is beyond dis-
pute. Isocrates had an easy reply : both practical man
and philosopher are one-sided ; the one wants culture and
breadth of imagination, the other loses his hold of con-
crete life. As a matter of fact his answer was his success.
His school became the University of Greece. It satisfied
a wide-spread desire for culture on the part of men who
did not mean to become professional mathematicians or
philosophers in the stricter sense. The leading names of
the next generation come chiefly from the school of Iso-
crates — the statesmen Timotheus and Leodamas, the tragic