Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/534

512 512 HISTORY OF THE prise by their inequality : * he aims at an equability of tone, or at least a tranquillity of feeling; deep and varied emotions would necessarily break the bonds of these regular periods, and combine the scattered members in a new and bolder organization. The ancients, therefore, agree that Isocrates was eutirely deficient in that vehemence of oratory which transfers the feelings of the speaker to his audience, and which is called SsLi'orriQ in the narrower sense of the word ; not so much because the labour of polishing the style in its minor details mars this vigour of speech (as Plutarch says of Isocrates : " How could he help fearing the charge of the phalanx, who was so afraid of allowing one vowel to come in contact with another, or of giving the isocolon one syllable less than it ought to have," t), but because this smoothness and evenness of style depended for its very existence upon a tranquil train of thoughts, with no perturbations of feeling to distract the even tenor of its way. . § 7. In the well-founded conviction that his style was peculiarly adapted to panegyrical eloquence, Isocrates rarely employed it in forensic speeches ; in these he approximates more nearly to Lysias. However, he was not, like the orator just mentioned, a professed speech- writer, or logographus. The writers of speeches for the law courts appeared to him, as compared with his pursuits, to be only doll-makeis as compared with Phidias ; he wrote comparatively few speeches for private persons and for practical purposes. The collection which has come down to us, and which comprises the majority of the speeches recognized by the ancients as the genuine works of Isocrates, § con- tains 15 admonitory, panegyrical, and scholastic discourses, which w^ere all designed for private perusal, and not for popular assemblies or law- courts; and after these come six forensic orations, which, no doubt, were written for actual delivery in a court of justice, (j Isocrates also wrote, the first part of which, with the fitv, is very artificially divided by the opposition of negation and position, and the developement of the negation in particular by the insertion of concessive sentences ; while the second part is broken off quite short. If we express the scheme of the period thus: — A B I ^ "~II a, a, b. /3, g, y a b E consists only of the words mu-j V o : SS o-ruaoZi rob; retouTtu;. In this Isocrates may have imitated Demosthenes. f Plutarch, do gloria Athen., c. "VIII. Demetrius {do Elocut., §247) remarks, that antitheses and paromcca are not compatible with ln/om;. J Tifi avrihotricj;, § 2. § Csecilius acknowledged as genuine only 28 speeches. We have 21. It is not a forensic speech, but written when Isocrates was compelled by the offer of an exchange to sustain a most expensive liturgy, — the Trierarchy. In order to correct the false impressions which were entertained with regard to his profession and income, he wrote this speech as " a picture of his whole life, and of the plan which ho had pursued," 7.
 * As in the beautiful antithetic period at the beginning of the Panathenaicus,
 * The speech about the exchange (vr%o «vmSe<re«s) does not belong to this class.