The Classics, Greek & Latin

REEK oratory was the outgrowth of the intellectual awakening that Athens experienced after the Persian wars, when the art of speaking came to be especially valued as a means of political influence. The teaching of this art was the profession of the Sophists, who naturally modelled their prose upon verse, since up to their time the presumption existed that no thought could be expressed artistically that was not put in metrical form. Under this impulse Greek oratory was cultivated as one of the fine arts, like sculpture and painting, to which it was often likened, and its external form and style always remained of supreme importance.

We look therefore in the original of a Greek oration for minute matters of style and niceties of diction that a modern orator would scantily regard. As such may be mentioned the balancing of clauses, the structure of sentences of equal length, the repetition of sounds at the turning point of corresponding phrases so as to suggest an echo from other words, the avoidance of hiatus between a closing and an initial vowel of two consecutive words, and the arrangement of words in a sentence so as to secure a certain rhythm and harmony. It is manifest that such minute and fine points of style cannot be reproduced in any translation. An undue attention to these refinements might easily become an artificial mannerism. Such mannerism was characteristic of the style of one of the earliest Sophists and teachers of rhetoric, Gorgias of Leontini, who put his stamp upon Greek prose writing for all time.

The entire history of Greek oratory may be called a development from this artificial prose to a more artless and simple style, which later again became debased by the

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The Classics, Greek & Latin, Bind 6