Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/358

 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