the fuller accounts compel us to believe. This shows us at least that he had many opponents and detractors, who looked upon him as anything but a great moral and social reformer.

§ 341. It is indeed not difficult to see injurious tendencies suggested by his teaching, which might alarm more earnest thinkers than the old conservatives, who feared that he was shaking all the foundations of traditional morality and religion. There is no doubt that by his discouraging the pursuit of practical politics, of oratory, and of physical science, until men had cleared up all their first principles by ample discussion, he encouraged a strong and very mischievous tendency among all social people-that of wasting their time in conversation, the λéoxηs тEρπVÒν кαкóv of Euripides. It is no doubt very well to say that these dialectical talks were all-important. Even in the Dialogues of Plato, which are of course vastly better than the actual discussions, there is much prolixity, and much waste of time and ingenuity. Accordingly the charge that Socrates taught young men to idle in talking over what they ought to do-ȧdoλɛoxεiv as the Greeks called it is not unfounded. Again, the doctrine that each man's first and most absolute duty was to purify his own soul from moral ignorance, and attain to that knowledge which was virtue—this doctrine asserted the infinite value of each man's own good as contrasted with the good of others and of the State. Hence Socrates preached what the Germans call that absolute subjectivity which was ultimately the destruction of the whole ancient idea of the State. Though himself an exemplary citizen, it may be asserted that none of his known pupils ever turned out even a moderately good one. Young aristocrats like Alcibiades, Critias, and Charmides set up their 'absolute subjectivity' as above the laws, and endeavoured to use other men as slaves or playthings. Men of pleasure like Aristippus used the virtuous and vicious alike for their own convenience, and escaped by voluntary exile from the intolerable duties of promoting the welfare and good government of their fellows. Last of all the Cynics, such as Antisthenes and Diogenes, broke with society altogether, lived as strangers under the protection of laws which they despised, and offended and shocked their fellow-citizens by the

grossest rudeness and the most shameless indecencies. No doubt these men were parodies of Socrates. They omitted all the refinement, all the grace, all the wonderful attractiveness, which his threadbare cloak and naked feet could not impair. They exaggerated his somewhat prosy homeliness about cobblers and tinkers and tailors as the proper illustrations in moral enquiry. They travestied his noble contempt of a false and unjust public opinion into an insolent disregard of all the traditional decencies of social life. Still they were parodies. They followed up his rejection of the ordinary culture of sophistic education with a rejection of all culture, and thus for the first time that closest of all alliances in Greek social life was dissolved. Unfortunately, perhaps indeed fortunately, the books of all the Socratic philosophers, except those of Xenophon and Plato, have perished. The myriad tracts enumerated by Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of Euclid of Megara, of Stilpo, of Antisthenes, of Diogenes, of Aristippus, and of the other viri Socratici are gone, and have hardly left a trace behind. But though we thus have escaped commenting upon their style and method, it was necessary to say a word in passing on the extraordinary revolution produced by Socrates in Greek thought. Had these men lived a century earlier, they would assuredly have been Sophists. In the fourth century they were all developed in antagonism to the general features of the Sophists.

§ 342. But we must now take up another thread in the complex woof, and show how great men of a totally different stamp stood out at Athens, together with the poets, the historians, and the Sophists. We have seen in the last chapters how, from the writing of treaties and drawing up of registers, the first attempts had been suggested of setting down first mythical histories, and then annals in unfettered or prose dictiona very important and late step in a society whose poetry had long reached a splendid literary form, and had been employed for politics and for philosophy as well as for more emotional and romantic subjects. These bald and dry attempts were gradually refined into the narrative form by Hecatæus, and perfected by the introduction of dramatic

elements of humour and pathos in the matter, and mixture of dialogue with narrative in the form, by the great and consummate genius of Herodotus. But with him this branch of Greek literature reached its highest point. The later attempts to write Ionic historical prose, such as that of Ktesias, strove merely to enhance the effects attained by Herodotus, and made no lasting impression upon their age. Indeed, it is very remarkable how little even his splendid work is cited among contemporaries, and how intent the men of his day were upon a different style and a different ideal in prose writing. Not even the great body of Greek speculation which was written in Ionic prose, and which contained the deepest thoughts of their deepest thinkers-Heracleitus, Democritus, Anaxagoras-could stay the current which set in a new direc

tion.

Perhaps an account of the Sophists should not close without a word about Hippias of Elis, whom the Platonic dialogues called after him describe as an ostentatious, but clever and versatile man, accomplished in many arts, but specially in rhetoric. His writings are completely lost, and there remain from him but a couple of antiquarian notes, such as that in the Argument of the Edipus Rex on the history of the word tyrant. Among his other researches, he undertook to publish for the Eleans a complete list of the Olympic victors, and this list, surviving in Eusebius' Chronicon, has ever since been quoted as the earliest and most authentic register of events kept in Greece. But Plutarch (Numa, cap. 1) says expressly it was a late work (that is, resting on no ancient or earlier researches), and that Hippias started from no trustworthy foundation. If so, the learned world has been mistaking a sophistical tour de force for an authentic record of facts. I have discussed the question in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, ii. 164, sq., where my results have not been shaken by any of the recent discoveries at Olympia. The early Olympiads were plainly manufactured, and Pausanias, who searched for archaic work, could find no dedication older than the so-called 29th Olympiad. But he speaks of rewritten and spurious epigrams.

CHAPTER IV.

THE BEGINNINGS OF ORATORY AND THE RISE OF ATTIC PROSE COMPOSITION-GORGIAS, ANTIPHON.

§ 343. THE new direction was itself determined by two great causes the spread of education among the masses, and the increase of democratic constitutions throughout the Greek world. For the consequent importance of conversation and discussion raised eloquence above all other branches of literature, and no sooner was critical attention directed to its power and charm, than they were found to be reducible to a theory which could be taught to a degree impossible in the case of poetry. This was the teachable or artificial element in oratory, by which the speaker, in addition to the natural gifts of genius and of outward grace, adds the technical skill derived from the science of rhetoric, the réxvn, as the first inventors called it.

In the simpler sense eloquence had always been at home among the Greeks. The Homeric poems assume it as a great gift in their heroes, and one not generally possessed by them. Odysseus, and Nestor, and Phoenix are the orators of the heroic age, and the specimens of their persuasive speaking in the poems show how keenly the rhapsodists and their audiences appreciated this high quality. In Hesiod it is an inspiration of kings by the muse. The deficiency of the Spartan Menelaus almost seems suggested by Doric, not by Achæan Sparta. But in early historical days, it is remarkable how little we hear of eloquence. None of the early tyrants is reported to have owed his power to this quality, not even Peisistratus, who was a literary and perhaps an eloquent man. In the pages of Herodotus we can only find the Athenian Hippocleides, who outshines the other suitors of Agariste in social eloquence at the

feast, and Themistocles-the first notable historic instance, which the evidence of Thucydides corroborates. Though Herodotus does not remark upon it, his dramatic narrative leaves us in no doubt as to the secret of Themistocles' influence. It is, however, certain that his speaking was not more based on technical knowledge than that of the orators in the Iliad, and that, like the many other speakers in Herodotus, he trusted to a persuasive manner, and to weighty facts to produce the effect he desired. The period after the Persian wars was that which we have already discussed in connection with tragedy, and the develop. ment of philosophy and sophistic. The democratic right of free speech, and the love of talking and disputing, so dear to Greeks of all ages, comes out everywhere. Tragedy is the poetry of argument and of eloquence, rival systems of philosophy are the arena of polemic and exposition; sophistic is little more than the setting up of this formal readiness as the highest and most perfect accomplishment of life. But far more important than all these luxuries of education were the practical uses of eloquence, not only in public deliberation, but in pleading before democratic assemblies or courts of justice. Hence the necessities of the age must produce teachers of eloquence in all these branches.

$344. The earliest practical development was due to the Sicilians, who seem to have been always remarkable among the Greeks for their Attic qualities, their quickness of intellect, and love of clever speaking. There are signs of this talent even in the scanty fragments of Epicharmus and Sophron; nor did it become extinct down to the days of Cicero, who specially notes it in many places through his Verrine speeches and his rhetorical writings. But the introduction of democracy at Syracuse in 466 B.C., and at Agrigentum a few years later, gave a great impetus to the study of oratory; and so it comes that while Aristotle, speaking loosely, mentions Empedocles of Agrigentum as the master of Gorgias and the father of rhetoric, Syracuse certainly produced in Korax the first founder of the art of preparing court speeches, with a view to persuading the judges by artful attack and defence. It is said that the expulsion of the tyrants produced so many