Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/530

508 50S HISTORY OP THE discourses. In the Praise of Helen he blames another rhetorician for writing a defence of this much maligned heroine, after having professed to write, her eulogium. In the Busiris he shows the Sophist Folycrates how he should have drawn up his encomium of this bar- barous tyrant, and also incidentally sets him right with regard to an ill f elected topic which he had introduced into an accusation of Socrates, composed by him as a sophistical exercise. Polycrates had given Socrates the credit of educating Alcibiades; "a fact which no one had remarked, but which redounded rather to the credit than to the discredit of Socrates, seeing that Alcibiades had so far excelled all other men." * In this passage Isocrates merely criticizes Polycrates for an injudicious choice of topics, without expressing any opinion upon the character of Socrates, or the justice of his sentence ; which were considerations foreign to the question. Isocrates attempts to pass off his own rhetorical studies for philosophy, f but he really had very little acquaintance with the philosophical strivings of his age. Otherwise he would not have included in one class, as " the contentious philosophers," the Eleatics Zeno and Melissu?, whose sole object was to discover the truth, and the Sophists Protagoras and Gorgias. J § 4. Little as we may be disposed, after all these strictures, to regard Isocrates as a great statesman or philosopher, he is not only eminent, but constitutes an epoch in himself, as a rhetorician or artist of language. Over and above the great care which he took about the formation of his style, Isocrates had a decided genius for the art of rhetoric ; and, when we read his periods, Ave may well believe what he tells us, that the Athenians, alive as they were to beauties of this kind, felt a real enthu- siasm for his writings, and friends and enemies vied in imitating their magic elegance. When we read aloud the panegyrical orations of Isocrates, we feel that, although they want the vigour and profundity of Thucydides ' or Aristotle, there is a power in them which we miss in every former work of rhetoric — a power which works upon the mind as well as upon the ear ; we are carried along by a full stream of har- monious diction, which is strikingly different from the rugged sentences of Thucydides and the meagre style of Lysias. The services which Isocrates has performed in this respect reach far beyond the limits of his own school. Without his reconstruction of the style of Attic oratory we could have had no Demosthenes and no Cicero ; and, through these, f e. g. in the speech to Bemonicus, § 3 ; Nicocles, § 1 ; Concerning the Peace, § 5 ; Busiris, § 7 ; Against the Sophists, §14; Panathenaicus, §263. In his <rioi avri- ~'"?ias, § 30, he opposes the a*sg) ru; Vtxa; xaXsvlovfttvou to the Kiol rh« tfiXurofyix* Praise of Helen, § 2 — 6 : -h -rio) ras tylx; QiXotrotpia. Similarly in the speech mo) a'jri&offms, § 208, he mixes up the physical speculations of the Eleatics and Pythagoreans with the sophisms of Gorgias.
 * Busiris, o 5.