Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/430

400 under Roman sway. Happily the plan of his history was so wide that it embraced much else: and to him we owe our knowledge of the first Punic War, and a great deal relating to the kingdoms of Syria and Egypt established after the death of Alexander.

Those are the four great historians of Greece. There were many others, but their works have been lost. The later writers of history in Greek—Diodorus of Sicily, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Appian (in the last century B.C.) are on a lower level as artists, and the two last were historians rather of Rome than Greece. To Diodorus, however, who was dull but honest, we owe a good deal of what is known of the history of Sicily.

The last department of Greek classical literature to be noticed is Oratory. Democratic institutions, I have already said, imply the existence and influence of oratory. Pericles and the demagogues who succeeded him were what they were because they knew how to persuade the people. Popular law courts involve the same necessity. In Athens, for instance, the jury consisted of some five hundred men. To address them successfully implied something of the same qualities as those possessed by a popular leader. Everywhere in Greece, therefore, we find professional teachers of the art of speech. No subject was more often professed by the Sophists, but of scientific treatises on its principles—represented by the general term Rhetoric, we have of the classical age only that of Aristotle. Of the actual products of the art—speeches—we have somewhat more. A class of professional speech-writers arose