Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/520

498 498 HISTORY OF THE teachers of rhetoric consisted in this one feature: that Gorgias, who had naturally a taste for smart and glittering ornaments, went much farther than Lysias in the attempt to charm the ear with euphonies, to captivate the imagination with splendid diction, and to blind the understanding with the magic of oratory: whereas Lysias (who was, at the bottom, a man of cood, plain common sense, and who had imbibed the shrewdness and refinement of an Attic mind by his constant intercourse with the Athenians, having belonged to their party even at Thurii,*) combined, with the usual arts of sophistic oratory, more of his own peculiarities —more of subtle novelty in the conception, and more of terseness and vigour in the expression. We derive this notion of the earlier style of Lysias principally from Plato's Phcedrus, one of the earliest works of that great philosopher, t the object of which is to exalt the genuine love of truth high above that snorting with thoughts and words to which the Sophists confined them- selves. The dialogue introduces us to Phcedrus, a young friend of Socrates, whom an essay of Lysias has filled with enthusiastic admiration. This essay he reads to Socrates at his request, and partly by serious argument, partly by a more sportive vein of reasoning, is led to recognize the nothingness of this sort of oratory. It is probable that Plato did not borrow the essay in question immediately from Lysias, but composed it himself, in order to give a comprehensive specimen of the faults which he wished to point out. Its theme is, to persuade a beauti- ful youth that he should bestow his affections upon one who loved him not, rather than upon a lover. As the subject of the essay is quite of a sophistic nature, so the essay itself is merely the product of an inventive genius, totally devoid of spirit and earnestness. The arguments are brought forward one after the other with the greatest exactness, but there is no unity of thought, no general comprehension of ideas, no necessary connexion of one part with the other ; nor are the different members grouped and massed together so as to form one consistent whole : hence, the wearisome monotony of conjunctions by which the sentences are linked together. The prevalent collocation is the antithesis tricked out with all its old-fashioned ornaments, the Isocola, Homoeoteleuta, &c. § The diction is free from the poetic ostentation of Gorgias ; but it is so dremoiuaii party there got the upper hand, and domineered over the Athenian colonists. t According to the old tradition, it was written before the death of Socrates (01. 95, 1. b.c. 399). In this short essay, three senteuces begin with iviTi..., and four with *ai iiAv ih. . • (> In the passages (p. 233) : ixiivoi ya^ xcci (a) xytf7rfitrovcrt, xa.) (b) uxoXovS-zitrouiri, xa.) (c) T'li Sv(>ii; vfewiri, xa.) (a) fzuXitrra. riT0r,<rovrxi, xa) (/3) obx IXci^irr'/iv %«{/v t'Uovrm, xa) (y) <7toXXa uyatu, kvtoTs ivfyvreu, the sentences a, 8, y are manifestly divided into three only for the sake of an equipoise of homceo'elcuta.
 * Lysias left Thurii when, after the failure of the Sicilian expedition, the Lace-