his suggestion and contrivance that hired bravoes struck down in secret the most prominent speakers in the Assembly. His keen eye marked every citizen who dared to raise his voice in condemnation of their infamous crimes; and every man so marked disappeared soon and for ever. It was by his advice that the members of the Kleisthenean senate of Five Hundred were still summoned to their council-chamber, the penalty for absence and the penalty for adverse speech being understood to be the same. It was Antiphon who devised the scheme by which this senate was made to go through its usual form of submitting questions for debate to the public assembly in which free discussion had been scotched and killed, but whose compulsory vote gave to the foregone decisions of the conspirators the character of deliberate acts of the people. From beginning to end the only instrument really relied upon was the dagger; and the only name which can be righteously applied to the chief actor in these dastardly crimes is that of arch-murderer. Yet we are told that a brief consideration of 'the task which he had to do' in bringing about this rapid ' and wonderful change,' and 'of the manner in which it was done, will supply the best criterion of his capacity' (i. 8). The phrase must denote his power as an orator, or else it is not to the point; and this power, it must be repeated, could be exercised only in harangues before the select conclave of his accomplices. The very conditions of deliberative eloquence are here struck out. The members of the clubs which he addressed had been always free, as citizens, to introduce any measure in the Assembly, so long as they were ready to abide by the vote of the majority accepting or rejecting it. Their determination not to submit and to do by violence that which they could not do by law stamps them at once as criminals of the worst sort; and eulogies on the cleverness of their leaders must, if order and law are to go for anything, be subjects only of grave regret. Yet of these clubs Mr. Jebb can say that

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'Antiphon need not have had much difficulty in proving to them that on this occasion they had a common interest. But to make them effective as well as unanimous; to restrain, without discouraging, the zeal of novices in a political campaign, and to make of these a compact and temperate force, loyally taking the word from the best men among them, and so executing the prescribed manœuvres that in a short time they were completely ascendant over an enormous and hostile but illorganised majority-this, assuredly, was the achievement of no ordinary leader.' (I. 9.)

Could more than this be said if the objects here named had been such as might be honourably aimed at by a society of

decent men? To speak of a set of cowardly assassins as loyally taking the word from the best among them, to talk of their fiendish acts as manœuvres for overcoming a hostile but illorganised majority, is indeed amazing. By the side of murderers striking in the dark the great body of orderly and law-obeying citizens must be always an ill-organised majority. With a reticence equal to that of Thucydides, who, oligarchic to the backbone, can speak of the career of Antiphon without a word of censure, Mr. Jebb can tranquilly note the absence ' of overt, and the skilful use of secret, violence' as the 'characteristic of the revolution,' as though in this fact there were nothing to enhance their guilt and to render the open bloodshedding of the French revolutionary convention innocent by comparison. Indeed, he nowhere utters a single word which implies that the upsetting of a free constitution by means of hired murderers is anything more than an act of which we may praise the ingenuity or the cleverness, or that the same work might not be taken in hand in England for the restoration of feudalism without disgrace and infamy to all who shared the enterprise. There is not even a word to show that laws passed by a whole people after full and free debate deserve the obedience and respect of a minority confessedly small and powerful only through their lawless crimes. Nay, with a calmness still more astonishing, Mr. Jebb tell us that, had the new Government been able to conciliate or to frighten the army at Samos, both 'sorts of men would have been satisfied, and the Council 'would have gone on working, for a time at least, as a seemingly harmonious whole' (i. 9). What satisfaction even in this case could have been felt by those who held that the upsetting of a free polity by means of murder was the greatest of all crimes, we are at a loss to see; but it is scarcely less unjust to speak of the Athenians at Samos as only an army than it is to dignify the Four Hundred at Athens with the name of a government. The citizens assembled in that distant island were speaking the simple truth when they declared that the violent suppression of the constitution was virtually a revolt of Athens from them; and the condemnation of Antiphon after the overthrow of his myrmidons was a righteous recompense for iniquities almost without a parallel in the history of a free people. It was Antiphon's rhetoric, we are told, which chiefly recommended him to the young men of his party: the whole evidence, even by Mr. Jebb's admission, goes to prove that he gained his ascendency by organising a plan for systematic assassination which, without him, they might not have had the sense to frame or the courage to execute. Our conclusion is,

that Mr. Jebb has altogether overrated the power of his eloquence. The greatest speech which he ever wrote was spoken in vain in the hearing of the Dikasts before whose bar he stood; and this fact is some evidence that Athenian citizens preferred the administration of equal law to the splendours of the grand style. What definite share the art of words may have had in setting up the Four Hundred, it might be hard to determine; it is enough to know that the assassin with his dagger played the chief part in the drama, and this fact enables us to estimate at its true measure the force of the rhetoric of Antiphon.

The second of the Athenian orators placed in the Decade of Cæcilius of Calacte is a man whose career presents some points of curious likeness and contrast with that of Antiphon. Like him, Andokides was charged with being a conspirator; but whatever may have been his misdeeds, by comparison with those of Antiphon they were on a very puny scale. Mr. Jebb devotes some pages to his alleged share in the Hermokopid plot; but as the mystery of the affair seems insoluble, we may take comfort from the reflexion that the testimony of a man who by his own confession was a false witness can have no great value. The long exile of the man, the difficulties with which he had to contend on his return, and the poor reputation which at best he acquired, may lead us rather to wonder how he found a place among the Ten at all. The reason, Mr. Jebb well urges, is supplied by the interest of the subjects on which he spoke.

'The speech on the Mysteries, supplying, as it does, the picturesque details of a memorable event, had an intrinsic value quite apart from the merits of the composition. . . . As Lykurgos seems to have owed his place among the Ten chiefly to his prominence as a patriot, so Andokides may have been recommended partly by his worth as an indirect historian. Again, Dionysios recognised at least the philological value of Andokides. It is further possible that even rhetoricians of the schools may have found him interesting as an example of merely natural eloquence coming between two opposite styles of art; between the formal grandeur of Antiphon and the studied ease of Lysias.' (I. 94.)

Cæcilius was a contemporary and friend of the Halicarnassian Dionysios, who, however, takes no notice of the canon framed by his colleague in the cause of the Atticist revival. Whether Cæcilius devised the canon, is not known. It is, at the least, not heard of before his time, while from the first century of the Christian era onwards we find it established. As to the reasons which determined the selection of the names, we can say nothing positively. (I. lxv.)

In truth, Andokides stands by himself. His predecessor Antiphon, and his successor Lysias, were both professional rhetoricians; Andokides came forward in the Assembly with the minimum of rhetorical training' (i. 88), and may thus be regarded practically as an amateur. But he was an amateur of remarkable powers. With singular good sense he abandoned the austere monotony of Antiphon for a style far more nearly answering to the simple talk of ordinary life; and if he is too fond of phrases which belong strictly to poetry, they are used with a readiness and artlessness which show how really 'natural a speaker he was' (i. 97). His faults and his merits are, indeed, on the surface; and Mr. Jebb has treated both with admirable clearness in the criticism which he sums up by saying that

'His extant works present no passage conceived in the highest strain of eloquence; he never rises to an impassioned earnestness. On the other hand, his naturalness, though not charming, is genuine; he has no mannerisms or affectations; and his speeches have a certain impetus, a certain confident vigour, which assure readers that they must have been still more effective for hearers. The chief value of Andokides is historical. But he has also real literary value of a certain kind: he excels in graphic description. A few of these pictures into which he has put all the force of a quick mind-the picture of Athens panicstricken by the sacrilege-the scene of miserable perplexity in the prison-the patriotic citizen arraigned before the Thirty Tyrants— have a vividness which no artist could easily surpass, combined with a freshness which a better artist might possibly have lost.' (I. 108.)

The fall of Athens after the treacherous betrayal of the fleet at Aigospotamoi was followed by the setting up of a government which would have been very much to the liking of Antiphon. Among the victims of this government was the rhetor Lysias. It would be difficult to find two men of like occupation presenting a stronger contrast than these two orators-the one caring for nothing but the exaltation of his party, holding that apart from the dominancy of a clique life was not worth the living for, and exulting in the success which he achieved by means of the assassin's dagger; the other convinced that obedience to established law is the first of duties, and that changes of law can be rightly made only by the people after free debate, and exhibiting throughout his whole career a readiness to obey and to maintain the law, and, if need be, to suffer for it. Nor is this all. No one could demand with fiercer eagerness than Antiphon the death of any man accused of homicide, or insist more vehemently on the indelible sin of bloodshedding; no man ever stuck less at secret murder, or rather no man ever

employed it more deliberately and systematically. It was only by an accident that Lysias escaped with his life from the clutches of the Thirty and their myrmidons, who put his brother to death without warning, without trial, and even without an accusation. Still Lysias could speak of their crime with tempered indignation, and treat his own wrongs chiefly as a link in a long series of iniquities carried out in defiance of law. Like Antiphon, Lysias appeared once only in person before the Athenian people, not, however, to plead for his life, but to denounce the system for the establishment of which Antiphon rejoiced to heap murder on murder. If, again, like Antiphon, he was shut out by circumstances from the career of a statesman, his time was spent not in hatching a conspiracy for the destruction of the Athenian constitution, but in patient industry which in some measure retrieved the losses inflicted by thievish tyrants. In Lysias the highest conscientiousness was accompanied by a natural easiness of temper which led him to look readily on the brighter side of things, and to enjoy to the utmost all that was wholesome and beautiful in Athenian life. It was likely, therefore, that he would lack the vehemence, without which the greatest heights of eloquence cannot be reached; and thus he would be but little drawn towards the grand style of Antiphon. His keen sense of honour taught him probably that a man on his feet might be less constrained and, it may be, even more dignified than one on stilts: nor was this the only advantage which the geniality of his disposition secured for him. It opened his eyes to the infinitely varying lights and shades of human character, and led him to see how vast a difference might separate one man's modes of thought, feeling, and expression from those of his neighbour. The practical sagacity thus attained enabled him to effect a revolution in Athenian oratory, and completed the contrast between himself and Antiphon. Whatever might be the cause in hand, the speeches of the latter were all cast in the same mint; and Lysias undoubtedly saw that if this monotony of severely austere language, with its carefully balanced antitheses, its condensed epigrams, and its strained and artificial use of words.. and phrases, should become a permanent tradition, Athenian eloquence would soon run out its course. He felt that the readiest way to the reason as well as the hearts of the judges in the law courts, or of the citizens in their assembly, was to speak as men spoke in common life-in other words, to rise to impassioned earnestness only when the nature of the subject or the circumstances of the case required it. A further and necessary inference was that, if this theory were true, each

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