Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/527

505 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 505 style, it follows that Plato, if he had criticized him when farther advanced in his career, must have classed him among the artizans, ■who strove after a mere semblance of truth, in opposition to the true philosophers. § 2. Isocrates had a strong desire to give a political turn to the art of speaking which, with the exception of the panegyrical species, had hitherto been cultivated chiefly for the contests of the courts :* but bashfulness and physical weakness prevented him from ascending him- self the bema in the Pnyx. Consequently, he set up a school, in which he principally taught political oratory ; and so sedulously did he instruct young men in rhetoric, that his industry was fully recognized by his contemporaries, and his school became the first and most flourishing in Greece.! Cicero compares this school to the wooden horse of the Trojan war, because a similar number of oratorical heroes proceeded from it. Public speakers and historians were his principal auditors ; and the reason of this was, that Isocrates always selected for his exercises such practical subjects as appeared to him both profitable and dignified, and chiefly proposed as a study to his hearers the political events of his own time— a circumstance which he has himself alleged as the main distinc- tion between himself and the Sophists. The orations which Isocrates composed were mostly destined for the school ; the law-speeches which he wrote for actual use in the courts were merely a secondary considera- tion. However, after the name of Isocrates had become famous, and the circle of his scholars and friends extended over all the countries inhabited by Greeks, Isocrates calculated upon a more extended publicity for many of his orations than his school would have furnished, and especially for those which touched on the public transactions of Greece : and their literary circulation, by means of copies and recitations, obtained for him a wider influence than a public delivery from the bema would have done. In this manner, Isocrates might, even from the recesses of his school, have produced a beneficial effect on his native land, which, torn with internal discord, was striving against the powerful Mace- donian ; and, to say the truth, we cannot but allow that there is an effort to^attain this great object in those literary productions which he addressed, at different times, to the Greeks in general, to the Athenians, to Philip, or to still remoter princes; § nay, we some- earlier rhetoricians for making the 3i*«|«rAw the chief point, and so bringing forward the least agreeable side of rhetoric. f He soon bad about 100 hearers, each of whom paid a fee of 1000 drachma; (one-sixth of a talent). X See especially the panegyric on Helen, {» 5, 6. § In this manner Isocrates endeavoured to work upon the island of Cyprus, where at that time the Greek state of Salamis had raised itself into importance. His Evagoras is a panegyric on that excellent ruler, addressed to ins son and successor, Nicocles. The tract Nicocles is an exhortation to the Salaminians to
 * ro iixa.vtx.oy yU,;. Isocrates, in his speech against the Sophists, J 19, blames