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 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-