Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/500

478 478 HISTORY OF THE guilty, whether truly or falsely, but was obliged to leave Athens. From this time he occupied himself with commercial transactions, which he carried on chiefly in Cyprus, and with endeavours to get recalled from banishment ; until, on the downfal of the thirty tyrants, he returned to his native city under the protection of the genera) amnesty which the opposing parties had sworn to observe. Though he was not without molestation on account of the old charge, we find him still engaged in public affairs, till at last, being sent as ambassador to Sparta in the course of the Corinthian war, in order to negotiate a peace, he was again banished by the Athenians because the result of his negotiations was unsatisfactory. We have three remaining speeches by Andocides : the first relating to his return from exile, and delivered after the restoration of the democracy by the overthrow of the Four hundred counsellors ; the second relating to the mysteries, and delivered in 01. 95, 1. c.c. 400, in which Andocides endeavours to confute the continually reviving charge with respect to the profanation of the mysteries, by going back to the origin of the whole matter ; the third on the peace with Lacedsemon, delivered in 01. 97, 1. B.C. 392, in which the orator urges the Athenian assembly to conclude peace with the Spartans. The genuineness of the last speech is doubted even by the old grammarians : but the speech against Alcibiades, the object of which is to get Alcibiades ostracized instead of the orator, is undoubtedly spurious. If the speech were genuine it could not have been written by Andocides consistently with the well-known circum- stances relating to the ostracism of Alcibiades : in that case it must be assigned to Phreax, who shared with Alcibiades in the danger of ostra- cism ; and this is the opinion of a modern critic :* but the contents and form of the speech prove beyond all power of confutation that it is an imitation by some later rhetorician, t Although Andocides has been included in the list of the ten celebrated orators, he is very inferior to the others in talent and art. + He exhibits neither any particular acuteness in treating the great events which are referred to in his speeches, nor that precision in the connexion of his thoughts which marks all the other writers of this time : yet we must give him credit for his freedom from the mannerism into which the more distinguished men of the age so easily fell, and also for a sort of natural liveliness, which may together be considered as reliques of the austere style, as it appears in Antiphon and Thucydides. § Yalckenaer.— [Sec Thirlwall, Hist, of Greece, III., p. 463.— Ed.] According to Meier, de Andocidis quce vulgo feriur oratione in Alcibiadem, a series of programmes of the University of Halle. + It is surprising that Critias was not rather enrolled among the Ten, but perhaps his having been one of the Thirty stood in his way. Comp. Chap. XXXI. § 4. § The dvriKeiyAv>i i%ts prevails in Andocides also, but without any striving after symmetry of expression.
 * Taylor (Lediones Lysiaca, c. VI.), who has not been refuted by Ruhnken and