ness of the ephor Sthenelaidas[1] or the insolent vehemence of Alcibiades[2]. But, as a rule, there is little discrimination of style. In all that concerns expression, the speeches are essentially the oratorical essays of the historian himself. At the end of the war, when he composed or revised them, the art of Rhetoric was thoroughly established at Athens. The popular dialectic of the Sophists had been combined with lessons in the minute proprieties of language. Protagoras taught correctness in grammatical forms[3], Prodicus in the use of synonyms[4]. The Sicilian Rhetoric had familiarised Athenian speakers with principles of division and arrangement[5]. Gorgias, with his brilliant gift of expression[6], had for a while set the fashion of strained antithesis and tawdry splendour. It might have been expected from the character of his mind that Thucydides would be keenly alive to what was hollow and false in the new rhetoric. Several touches in the History show that
- ↑ i. 86, τοὺς μὲν λόγους τοὺς πολλοὺς τῶν Ἀθηναίων οὐ γιγνώσκω, κ.τ.λ.
- ↑ vi. 18 § 3, ταμιεύεσθαι ἐς ὅσον βουλόμεθα ἄρχειν: § 4, στορέσωμεν τὸ φρόνημα, etc., where the scholiast remarks that, this is the harshest (σκληρότατον) of the metaphors in Thucydides, ἀλλὰ κατὰ Ἀλκιβιάδην.
- ↑ ὀρθοέπεια, Plat. Phaedr. 267 C.
- ↑ ὀρθότης ὀνομάτων, Plat. Euthyd. p. 277 E.
- ↑ The two things which the early Sicilian Rhetoric most sought to teach were skill in marshalling facts and skill in arguing probabilities: cp. Attic Orators, vol. i. p. cxviii f.
- ↑ Cp. ib. i. cxxiii. Gorgias was not properly either a student of technical rhetoric or a sophist.
