Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/517

495 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 495 of Thucydides first began to attract notice. In reference to the speeches, Cratippus — a continner of the history — was perhaps right when he as- signed, as a reason for the omission of speeches in the VII Ith book, that Thucydides found them no longer suited to the prevailing taste.* Even at that time these speeches must have produced much the same effect upon the Attic taste as that which Cicero, at a later period, endeavoured to convey to the Romans, by comparing the style of Thucydides with old, sour, and heavy Falernian.f Thucydides was scarcely easier to the later Greeks and Romans than he is to the Greek scholars of the present time ; nay, when Cicero declares that he finds the speeches in his history almost unintelligible, modern philologers may well congratulate them- selves that they have surmounted all these difficulties, and left scarcely anything in them unexplained or misunderstood. CHAPTER XXXV. 9 1. Events which followed the Peloponncsiaii war. The adventures of Lysias. Leading epochs of his life. §2. The earlier sophistical rhetoric of Lysias. §3. The style of this rhetoric preserved in his later panegyrical speeches. § 4. Change in the oratory of Lysias produced by his own impulses and by his employment as a writer of speeches for private individuals. § 5. Analysis of his speed i against Agoratus. § G. General view of his extant orations. § 1. The Peluponnesian war, terminating, as it did, after enormous and unexampled military efforts, in the downfall of the power of Athens, was succeeded by a period of exhaustion and repose. Freedom and democracy were indeed restored by Thrasybulus and his party, but Athens had ceased to be the capital of a great empire, the sovereign of the sea and of the coasts ; and it was only by the prudence of Conon that she recovered even a part of her former supremacy. The fine arts which, in the time of Pericles, had been carried to such perfection by Phidias and his schoo., were checked in their further progress ; and did not resume their former vigour till a generation later (01. 102. b.c. 372), when they sprung up into new life in the later Attic, school of raxiteles. Poetry, in the later tragedy and in the dithyramb, degenerated more anil f Cicero, Brutus 83. § 288.
 * Cratippus, cqntd Dionys. de Thucyd. Judic., c. XVI., p. 817: roTf «.x,ciivtrii