Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/490

468 468 HISTORY OF THE that it should take for its pattern the poetry which had preceded it by so long an interval : the ears of the Greeks, accustomed to poetry, re- quired of prose, if it professed to be more than a mere necessary com- munication of thoughts, if it aimed at beauty, a great resemblance to poetry. Gorgias complied with this requisition in two ways : in the first place, he employed poetical words, especially rare words, and new compounds, such as were favourites with the lyric and dithyrambic poets.* As this poetical colouring did not demand any high flight of ideas, or any great exertion of the imaginative powers, and as it re- mained only an outward ornament, the style of Gorgias became turgid and bombastic, and compositions characterized by this fault were said, in the technical language of Greek rhetoric, to gorgiaze.^ In the second place, the prevailing taste for prose at that time seemed to require some substitute for the rhythmical proportions of poetry. Gorgias effected this by giving a sort of symmetry to the structure of the sentences, so that the impression conveyed was, that the different members of the period were parallel and corresponding to one another, and this stamped the whole with an appearance of artificial regularity. To this belonged the art of making the sentences of equal length, of making them corre- spond to one another in form, and of making them end in the same way : + also the use of words of similar formation and of similar sound, i. e. almost rhyming with one another : § also, the antithesis, in which, besides the opposition of thought, there was a correspondence of all the different parts and individual points; an artifice, which easily led the orator to introduce forced and unnatural combinations, || and which, in the case of the Sicilian rhetoricians, had already incurred the ridicule of Epicharmus.^f If we add to this the witty turns, the playful style, the various methods of winning the attention, which Gorgias skilfully interwove with his expressions, we shall have no difficulty in under- cularly assigned to Gorgias and Lycophron. In the Poetic, 22, Aristotle says, that the SivrXa WofjLara, i. e. extraordinary words and novel compounds, occurred most frequently in the Dithyramb. f yogyia.Zf.ii. J ItroxuXa, Kaotffu., oyjioriXturx. § Tla^cvo/jMiriai, Tapn^ritni;. an aTam, or deceit : — nv * ri avarvtra; ^ixuiorigo; rou f/M a.ita.rwtt.vro; xu.1 o uTwrtifai; troipuiripo; tov /J.h afarrjivros, i. e. in which the deceiver does his duty better than the undeceiving, and where the person deceived shows more feeling lor art than the person who will not yield to the deception. All these figures occur in abundance in the very important and no doubt genuine fragments of Gorgias' funeral oration, which are preserved in the scholia on Hermogenes : see Foss, de Gorgia Leontlno, p. 69. Spengel, Zvvayuyri, p. 78. Clinton, F. H., Vol. II., p. 404, ed. 3. H In the verse : roxa fiiti t'v twoi; yan riv, t'oxo. 5s rra^a. Tnvoi; yui, which is an opposition of wards rather of sense, such as naturally resulted from a forced anti- thetical style : see especially Demetrius, de Ehmtione, § 24.
 * See Aristotle, Rhetor. III., 1, 3, and 3, 1. Here the Wx£ Iviparx are parti-
 * As in the forced but ingenious definition of tragic illusion, namely, that it is