Of the rise of Rhetoric in Hellas I need say little: the whole subject has been admirably treated elsewhere.[527] For educational purposes, Hellenic rhetoric started with several fatal drawbacks and some counterbalancing advantages. The southern nature of the Hellenes preferred sensuous charm of sound to logical accuracy of fact; their rhetoric, arising as it did out of poetry, and modelling itself upon its literary parent, pandered only too readily to their taste. With truth it had no more to do than Homer had; its object was to please the ear by curious rhythms, balanced clauses, parisosis, and all other possible devices. As long as the form was excellent, no matter how trivial the subject:[528] mice or salt
were good enough for a theme. The oration must, of course, be full of passion, but that could be simulated: rhetoric had inherited the legacy of acting from its parent, Lyric Poetry. So rhetoric became simply a question of style, not of argument; and since arguments were not required, the strength or weakness of a case did not matter: rhetoric could make any cause attractive to a sensuous Hellenic ear by its tricks of style, and thus make “the weaker cause the stronger.” The method by which its professors taught their pupils brought out this attitude clearly. They were accustomed to take an imaginary case, and then to teach their pupils how to write a speech on either side of it: the extant “Tetralogies” of Antiphon are examples of the method, which was excellent educationally; for it is good to see the arguments on both sides of a case. It was the carelessness about fact and indifference to truth, and the element of acting, that were so dangerous to the pupils. These elements certainly wrecked the justice of the Athenian courts; their effect on Hellenic character was probably equally unsatisfactory.
Rhetoric also inherited the “gnome” or commonplace, a general statement about ethics or politics or what not, which could be developed into a sententious little essay. Budding orators learned to compose a little store of these and keep them ready for use, to be inserted in a speech whenever an opportunity occurred. For writing these essays, a certain amount of independent thought about politics and ethics was necessary; and both the thought and the essay-writing were no doubt good for the lads.
The flowery and poetic style, which was the main characteristic of early Hellenic rhetoric, was the creation of Gorgias. A fragment of a funeral oration, in which no doubt he put forth all his powers, may be given as a sample of the sort of thing which his pupils learned to write:—
“As witness to their deeds these dead set up trophies over the foe, offerings to Zeus, offered by themselves. They were not unskilled in natural Ares nor lawful loves nor armèd strife nor beauty-loving Peace; revering the Gods by Justice, honouring their parents by Service, just to their countrymen by Equality, faithful to their friends by Loyalty. Therefore, when they died, love for them died not with them, but deathless in bodies no longer bodies it lives when they live no longer.” In the Encomium on Helen we have “fright exceeding fearful, and pity exceeding tearful, and yearning exceeding painful,” and “productive of pleasure, destructive of pain.” In the Palamedes Gorgias even uses puns.
His poetical compounds and those of his pupil Alkidamas were famous. In short, at this time there was no boundary whatever between poetry and prose: prose, if anything, was the more poetical of the two.
This strange hothouse Euphuistic style of Gorgias took Hellas by storm, and his influence was enormous: it even half-mastered the austere mind of Thucydides. As reformed by the greater critical faculties of his pupil Isokrates, it became the parent of Ciceronian Latin and so of the prose literature of centuries.
The other rhetorical Sophists of the time are less interesting. Likumnios and Polos, teacher and pupil, seem to have devoted themselves to questions of rhythm: they employed quaint conceits and affectations, like Gorgias. Theodoros and Euenos divided and subdivided the parts of an oration into “confirmation” and “additional confirmation,” and “by-blames” and “by-panegyrics”: in which work Polos joined them. Thrasumachos of Chalcedon, who seems to have been a bigger man altogether, began to attack the psychological side of rhetoric by studying the questions of pathos and indignation; these studies he embodied in pamphlets, and no doubt his results were imparted to his pupils.
One of the beauties of old Hellenic education had been that it did not make the rich a class apart from the poor by giving a widely different form of culture. The rise of the Sophists changed all this: their fees excluded the poor. The odium of resultant class-separation fell upon the teachers. Their pupils, rich, aristocratic, and cultured, inclined towards oligarchy. Hellenic sentiment held the teacher responsible for the whole career of his pupils. So for this reason again the democracies regarded the Sophists with suspicion, as the trainers of oligarchs and tyrants. It was chiefly because he had been the teacher of Kritias and Alkibiades that Sokrates was put to death by the restored democracy. The persuasive powers which the rhetoricians gave to their pupils might be, and often were, misused; the pupils might mislead the Ekklesia into bad policy or the law-courts into injustice by their eloquence. However much the Sophists might protest that they taught only rhetoric, not ethics, they were held responsible for the dishonesty as well as for the eloquence of such pupils. Besides, rhetoric gave the rich man, who alone could buy it, a most undemocratic influence in the State. The odium against the Sophists was increased by their religious and political views. They were free thinkers in all things. Protagoras was a frank agnostic; Gorgias believed that nothing whatever existed. Their political theories were equally revolutionary, full of the idea of Social Contracts and the right of the one strong man. All this was extremely distasteful to the majority, who were democratic and orthodox. But it must be remembered that no such views appeared in lectures: they were confined to an occasional book or to private conversation. Outwardly the Sophists were law-abiding and respectable servants of the constitution, and their lectures were, if anything, rather commonplace.
Thus the prejudice against them was excited partly by their freethinking and partly by their fees. The first of these two reasons applied still more to Sokrates and the philosophic schools. But Sokrates neither asked nor received fees: Plato and Aristotle only accepted presents. Consequently when the philosophic party tried to dissociate themselves in the popular mind from the Sophists with whom they were confounded, they attempted to revive the old Hellenic prejudice against taking fees for “wisdom,” which had given trouble to the lyric poets, and to emphasise the money-making aspects of the Sophists’ profession. This rather absurd appeal to the gallery has influenced posterity; but it did not win universal acceptation in Hellas. Aischines still calls Sokrates a Sophist. Under the Roman Empire “Sophist” became a title of distinction applied to artistic stylists and teachers like Libanius.