Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/350

 326 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE rhetoric in Cicero's time, a man of some genius and much enthusiasm, but with no interest in anything but rhetorical technique. He criticises Thucydides the his- torian, Plato the philosopher, Isocrates the publicist, Isaeus the acute lawyer, Lysias the work-a-day persuader of juries, all from practically the same stand-point— that of a man who had all his life studied style and taught style, who had written twenty volumes of history with a view to nothing but style. In his own province he is an excellent critic. He sees things which we do not see, and he feels more strongly than we feel. He speaks with genuine hatred of the Asiatic or late and florid style, the ' foreign harlot ' who has crept into the place of the true and simple Attic. Our tradition has thus neglected historians, playwrights, philosophers, men of science, and clung to the men who wrote in speech-form ; and these last, whatever the aim and substance of their writing, are all judged as technical orators. The importance to us of the 'orators' lies in three things. First, they illustrate the gradual building up of a normal and permanent prose style. The earliest artists in prose had been over-ornate ; Gorgias too poetical, Antiphon too formal and austere, Thucydides too difficult. Thrasymachus of Chalcedon (p. 162) probably gave the necessary correction to this set of errors so far as speak- ing went. His style was ' medium ' between the pomp of Gorgias and the colloquialness of ordinary speech. His terse periods and prose rhythms pleased Aristotle. But he was a pleader, not a writer. The next step appears in Lysias. He had an enormous practice as a writer of speeches under the Restored Democracy, and, without much eloquence or profound knowledge of the law, a reputation for almost always winning his cases. His