expression combined with a distinguished air was his secret of power, carrying everything before him among a people who were familiar with the poetry of Homer and the prose of Herodotus. But the people were just emerging from the rhythmic age in which everything to be excellent had to be expressed in verse, into which they fell as easily as children fall into rhymes. Accordingly they were pleased with the poetic Gorgias as they would not have been in subsequent times when the true place of rhythm in prose had been discovered. Then Pericles follows, embalmed in the pages of Thucydides, famous for "the thoughts and moral force which won him such renown for eloquence as no one else ever secured without artistic aids. Tranquil and stately, rapid and yet persuasive, he had the rare art of leaving his words sticking in the memory of his hearers."

In Antiphon appears the first master of the comparatively new art of rhetoric, now becoming indispensable in the courts and in the assembly of the people, which was the legislature of Athens. He represents the primitive ideas and methods of oratory. Hitherto all expressions had been in poetic measures or in common talk. Now a speech was beginning to be evolved which was neither common nor high-flown, but combined the excellencies of both. "Having weight and grandeur rather than life and vivacity, he is ambitious to bring the whole of his thought down upon his hearers with a splendid and irresistible force, dazzling and overawing them." Harsh, stern, or crabbed is the critical term for this style among the Greeks, emphasizing each word, clause, and sentence,

employing a rough naturalness while choosing a majestic rhythm, with slow and measured delivery. The nearest modern representation of it is a French gentleman of the old school, superb in decorum and artificial in ostentation.

Lysias should be remembered as the plain speaker as distinguished from the grand styles that preceded him. It was a lawyer's language of sober prose, a lawyer, moreover, who had the daring in an age of stereotyped professional work to adapt himself to the character of his clients. Simple, clear, concise, and vivid, with a peculiar power of seizing and portraying character, blended with an accurate discernment of the properties of the subject, the audience, and the occasion, Lysias added to all what the ancient critics called his "charm," famous but not to be explained, intangible and elusive as the harmony of music and the beauty of a statue. "To write well," says Dionysius, "is given to many men; but to write winningly, gracefully, with loveliness is the gift of Lysias.”

Isocrates, it will be borne in mind, was less an orator proper than an artist of a literary rhetorical prose. The stately flow of his periodic sentences was made harmonious by the prose rhythm of which he was the discoverer and developer, although not the perfecter. He regarded melodious prose as much a work of art as poetry, having its sources in the music latent in language and revealed to those who have the ear to hear it and write it. Moreover, he lifted rhetoric out of the courts and the myths of the heroic age to the higher level of state affairs and the interests of Greek citizenship. Still, he is the artist of the school, developing a literary style chiefly for the

historians, but not without its advantages to Demosthenes, and later to Cicero, and through him to later times.

Andocides must stand for the natural orator who depends upon his own resources rather than upon what the experience of all ages can give him in the written laws which have been gathered from that experience. His simplicity and inartificiality, with a certain vividness in his narrative and a confident vigor which is apt to go with self-making, rendered his speech effective with men of his own rank.

In Isæus is seen the professional man narrowing, and therefore advancing, the lawyer's business; a specialist in private causes of property and inheritance, but by the same process narrowing his own ability to seize upon the grand opportunity of becoming eminent in the larger field of deliberative oratory in which Demosthenes, his pupil, was successful.

This brief summary of the characteristics of orators, chiefly forensic, belonging to the first period of Greek rhetoric, may itself be reduced to a more diminutive scale if we say: the solemn and sometimes pathetic Thucydides; the majestic and restrained Pericles; the grave and stately Antiphon; the plain but versatile Lysias; the elegant and artistic Isocrates; the inartificial and self-confident Andocides; the intense and vigorous Isæus. Taken together they represent a marvelous epoch in the history of the high art of public speech, teaching us that excellence in it is not the exclusive property of any one form and method, but that each one's own natural way, improved by that careful study which appropriates the best of others' ways, is the best way for him. That while

imitation is fatal, and nature untrained is apt to blunder, natural capacity guided by art will have its own kind of success according to the mental and moral character of the speaker. In this first age of oratory sincerity and earnestness and knowledge of men, finding their expression with skill, vigor, and dignity, are the qualities and methods which told most, and will always tell most, for the speaker with his hearer.

V.

POLITICAL ORATORS.

OY THE orators whose work has been traced thus

BY

far an oratorical prose was developed which takes its character largely from the requirements of forensic speech. The eminently practical origin of it cannot be overlooked. It began with the statement of personal rights to what is one's own, which, next to the defence of hearth and home by arms, is the most earnest strife in which men engage. We find, accordingly, a vigorous earnestness in the pleadings of the orator, and directness of statement aided by skill in marshaling arguments and reasons, enforced by appeals to the conscience and heart of persons who have sympathies as well as judgments, emotions as well as intellect. Of necessity, forensic oratory does not cover interests much beyond those of the individual; but these are sacred and the foundation of the larger interests and rights of the state. The discussion of the one prepared the way for the maintenance of the other. It was, therefore, to forensic oratory that the higher art of deliberative speech owed its main excellencies when its masters began to discuss affairs of state. The able lawyer became the successful political

orator.

Four men exemplify the best period of political eloquence. LYCURGUS, 396 B. C., the first of these in or