man must speak in accordance with his own character and condition, and that therefore it must be absurd to make the young and the old, the knave and the simpleton, speak in the same style. When, then, after the ruin of his fortunes by the iniquitous greed of the Thirty, he found himself compelled to earn his bread by composing speeches for suitors and others, he determined to act upon his conviction; and the result was the death-blow of the fashionable style which in its persistent solemnity was often, as Mr. Jebb has well said, not merely ludicrously unsuited to the mouth into which it was put but fatal to all impressiveness (i. 160).

6

So far as regards its form, the plain style adopted by Lysias had already been used by writers of speeches for the law courts; and the term may mislead us, unless we remember that its plainness consisted not in the absence of all ornament but in the avoidance of decidedly poetical language and the employment of sober prose. But no one who employed this style had used it so as to make it suit in each case the character of the person who was to be the speaker. Lysias did this, and thus deserves to be regarded as a discoverer. As Mr. Jebb justly remarks, Lysias may, in a general sense, be regarded as the perfecter of a style already practised by many others; 'but it is closer to the truth to call him the founder of a new one, and of one in which he was never rivalled' (i. 163). He is even more important as a writer than as a speaker; and the Greek language was still more indebted to him than was the theory or the practice of Greek eloquence. 'He brought,' to cite again Mr. Jebb's words, the every-day idiom into a closer ' relation than it had ever before had with the literary idiom, ' and set the first example of perfect elegance joined to plainness, deserving the praise that, as in fineness of ethical por'traiture he is the Sophocles, in delicate control of thoroughly 'idiomatic speech he is the Euripides, of Attic prose' (i. 198). Working on these principles, Lysias has acquired a lasting literary reputation of the highest kind for purity of diction, for fresh and natural expression, for an art and skill which are all the greater for being hidden, and for a candour and sobriety which touch the heart, if they do not stir the passions, of his hearers. He is, in short, always natural, and therefore always unaffected; nor can it be said that the enthusiastic criticism of Dionysios in speaking of these characteristics is in any way overcharged. The passage in which Mr. Jebb cites his remarks cannot fail to delight even those who may distrust the minute analysis of style which meets them in many parts of this work.

'It is noticeable that while his Roman critics merely praise his elegance and polish, regarding it as a simple result of his art, the finer sense of his Greek critic apprehends a certain nameless grace and charm, which cannot be analysed or accounted for: it is something peculiar to him, of which all that can be said is that it is there. What, asks Dionysios, is the freshness of a beautiful face? What is fine harmony in the movements and windings of music? What is rhythm in the measurement of times? As these things baffle definition, so does the charm of Lysias. It cannot be taken to pieces by reasoning; it must be seized by a cultivated instinct. It is the final criterion of his genuine work. "When I am puzzled about one of the speeches ascribed to him, and when it is hard for me to find the truth by other marks, I have recourse to this excellence as to the last piece on the board. Then, if the Graces of Speech seem to me to make the writing fair, I count it to be of the soul of Lysias, and I care not to look further into it. But if the stamp of the language has no winningness, no loveliness, I am chagrined, and suspect that after all the speech is not by Lysias; and I do no more violence to my instinct, even though in all else the speech seems to me clever and well-finished; believing that to write well, in special styles other than this, is given to many men, but that to write winningly, gracefully, with loveliness, is the gift of Lysias." (Vol. i. p. 177.)

Even in this criticism of the Augustan writer there is nothing which implies the presence of the characteristics needed to produce oratory of the highest kind. There may be in Lysias the most skilful clearness in the arrangement of matter, the most unaffected and yet the most carefully artistic treatment of topics; but we shall look in vain for that glowing fervour which in its increasing intensity may be compared with the glory which becomes most dazzling at the moment of sunset. In Mr. Jebb's words, the nature of his progress through 'a speech is well described by an image which his Greek ' critic employs. Like a soft southern breeze, his facile inspi'ration wafts him smoothly through the first and second stages of his voyage; at the third it droops; in the last it dies' (i. 183). It may be hard to determine how far this failure is due to a deficiency of genius, because it is hard to say how far mere deficiency of genius may impair the force of moral conviction. It is absurd to compare Lysias with Demosthenes. The circumstances of the two men were wholly different. The life of Demosthenes was not merely a public one: it was a duel with the craftiest politician and the greatest general of his age. The life of Lysias was for the most part passed in contented obscurity and in the handling of subjects in which 'the attempt at sublimity would have been ridiculous' (i. 188). There were, indeed, one or two occasions which roused in him more profound emotions. Lysias would not have been himself

had he not felt that disunion, distrust, and faction were evil things, and that they had wrought untold mischief in Hellenic society. But if he was aware of the disease, he could propound no better remedy than the turning of Greek arms against a foreign enemy. All evils would, he believed, be cured in a moment, if the Greeks could only be persuaded to combine in attacking the Persian king. Hellas, he declared, was burning at both ends: and yet he seemed to fancy that the firebrand on the one side would go out, if the cities of Continental Greece would join together in quenching the firebrand on the other.

"It befits us," says Lysias, as Mr. Jebb translates his words, "to desist from war among ourselves, and to cleave, with a single purpose, to the public weal, ashamed for the past and apprehensive for the future; it befits us to imitate our forefathers, who, when the barbarians coveted the land of others, inflicted upon them the loss of their own, and who, after driving out the tyrants, established liberty for all men alike. But I wonder most of all at the Lacedæmonians, and at the policy which can induce them to view passively the conflagration of Greece. They are the leaders of the Greeks, as they deserve to be, both for their inborn gallantry and for their warlike science; they alone dwell exempt from ravage, though unsheltered by walls; unvexed by faction; strangers to defeat; with usages which never vary; thus warranting the hope that the freedom which they achieved is immortal, and that, having proved themselves in past perils the deliverers of Greece, they are now thoughtful for her future." (Vol. i. p. 189.)

The feelings of disappointment and pain which such language must awaken in many minds are caused not so much by the nature of the enterprise recommended as by the speaker's utter ignorance of the real cause of the misery which he deplores. That Lysias should express amazement at the action or inaction of Sparta is itself beyond measure amazing. The immobility of Spartan civilisation is taken as evidence of the permanence of their freedom by a man who, if he thought about it, must have confessed that freedom had never been known in Sparta, and that the absence of faction, so far as it was absent, was owing to the use of precisely the same system and the same means which had been employed at Athens by Antiphon. But it is most of all astonishing that he could fail to trace to Sparta and her confederacy all the evils which were eating as a cankerworm at the very heart of Hellenic society and insuring the domination of a foreign conqueror. To wonder that the Spartans should act as they had acted from the beginning is much like wondering that the panther retains its spots and the Ethiopian the blackness of his skin; and we might be tempted to set down a man who expressed such wonder as either very shortsighted or

not much in earnest. We may, if we please, say that the evils which Lysias discovered with such partial vision were already, and had long been, incurable; but we stand amazed at the fancy that the most hopeless discordance of political ideas, and the most radical divergence of principle, might be cured by a joint military expedition against a potentate whose weakness had been proved by the all but successful adventure of Cyrus, and the subsequent escape and exploits of the Ten Thousand.

Four years later the spectators assembled at Olympia for the great festival heard another oration which urged the same project, and which, it is said, had cost the author the anxious toil of more than ten years. But if in his Panegyric speech Isocrates proclaims the ravages of the same disease, and insists on the same remedy, he roundly charges Sparta not with laziness merely, or indifference, but with positive treachery. It is her business to lead the Greek against the barbarian; but she is allowing the Persian king on the one side, and the Syracusan despot on the other, to threaten the autonomous cities of Hellas, because the policy of utter isolation suits her own heartless and selfish ambition. The great merit of this oration as a work of art must be admitted by all; but the speech displays also a degree of historical discernment which might have warranted the expectation of a more creditable policy than that which in fact marked the long and laborious career of Isocrates. No one could have summed up more forcibly the benefits which the maritime empire of Athens had secured for Greece, and the frightful miseries which came in as a flood on the establishment of Spartan rule. The extension of the Hellenic world by means of her colonies, the general security which Athens imparted by sea, and, so far as her power extended, by land, the equal justice which she administered to her own citizens and to the members of the allied or dependent states, the readiness with which she took up the cause of the oppressed, and the sense of union in a great confederacy which she wakened in the general body of her subjects, are all contrasted with the disintegrating results of Spartan policy, the violent tyranny which took the place of popular government, the consequent impossibility of obtaining redress for the grossest wrongs, and the impunity assured to marauders by land and pirates by sea. These points, it is true, are strangely, and perhaps absurdly, jumbled up with mythical stories which the public life of a statesman would probably have taught Isocrates to avoid; but the very clearness with which he perceives the difference between Spartan and Athenian rule might have convinced him that the only hope of recovery lay not in attacking other

people, but in returning to the path which might have led, slowly and painfully perhaps, yet surely, to something like national coherence. This is just what Demosthenes saw, and what apparently no one else could see; and it is precisely this conviction, and the fearless consistency with which he acted upon it, that made him the foremost of Greek orators, and won for him an absolutely unsullied name and the glory of a life-long martyrdom for a righteous yet failing cause. Of such greatness Isocrates was wholly incapable, and he can be acquitted of actual treachery only because the ideas even of Athenian citizens on the subject of civic allegiance were so loose and shifting, and because he never betrayed the state by becoming the pensioner and tool of a foreign enemy with whom he had been sent to negotiate. Short of this, he did all that he could to counteract the great work which Demosthenes regarded as the sacred business of his life, and to divert the people from the measures needed to cure evils at home by cheating them with dreams of splendid retaliation on the representatives of Xerxes. If Sparta failed him, he could betake himself to Iason of Pherai. The assassination of Iason left him free to address his expostulations and entreaties to the Syracusan tyrant, whose tents Lysias had exhorted his hearers to plunder or dismantle at Olympia. If Dionysios turned a deaf ear to his strain, he would invoke the aid of the Macedonian king, whose armies hung like a thunder-cloud in the north, big with danger for the whole Greek world. Having once fixed his mind on the thought of this fatal championship, he stuck to the idea with a devotion which almost equalled that of Eschines. The possession of Thermopyla and the fortifying of Elateia could not weaken the ardour with which he looked to Philip as the future leader of the Greeks against the Persian king; and the fatal fight of Chæronea would waken in him only a feeling of satisfaction in the thought that some of the hopes which he had cherished for more than half a century were now in a fair way of being realised. There is, indeed, the tale that Isocrates, on hearing the news of the defeat, starved himself and died on the burial day of those who had fallen in the battle. The third letter to Philip, written a few days before his death, stands out in complete contradiction to this story, and Mr. Jebb holds that there is no reason for questioning its genuineness. But even on the supposition of its spuriousness,

'How,' he well asks, 'is the motive of the suicide to be explained? Undoubtedly Isocrates regretted the struggle between Athens and Philip; it had been brought on by a policy which he disapproved.