Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/53

Rh Halicarnassus, and in the first century after Christ by the geographer Strabo, the Jewish historians Josephus and Nicolas of Damascus, and the biographer Plutarch the Boeotian. The ecclesiastical and the Byzantine historians keep up the tradition to the end. Meanwhile the varied interests of free states had given birth to oratory, which flourished at Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. We possess orations of ten Attic orators, the most famous of whom was Demosthenes (B.C. 384–322). With the loss of freedom oratory lost some of its significance, but it was taught and practised as an art in various parts of Hellas, especially in Rhodes and the Greek cities of Asia. And though we possess few specimens for the next five centuries—the orations of Dion Chrysostom in the first, and of the Emperor Julian in the third century A.D., being the most important—yet it was taken up again by the Christian Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., and thus had an unbroken tradition to the end. It was this popular use of Greek prose that produced the "common dialect," formed on the Attic use, which prevailed over the Greek world, and was adopted by writers in other departments, such as Lucian in his dialogues; Appian and Arrian in their histories, in the second century, and the romance writers in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.

The fact that Athens was the chief home of philosophy from the fourth century B.C., also determined the fact that Attic in some form or another was to be the language of philosophers. From Plato (B.C. 427–347) and Aristotle (B.C. 384–324) to the