The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War]

Sophocles

CHAPTER XXIX. GREEK LITERATURE

ORATORY AND LYRIC POETRY

Of all branches of literature there is none more closely interwoven with political life than oratory. This art could only have been developed among the Ionians, for no other race had the same innate taste for vivacious utterance, or the same feeling for fluency, copiousness, and brilliancy of speech. Nor is there any doubt that the kind of oratory which aims at influencing the feeling and directing the resolutions of the civic body was first practised in the cities of Ionia. But it was at Athens that Greek oratory was brought to its true perfection. There the public oration developed side by side with freedom of speech and the duty of speaking which was encumbent on every Attic citizen. It seemed so intimately connected with the life of Attica that the state of Theseus was represented as founded by it.

For this reason oratory was not the subject of a special study that could be conceived of apart from public life, but the simple expression of practical experience and statesman-like prudence; for at that period men could not have imagined a popular leader who was not at the same time a statesman proved in peace and war and had not won by his public career the right to be listened to by his fellow citizens. And as oratory grew into a power which dominated the life of the community, so language itself was advanced to a new stage in development, when Athens became the centre of the world. What grew out of the local dialect was a new idiom, in which the power inherent in the Greek language first came to its full maturity by becoming the vehicle of Attic culture.

The Greek language had undergone a many-sided development in Ionia. The Ionic dialect was the repository not only of the Homeric and post-Homeric epics and hymns, but of the whole treasure of elegiac and iambic poetry. Ionia was the first country to avail herself largely of the art of writing. This was first put to use in connection with the art of the country; the epic poems which had been composed without the aid of writing, and had become the property of the nation, were by its aid disseminated, cast into permanent form, and continued. Reading and writing were first introduced into the schools of the Rhapsodists, which is the reason why Homer himself is represented as a schoolmaster; and when the later epic poets—Arctinus, Lesches, and others—who sang in Ionia after the beginning of the Olympiads, made the great epic the starting-point of their own poems, in which they endeavoured to amplify, supplement, and connect the substance of the Iliad and the Odyssey, writing was a common accomplishment among poets, and the rhapsodic art itself took on more of the character of a science in consequence.

At this point, however, and in Ionia as before, there came into being a wholly novel method of literary statement, intended, not to rouse the emotions of a crowded audience, but to spread abroad the results of scientific research. Philosophers and historians wrote for the public in prose, and in the sixth century the taste for reading and writing spread with great rapidity through the whole of Ionia, where Samos, in particular, became a school for the cultivation of the art of writing.

At this time, however, prose did not develop in contrast to poetry; as yet no distinction was made between the two classes of composition. The colloquial language of ordinary life, the lively popular note, was simply adopted by writers of fables, and from the tales of Æsop the maxims of homely wit and wisdom passed into literature. Archilochus was fond of using them, so was Herodotus. Men were so accustomed to learn from the poets that even speculative philosophers set forth their theories in poetic garb, like Xenophanes, who wandered about reciting his doctrines in the form of a rhapsody. The narratives of Herodotus are composed with a view to stirring the listening crowd, and the poetic character of his descriptions is unmistakable. His style flows on with the ease of an epic recitation, his sentences hang together loosely; poet-like he sees around him the audience which he desires to enchant and thrill with the charm of his story. Even in philosophy no attempt was made to reproduce the sequence of ideas in clear and exact terms. The teachings of Heraclitus bore the character of Sibylline oracles; he delighted in figurative language which suggested rather than followed up an idea, and apart from the abstruseness of his thought the construction of his sentences was so far from plain that it was impossible to determine precisely the grammatical sequence of his discourse.