To some extent only: for Isocrates, at least in so far as we possess his work, is a rhetorician on the applied sides, which commended themselves so especially to the Greeks, not on the pure side. The legend of his death, at least, fits the political interests of his life; his rhetoric is mostly judicial rhetoric; little as he is of a philosopher, he attacks the sophists as philosophers were in duty bound to do. His purely literary allusions (and they are little more) have a touch of that amusing, that slightly irritating, that wholly important and characteristic patronage and disdain which meets us throughout this period. He was at least believed to have written a formal Rhetoric, but it is doubtful whether we should find much purely literary criticism in it if we had it. His own style, if not exactly gaudy, is pretentious and artificial: we can hardly say that the somewhat vaguely favourable prophecy which Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates about him at the end of the Phædrus was very conspicuously fulfilled. And his critical impulses cannot have been very imperative, seeing that though he lived till nearly a hundred, he never found the “happy moment”[[32]] to write about poetry spoken of in the 12th section of the Panathenaic with a scornful reference to those who “rhapsodised and chattered” in the Lyceum about Homer and Hesiod and other poets. Most of his actual literary references are, as usual, ethical, not literary. In the 12th and 13th section of the oration-epistle to Nicocles[[33]] he upbraids mankind for praising Hesiod and Theognis and Phocylides as admirable counsellors in life, but preferring to hear the most trumpery of comedies; and himself declares Homer[[34]] and the great tragic masters worthy of admiration because of their mastery of human nature. In the Busiris[[35]] he takes quite a Platonic tone about the blasphemies of poets against the gods. There is, indeed, a curious and interesting passage in the Evagoras[[36]] about the difficulties of panegyric in prose, and the advantages possessed by verse-writers. They have greater liberty of handling their subject; they may use new words and foreign words and metaphors; they can bewitch the soul with rhythm and metre till even bad diction and thought pass unnoticed. For if (says the rhetor naïvely enough) you leave the most celebrated poets their words and meaning, but strip them of their metre, they will cut a much shabbier figure than they do now. But this does not take us very far, and with Isocrates we get no further.
Nor need we expect to get any further. Criticism, in any full and fertile sense of the word, implies in all cases a considerable body of existing literature, in almost all cases the possibility of comparing literatures in different languages. The Greeks were but accumulating (though accumulating with marvellous rapidity) the one; they had as yet no opportunity of the other, and it must be confessed that they did not welcome the opportunity with any eagerness when it came. All the more glory to them that, when as yet the accumulation was but proceeding, they produced such work in the kind as that of Plato and Aristophanes; that at the first halt they made such astonishing, if in some ways such necessarily incomplete, use of what had been accumulated, as in the next chapter we shall see was made by Aristotle.
[4]. I am not aware of any complete treatment of the subject of Greek criticism except that of M. Egger already cited, and, as part of a still larger whole, that of M. Théry (see note on Preface). The German handlings of the subject, as Professor Rhys Roberts (p. 259 of his ed. of Longinus) remarks, seem all to be concerned with the philosophy of æsthetic. If the work which Professor Roberts himself promises (ibid., p. ix.) had appeared, I should doubtless have had a most valuable guide and controller in him.
[5]. Philosophorum Græcorum Veterum Reliquiæ. Rec. et ill. Simon Karsten (Amsterdam, 1830-38). Vol. i. pars 1, Xenophanes; vol. i. pars 2, Parmenides; vol. ii. Empedocles.
[6]. Democriti Abderitæ Operum Fragmenta. Coll., &c., F. G. A. Mullachius (Berlin, 1843).
[7]. Karsten, i. 1. 43. Fr. 7.
[8]. Ibid., i. 1.77. Fr. 23. Xenophanes is emphatic on the necessity of putting the water in first.
[9]. Ibid., i. 1. 55. Fr. 17. The philosopher says merely ἐρεβίνθους, but we know from Pherecrates (ap. Athenæum, ii. 44) that they were parched or devilled, πεφρυγμένους.
[10]. Parm. de Natura, l. 11; Karsten, I. ii. 29.