seen to be prophetic of a decline in imaginative creativity to come in the fourth
century. The current malaise and future decline are put down to the new critical spirit
of the Greek enlightenment, represented here by Socrates and to some extent
Euripides. In fact, of course, though similarly sceptical of received ideas, they
responded very differently to the new critical spirit. The hostility later shown to tragic
poets (including Aeschylus) by Socrates as Plato’s spokesman in the Republic (see
p. 203) has further given the comic poet’s analysis here the uncanny force of prophecy.
The last two plays of Aristophanes, the Assemblywomen and Wealth, differ from
their predecessors in that the parabasis is abandoned and the plays are less overtly
political. The fantastic and the anarchic yield just a little to probability and realism
in character and plot construction. In an earlier play, the Thesmophoriazusae, the
burlesque of Euripidean recognition scenes, cunningly contrived escapes snatching
the victim from the jaws of death and ingenious plotting, points to the new direction
that comedy was gradually to take in the fourth century until it is quite transformed
in the plays of Menander (c. 342–293).
Oratory and prose
Although the historians and philosophers are treated primarily in chapters devoted
to history and philosophy, Herodotus, Thucydides and Plato are masters of Greek
prose who might equally claim a place here for their literary qualities. Aristotle’s
extant works lack polish; his more stylish work does not survive. The earliest of them,
Herodotus, writes in an easy, familiar style that has affinities with the oral tradition.
Indeed, his language has been described as ‘speech as it is spoken’. But by the time
of Thucydides, prose writing had been affected by the new study of rhetoric
associated with the sophist movement that reached Athens in the generation after
Herodotus. The earliest rhetoricians seem to have emanated from Sicily, and rhetoric
made a powerful impact at Athens with the visit in 427 of the Sicilian sophist Gorgias
of Leontini (c.485–375), famous for his use of antithesis, balance and parallelism in
length of clauses and sounds of words.
Oratory itself had long played a part in Greek life, in the courts (forensic), in the
assembly (deliberative) and on festive occasions (epideictic), but through the
systematic study of rhetoric, the sophists and their successors sought to put the art
of speaking and speech-writing on a more professional basis, equipping their pupils
for success in the public life of the developed polis. In the fourth century, rhetoric
became the centrepiece of schools orientated more towards practical learning than
the philosophical Academy of Plato or the later Lyceum of Aristotle. The founder of
one such school, the Athenian Pan-Hellenist Isocrates (436-338), voices his thinking
on this topic in his festival oration the Panegyricus (46):
168 THE GREEKS