Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/93

 i'UBLIC SPEAKING. 77 even in all foreign expeditions, they habitually acted in obedience to orders from home ; while in affairs of the interior, the supe- rior power of the ephors sensibly overshadowed them. So that, unless possessed of more than ordinary force of character, they seem to have exercised their chief influence as presiding mem- bers of the senate. There is yet another point of view in which it behoves us to take notice of the council and the agora as integral portions of the legendary government of the Grecian communities. "We are thus enabled to trace the employment of public speaking, as the standing engine of government and the proximate cause of obe- dience, to the social infancy of the nation. The power of speech in the direction of public affairs becomes more and more obvious, developed, and irresistible, as we advance towards the cul- minating period of Grecian history, the century preceding the battle of Chjeroneia. That its development was greatest among the most enlightened sections of the Grecian name, and smallest among the more obtuse and stationary, is matter of notorious fact ; nor is it less true, that the prevalence of this habit was one of the chief causes of the intellectual eminence of the nation gen- erally. At a time when all the countries around were plunged comparatively in mental torpor, there was no motive sufficiently present and powerful to multiply so wonderfully the productive minds of Greece, except such as arose from the rewards of pub- lic speaking. The susceptibility of the multitude to this sort of guidance, their habit of requiring and enjoying the stimulus which it supplied, and the open discussion, combining regular forms with free opposition, of practical matters, political as well as judicial, are the creative causes which formed such con- spicuous adepts in the art of persuasion. Nor was it only pro- fessed orators who were thus produced; didactic aptitude was formed in the background, and the speculative tendencies were supplied with interesting phenomena for observation and combi- nation, at a time when the truths of physical science were almost inaccessible. If the primary effect was to quicken the powers of expression, the secondary, but not less certain result, was to develop the habits of scientific thought. Not only the oratory of Demosthenes and Perikles, and the colloquial magic of Socrates, but also the philosophical speculations of Plato, and the syste-