portance of speech in political and civic life. But in Thucydides the use of the licence is dramatic—that is, conducive to the truthful and vivid presentment of action. In most of the later Greek and Roman historians it is either rhetorical—that is, subservient to the display of the writer's style—or partly dramatic and partly rhetorical. The art of rhetoric passed through two stages of educational significance in the ancient world. In the first stage, with which Thucydides was contemporary, rhetoric meant a training for real debate in the assembly or the law-courts. Then, as Greek political life died down, rhetoric came to mean the art of writing or declaiming[1]. The speeches in Thucydides have the dramatic spirit, and not the rhetorical, because, although the art of rhetoric has helped to make them, they are in direct relation with real action and real life. The rhetorical historians of the ancient world represent the second stage of rhetoric: their speeches are only more or less possible declamations. The modern writers who attempted to revive the practice were in a lower deep still, since for them rhetoric was not even a living element of culture[2]. But it may be well to consider a little more closely
- ↑ The process of this change has been sketched in the Attic Orators, vol. ii. ch, xxiv.
- ↑ The Roman historical writers of the Empire were under the influence of the recitations (cp. Mayor on Juvenal iii.; and Heitland and Raven, in the Introduction to their extracts from Quintus Curtius, in the Pitt Press Series, p. 12). Prejudicial to history as this influence was, it yet gave a special interest to the speeches, regarded as exercises in a familiar art.
