Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/533

511 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 511 § 6. Isocrates was justly impressed with the necessity of having a certain class of subjects for the developement of this particular style. He is accustomed to combine the substance and form of his oratory, as when he reckons himself among those "who wrote no speeches about pri- vate matters, but Hellenic, political, and panegyrical orations, which, as all persons must allow, are more nearly akin to the musical and metrical lan- guage of the poets than to those speeches which are heard in the law- courts."* The full stream of Isocratic diction necessitates the recurrence of certain leading ideas, such as are capable of being brought out in the details with the greatest possible variety, and of being proved by a con- tinually increasing weight of conviction. The predominance of the rhe- toric of Isocrates consequently banished from the Attic style more and more of that subtilty and acuteness which seeks to give a definite and accurate expression to every idea, and to obtain this object a sacrifice was made of the correspondence of expressions, grammatical forms, and con- nexions of sentences, which formed the basis of that impressive and sig- nificant abruptness of diction by which the style of Sophocles and Thucy- dides is distinguished. The flowing language and long periods of Isocrates, if they had had any of this abruptness, would have lost that intelligibility without which the hearers would not have been able to foresee what was coming, and to feel the gratification resulting from a fulfilment of their expectations. In Thucydides, on the contrary, we can scarcely feel con- fident of having seized the meaning even when we get to the end of the sentence. Hence it is that Isocrates has avoided all those finer distinc- tions which vary the grammatical expression. His object manifestly is to continue as long as possible the same structure with the same case, mood, and tense. The language of Isocrates, however, though pervaded by a certain genial warmth of feeling, is quite free from the influence of those violent emotions, which, when combined with a shrewdness and cunning foreign to the candid disposition of Isocrates, produce the so- called figures of thought. t Accordingly, though we find in his speeches vehement questions, exclamations, and climaxes, we have none of those stronger and more irregular changes of the expression which such figures beget. Isocrates also seeks a rhythmical structure of periods, which seldom admits of any relation of the sentences calculated to cause sur- dam, Cicero) and melodious effect ^J.Xos, is the expression of Demetrius), such as was suitable to epic poetry and the old Ionic prose. The contraction and elision of vowels, on the other hand, make language more plain and compact ; and, when all collisions of vowels at the end and beginning of words is avoided, a kind of smoothness and finish is produced, such as was necessary for dramatic poetry and panegyrical oratory. According to Dionysius, every hiatus is removed frdm the Areopagiticus of Isocrates ; to produce this, however, there must have been a greater number of Attic contractions (erases) than we find in the present state of the text. t «'£>V*«7« rr,; ^invoice;, (.'hap. XXXIII., j 5,
 * Isocrates, -rt/>) avriioinu;, § 16.