Thus, great as was the wealth of Ionian literature, it had as yet no prose, while other parts of the country were even more backward. Generally speaking, we may say that the distinction between poetry and prose as two separate forms of literature was not recognised by the Greeks till late. We need only recall the hymns of Pindar to see how phrases and ideas of an entirely prosaic order occur side by side with the loftiest flights of poetic imagery. It was reserved for Athenian literature to create a prose style. The language was sufficiently new and supple to take and reproduce the peculiar impress of the Attic spirit; and this, as compared with the Ionic spirit, manifests itself in language, as in garb and manners, by greater simplicity and smoothness of form.
The dialect spoken in Attica occupied a sort of intermediate position among the dialects of the various tribes of Greece, and was therefore admirably fitted to become the medium of communication among all educated Greeks. For, although closely akin to Ionic, the Attic dialect had remained free from many Ionic peculiarities developed in the islands and on the further coast—particularly from the tendency to soften the vowel sounds.
Side by side with the eloquence which subserved political ends and was designed to guide the masses, there developed in Athens the speech of the law courts, which from the outset was more strictly in accordance with regular rules and bore more likeness to a literary exercise, by reason of the rise of a class of writers who composed pleas for others. For it was the law in Attica that every man must conduct his own case, so that even those who had their speeches composed by counsel were themselves obliged to deliver them. Accordingly the personality of the orator, which carried such weight in political speeches, fell completely into the background; he was a mere writer of orations (logographos), and dealt with public instead of private affairs. This kind of oratory entered into much closer relations with sophistry, because the latter aimed at giving the mind such versatility as would enable it to handle with skill any subject presented to it and to discover in each the greatest variety of interesting matter.
A Greek Orator
A peculiar kind of public oration which attained to importance in the Athens of Pericles was the speech in honour of citizens who had fallen in battle. By a special statute which dates from the time of Cimon, a speech of this character was associated with a public funeral; and it was the custom to commission the most approved orator of the day to deliver this funeral oration in the name of the community, as an honourable distinction and acknowledgment of the public services of the deceased. Wordy and elaborate eulogiums did not suit the taste of the time. At such moments, when the citizens felt themselves smitten with grievous loss, it seemed a worthier task to bid them take courage, to turn their mourning into thanksgiving, their sorrow into joy and pride, by holding up before them the lofty interests of the public service for which their fellow citizens had laid down their lives, and to encourage the hearers to the same joyful self sacrifice.
Considering that all the arts and sciences flourished most vigorously during the period of the Persian wars, the fruits of which came to maturity in the years of peace under Pericles, it may well surprise us that the lyric art, the very one which is wont to be most closely associated with every spiritual movement, did not keep pace with the development of the other arts; and that the Wars of Liberation, so national, so just, and crowned, after grievous trials, with such amazing success, found no fuller echo in popular minstrelsy. Various circumstances combine to explain the fact.
The home of Æolian lyric poetry was more remote from the agitations of the times, and the inspiration which had called forth the poems of Alcæus and Sappho a hundred years before had burnt low. Choral lyric poetry, on the other hand, was too completely interwoven with religious worship and earlier conditions of life, it was too much accustomed to put its art at the service of the old families whose glories belonged to the past rather than the present, to find itself at home in these changed times. The Theban bard, in particular, was too deeply concerned for his native city—which had reaped nothing but shame and misery from the Wars of Liberation—and for Delphi—which had from the first looked with disfavour on the national aspirations after liberty—to appreciate dispassionately the glories of the new era, though he was too large hearted and liberal minded to refuse the victorious city of Athens its meed of admiration and praise in song. The Thebans punished Pindar for calling Athens “the pillar of Hellas”; the Athenians rewarded him, rightly esteeming his tribute a triumph of the good cause. In Sparta nothing was done to celebrate the Wars of Liberation. The Spartan constitution allowed no freedom of intellectual life, and furnished too little in the way of comfort and contentment to prove a favourable soil for poetry.
Greek Comedian