Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/274

244 petty ambitions and narrow interests. Nor was oratory what it had been, when the interests concerned were greater and the issues more portentous. It came to be used as the vehicle of literary or social criticism rather than as the art of persuasion. And the most flourishing schools of rhetoric were found rather in other parts of Hellas—in Rhodes and the Asiatic cities. Philosophy, however, continued to find its chief home in Athens. Plato, who died in B.C. 347, and Aristotle in B.C. 322, had successors in their Schools of adequate abilities, though of far inferior influence. But Epicurus—an Athenian, though born in Samos—coming to Athens in B.C. 307, drew numerous pupils to his quiet garden to listen to doctrines which were to have an influence beyond the Hellenic world; and Zeno about the same time made the Stoa, in which he taught the fountain head of an elevated philosophy which attracted many of the best minds for many centuries after his death. It is true that there was an opposition which in B.C. 305 carried a decree banishing all philosophers, but this was repealed in the next year, and Athens gradually became a place of study and a university, though its fortifications, especially at the harbour, were still sufficiently formidable to make it a place of arms if the same spirit had still inspired its citizens. Yet it never again played a serious part in Greek politics, and practical men like Polybius were apt to sneer even at its philosophical schools as encouraging useless and sophistical speculations rather than sound learning.