gious conduct and another axiom of religious belief. They apply to that which is divine within us the inmost secret of our knowledge and mastery of that which is divine without us: man, the servant and interpreter of nature, is also, and is thereby, the servant and interpreter of the living God.

LECTURE IV.

GREEK AND CHRISTIAN RHETORIC.

Ir is customary to measure the literature of an age by its highest products, and to measure the literary excellence of one age as compared with that of another by the highest products of each of them. We look, for example, upon the Periclean age at Athens, or the Augustan age at Rome, or the Elizabethan age in our own country, as higher than the ages respectively of the Ptolemies, the Cæsars, or the early Georges. The former are "golden;" the latter, "silver." Nor can it be doubted that from the point of view of literature in itself, as distinguished from literature in its relation to history or to social life, such a standard of measurement is correct. But the result of its application has been the doing of a certain kind of injustice to periods of history in which, though the high-water mark has been lower, there has been a wide diffusion of literary culture. This is the case with the period with which we are dealing. It produced no writer of the first rank. It was artificial rather than spontaneous. It was imitative more than original. It was appreciative rather than constructive. Its literature was born, not of the enthusiasm of free activity, but rather of the passivity which comes when there is no

hope. But as to a student of science the after-glow is an object of study no less than the noon-day, so to a student of the historical development of the world the silver age of a nation's literature is an object of study no less than its golden age.

Its most characteristic feature was one for which it is difficult to find any more exact description than the paradoxical phrase, "a viva-voce literature." It had its birth and chief development in that part of the Empire in which Christianity and Greek life came into closest and most frequent contact. It was the product of the rhetorical schools which have been already described. In those schools the professor had been in the habit of illustrating his rules and instructing his students by model compositions of his own.1 Such compositions were in the first instance exercises in the pleading of actual causes, and accusations or defences of real persons. The cases were necessarily supposed rather than actual, but they had a practical object in view, and came as close as possible to real life. The large growth of the habit of studying Rhetoric as a part of the education of a gentleman, and the increased devotion to the literature of the past, which came partly from the felt loss of spontaneity and partly from national pride,2 caused these compositions in the rhetorical

1 I have endeavoured to confine the above account to what is true of Greek Rhetoric: the accounts which are found in Roman writers, especially in Quintilian, though in the main agreeing with it, differ in some details. The best modern summary of Greek usages is that of Kayser's Preface to his editions of Philostratus (Zürich, 1844; Leipzig, 1871, vol. ii.).

2 E. Rohde, der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer, Leipzig, 1876, p. 297.

schools to take a wider range.1 They began on the one hand to be divorced from even a fictitious connection with the law-courts, and on the other to be directly imitative of the styles of ancient authors. From the older Rhetoric, the study of forensic logic and speech with a view to the actual practice in the law-courts, which necessarily still went on, there branched out the new Rhetoric, which was sometimes specially known as Sophistic.

(μcλétai),

Sophistic proceeded for the most part upon the old lines. Its literary compositions preserved the old name, "exercises” (μeλéтα), as though they were still the rehearsals of actual pleadings. They were divided into two kinds, Theses and Hypotheses, according as a subject was argued in general terms or names were introduced.2 The latter were the more common. Their subjects were sometimes fictitious, sometimes taken from real history. Of the first of these there is a good example in Lucian's

1 There is a distinction between τὰ δικανικὰ and τὰ ἀμφὶ μελέτην, and both are distinguished from Tà TоATIKά in Philostratus, V. S. 2. 20, p. 103. Elsewhere Philostratus speaks of a sophist as being δικανικοῦ μὲν σοφιστικώτερος σοφιστοῦ δὲ δικανικώτερος, " too much of a litterateur to be a good lawyer, and too much of a lawyer to be a good litterateur," 2. 23. 4, p. 108.

2 θέσις is defined by Hermogenes as ἀμφισβητημένου πράγματος Sýrηois, Progymn. 11, Walz, i. p. 50: vπóleσis as τŵv èπì μépovs ζήτησις, Sext. Emp. adv. Geom. 3. 4: 50 τὰς εἰς ὄνομα ὑποθέσεις, Philostr. V. S. prooem. The distinction is best formulated by Quintilian, 3. 5. 5, who gives the equivalent Latin terms, "infinitæ (quæstiones) sunt quæ remotis personis et temporibus et locis cæterisque similibus in utramque partem tractantur quod Græci Oéoiv dicunt, Cicero propositum... finitæ autem sunt ex complexu rerum personarum temporum cæterorumque: hæ voléσis a Græcis dicuntur, caussa a nostris, in Iris omnis quæstio videtur circa res personasque consistere."

Tyrannicide: the situation is, that a man goes into the citadel of a town for the purpose of killing a tyrant: not finding the tyrant, the man kills the tyrant's son: the tyrant coming in and seeing his son with the sword in his body, stabs himself: the man claims the reward as a tyrannicide. Of the second kind of subjects, there are such instances as "Demosthenes defending himself against the charge of having taken the bribe which Demades brought," and "The Athenians wounded at Syracuse beg their comrades who are returning to Athens to put them to death."2 The Homeric cycle was an unfailing mine of subjects: the Persian wars hardly less so. "Would you like to hear a sensible speech about Agamemnon, or are you sick of hearing speeches about Agamemnon, Atreus' son?" asks Dio Chrysostom in one of his Dialogues. "I should not take amiss even a speech about Adrastus or Tantalus or Pelops, if I were likely to get good from it," is the polite reply. In the treatment of both kinds of subjects, stress was laid on dramatic consistency. The character, whether real or supposed, was required to speak in an appropriate style. The "exercise" had to be recited with an appropriate into

3

1 Philostr. V. S. 1. 25. 7, 16.

2 Ib. 2. 5. 3.

3 Dio Chrysost. lvi. vol. ii. p. 176.

4 πроσшжожоitα, for which see Theon. Progymnasmata, c. 10, ed. Spengel, vol. ii. 115: Quintil. 3. 8. 49; 9. 2. 29. The word πокρίveola was sometimes applied, e.g. Philostr. V. S. 1. 21. 5, of Scopelianus, whose action in subjects taken from the Persian wars was so vehement that a partizan of one of his rivals accused him of beating a tambourine." 'Yes, I do," he said; "but my tambourine is the shield of Ajax."