Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/521

499 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 499 carefully formed, and with so many artificial turns, that we are at once struck with the labour which such a school-exercise must have cost the writer. § 3. In the extant collection of the works of Lysias we have no school-exercise (jxeXinj) of this kind, and, generally, no speech anterior in date to the accusation of Eratosthenes : we have only those works which he composed in his riper years, and which exhibit the more matured taste of their author.* Among these, however, there is one which presents traces of his earlier declamation ; the reason of which is to be sought in the difference of subject. The Funeral Oration for the Athenians who fell in the Corinthian war, which was written by Lysias after 01. 96, 3. b.c 394, but could hardly have been delivered in public, belongs to a class of speeches formally distinguished from the delibera- tive f and judicial % orations, because it was not designed to produce any practical result. On this very account, the sort of speeches to which we refer, and which are called " speeches for display," " show- speeches," § were removed from the influence of the impulses which imparted a freer and more natural movement to orations of the prac- tical kind. They were particularly cultivated by the Sophists, who professed to be able to praise and blame everything; and, even after the time of the Thirty, they retained their sophistic form. Such a work is the Epitaphius of Lysias. This oration, following the fashion of such " show-speeches" (iwilei^Eio), goes through the historical and mythical ages, stringing together the great deeds of the Athenians in chronological order ; dwelling at great length on the mythical proofs of Athenian bravery and humanity, such as their war with the Amazons, their exer- tions in obtaining the sepulture of the heroes who fell at Thebes, and their reception of the Heracleidae ; then recounting the exploits of the Athenians during the Persian invasion ; but passing rapidly over the Peloponnesian war;— in direct contrast to the plan of Thucydides ; — and in general laying the greatest stress on those topics which were most adapted for panegyrical declamation. || These ideas are worked out in so forced and artificial a manner, that we cannot wonder at those scholars who have failed to recognize in this speech the same Lysias that we find in the judicial orations. The whole essay is pervaded by a regular ciutTra; xaxoXoyiav, which is neither a judicial speech nor yet a mere piXirtl. It seems to he based upon real occurrences, but is altogether sophistical in the execution. It is a tract in which Lysias renounces the friendship of those with whom he had been on terms of intimacy and friendship. ■ trvy./ioi/XivTix.ov yivoi, dcliberativum genus. J hxavixev, judiciale genus. § iTihixrixiv, -ruvriyv^ixov ytves- in which he extols those who put down the tyranny of the Thirty, add among them, the strangers who fought for the democracy on that occasion, and conse- quently obtained in death the same privileges as the citizens themselves (§ CGJ. U 12 k 2
 * With the exception, as it seems, of the singular little speech, <r^o; rob; o-uveu-
 * The only passage in which he evinces any real inUvest in his subject is that