402 HISTORY OF GREECE. apart from ambitious purposes ; hardly less so than the use (ft arms or the practice of the gymnasium. Accordingly, the teach* ers of grxmmar and rhetoric, and the composers of written speeches to be delivered by others, now began to multiply and to acquire an unprecedented importance, — as well at Athens as under the contemporary democracy of Syracuse,i in which, also, some form of popular judicature was established. Style and speech began to be reduced to a system, and so communicated : not always happily, for several of the early rhetors 2 had adopted an artificial, ornate, and conceited manner, from which Attic good taste afterwards liberated itself, — but the very character of a teacher of rhetoric as an art, — ^ a man giving precepts and putting himself forward in show-lectures as a model for others, is a feature first belonging to the Periklean age, and indicates a new demand in the minds of the citizens. We begin to hear, in the generation now growing up, of the rhetor and the sophist, as persons of influence and celebrity. These two names denoted persons of similar moral and intellectual endowments, or often indeed the same person, considered in different points of view ; 3 either as professing to improve the moral character, or as com- municating power and facility of expression, or as suggesting premises for persuasion, illustrations on the common-places of morals and politics, argumentative abundance on matters of or- dinary experience, dialectical subtlety in confuting an opponent, ' Aristot. ap. Cicero. Brat. c. 12. "Itaque cum sublatis in SiciM tyran- nis res private longo intervallo judiciis repeterentor, tam primum qnod esset acuta ea gens et controversa natutci, artem et praecepta Siculos Cora- cem et Tisiam conscripsisse,"etc. Compare Diodor. xi, 87 ; Pausan. vi, 17, 8.
- Especially Gorgias : see Aristotel. Rhetor, iii, 1, 26; Tiraaeus, Fr.;
Dionys. Halicam. De Lysia Judicium, c. 3 ; also Foss, Dissertatio de Gorgi^ Leontino, p. 20 (Halle, 1828) ; and "Westermann, Gcschichte der Bered samkeit in Griechenland und Eom., sects. 30, 31. ^ Plato (Gorgias, c. 20-75: Protagoras, c. 9). Lysias is sometimes desig- nated as a sophist (Bemosthen. cont. Xeasr. c. 7, p. 1351; Athenae. xiii, p. 592). There is no sufficient reason for supporfng with Taylor ( Vit. Lysise, p. 56, ed. Dobson) that there were two persons named Lysias, and that the person here named is a diiFerent man from the author of the speeches which remain to us : see Mr. Fynes Clinton, Fast. H. p. 360- Appendix, c. 20.
