Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/357

REASONS FOR PUBLISHING SPEECHES 333 There remain a few cases where the object of publi- cation was merely literary or educational. The alleged remains of Gorgias, two speeches of Alkidamas, and two of Isocrates are 'mere literature.' The tetralogies of Antiphon are educational exercises with a political object. The great Epideictic ' Logoi ' — 'speeches of display' — really deserve a better name. They express the drift of the pan-Hellenic sentiment of the time, and are only unpractical in the sense that internationalism has no executive power. Gorgias, in his Olympiacus * of 408, urged a definite pan-Hellenic policy against Persia. Lysias in 388 compromised the Athenian Democracy by a generous but wild onslaught on Dionysius of Syra- cuse. Two Olympiads later Isocrates gave the world a masterpiece of political criticism, the Panegyricus. The funeral speeches which were delivered yearly on those slain in war, were religious sermons of a somewhat formal type, and were seldom published. Our only genuine example has a practical interest as giving Hyperides's defence of his war policy in 323. And doubtless the lost Funeral Speech of Demosthenes contained a similar justification of Chaeronea. The publication of a speech, then, depended chiefly on practical considerations, very little on the artistic value of the speech itself. The preservation of what was published was very largely a matter of accident. The movement for preserving and collectuig books may be roughly dated from the founding of Aristotle's school in 335 B.C. The Peripatetics formed the beginning of the scholarly or Alexandrian movement in antiquity. They sought out remarkable books as they sought out facts of history and nature, to catalogue and understand them. And though it is not probable that Aristotle 23