391 



dramatic poets produced ly (ireece wan very great ; 

 I'.ir ii- tin- tragedies i.f .K.-chyluh, BophoOM, Mid 

 Kuripide-. '1'ln- Three and the comedies of Aris 

 t..|.i,.i!i.-~ an- the Greek drama. 



Hut tin- drama i not the only form of Greek 

 .inn- for which we have to thank Greek 

 .li-iiHM-iai-y. To it \vi- owe all three forms of prose 

 literature -history, oratory, and philosophy. For 

 mi\\ lit length, after composition in verse had l>een 

 practiced tor -oiue four centuries, composition in 



Ei.e \\a- ait cm | it rd, which fleeing that the Greeks 

 ,i.| -|H.k'-n pro-e all the time, even as M. .loin 

 lain -seems strange. In fact, liowever, a really 

 .riu'inal idi'a, indeed even a moderate departure 

 from what ' is always done ' on a given occasion, is 

 not ot' frequent occurrence in the history of the 

 woi Id. The mere conception that it was possible 

 to compose otherwise than in verse seems not to 

 Jia\i- 01 -i -in-red to auy one. Then, to put on paper 

 rir^ of connected ideas, when one has them, is 



not a matter of utaolute ease and simplicity. It is 

 <|iiit<' conceivable that it may have-been easier to 

 write in verse than in prose; the earliest philo- 

 sophers Xenophanes, Parmenides, Empedocles 

 apparently found it so. When, however, the idea 

 >f prose composition had been once struck out, it 

 \\a-, thanks to the encouragement afforded by the 

 great public, rapidly worked out in various direc- 

 idl inde 



So rapidly indeed that it is difficult to say 

 whether oratory, though distinctly posterior to 

 history, is or is not to be ranked as earlier than 

 philosophy. As, however, the style of the greatest 

 writer of philosophy, Plato, would certainly not 

 have attained the perfection it displays had not 

 some of the orators previously demonstrated what 

 <-oiilil lie done with the language in certain direc- 

 tion-, we may consider philosophy to be the latest 

 of the three forms of Greek prose literature, and 

 to rorrespond to the latest of the three forms of 

 Greek verse literature, the drama, in that each 

 resumes in itself the two forms which precede it. 

 Narrative and argument both find their place in 

 philosophy, as lyric and epic in drama. Oratory, 

 like lyric, is the expression of the individual man 

 dealing with the present. Prose begins with uarra- 

 tive in the form of history, as verse begins with 

 narrative in the form of epic. 



Again, it is somewhat difficult for us to realise 

 that history could have been composed for oral 

 delivery. But the fact remains that, though in the 

 time of Xenophon, the most recent of the three 

 historians whose works have survived, there was a 

 trade in l>ooks, at the time when his predecessors 

 Thucydides and Herodotus composed their works 

 there was no reading public for whom they could 

 have intended their histories. Herodotus, the 

 lather of history,' probably recited his at the great 

 national festival of the Olympian games. Thucy- 

 dides as much as states that he wrote for posterity, 

 and implies that in so doing his design was 

 singular. 



In the case of oratory, the essentially oral .nature 

 of this form of literature is patent. Tnat it should 

 have Keen developed as a form of literature when 

 it was is due on the one hand to the cultivated 

 taste of the democratic dicasta or jurors, who 

 demanded literary merit in the speeches addres-ed 

 to tin-in, and on the other to the frequent access 

 to the great public atlorded by the law courts to 

 Moiling genius. The accident that at Athens a 

 suitor was compelled himself to speak on his own 

 behalf, and therefore evaded the intention of the 

 law by getting a professional speech-writer to cora- 

 po>c a speech for him to learn and deliver as his 

 own, did much to open the law-courts to literary 

 genius and to develop eloquence. Of the orators 

 we are fortunate enough to have considerable re- 

 mains of Antiphon, Andocides, Lysias. Isolates, 



, /Kschine*, Hyperidett, and, greatest of all, 



Finally, the third form of Greek prone literature, 

 philosophy, wan enw-ntially oral. Six-rates, who 

 gave to philosophy the direction it has followed t<, 

 this day, never wrote a word. Plato and Arinlotle 

 lectured, and if they also wrote, it wan that their 

 written teaching might be read aloud in the schools 

 they founded, after they were gone. 



In nothing is the post-classical period of Greek 

 literature more remarkably distinguished from the 

 classical than in the fact that we no longer find 

 one form of literature cultivated at a time, but all 

 kinds simultaneously. If the term 'post-classical' 

 is sometimes employed, and sometimes justly re- 

 sented as being almost a term of reproach, it must 

 be admitted on the one -hand that Theophrastus, 

 Theocritus, Metiander, Plutarch, Lucian, are name** 

 that would adorn even a ' classical ' period, and on 

 the other that, notwithstanding these great names, 

 the post-classical period created no new form of 

 literature, that, viewed as a whole, it can point 

 to no progress made in any of the forms already 

 created, and that all its activity, which was enor- 

 mous, was in the direction of deterioration. When 

 we pass from the classical period to the post-classi- 

 cal we have as our guiding principle not develop- 

 ment but decay. In the Alexandrine period ( 332- 

 146 B.C.) this is less notable than in the ages which 

 succeeded it up to the fall of By/an tium ( 1453 A.D.), 

 though it is unmistakable. The Alexandrine period 

 is so called because Alexandria, the colony founded 

 by and named after Alexander, became, thanks to 

 the learned liberality of the first three Ptolemies, 

 the seat of two great libraries, and the greatest 

 centre of literary culture. But though the greatest 

 it was by no means the only such centre of culture 

 in the age to which it gives its name. Egypt was 

 not the only one of the kingdoms that rose from 

 the ruins of Alexander's empire which could boast 

 of a literary capital supported by the lilterality 

 of its kings. Antiochia, Pella, and, above all, 

 Pergamum, vied with Alexandria ; and the rivalry 

 of Pergaiuum was only extinguished when Antony 

 sent its magnificent library of 200,000 volumes as 

 a present to Cleopatra. But before this Perga- 

 mum had hail time by its cultivation of rhetoric to 

 att'ect Rome and Roman oratory in no small degree. 

 Nor were the true Greek abodes of literature at 

 once deserted by the Muses during this the first 

 period of decline. In Athens the new comedy, 

 with Menander for its great representative, and 

 philosophy, with Theophrastus as its chief, still 

 flourished. In Syracuse there was developed, not 

 indeed a new form of literature, but a new mixture 

 of ancient forms bucolic poetry, which is a mix- 

 ture of the narrative and the dramatic forms, while, 

 although the (usual) employment of the hexametei 

 might approximate it to epic, the recurrence of a 

 refrain gives it a lyrical air. History can be said 

 to exhibit, at the most, incipient decay in a period 

 which can point to Polybius, to say nothing of 

 Berosus ana Manetho ; and epigrammatists were 

 numerous. Aratos indeed, the greatest of Alex- 

 andrine didactic poets, and Apollonius, the greatest 

 epic poet of this period, have done nothing that 

 they should be compared with ' classical ' writers 

 of hexameters. But it is not on it* poetry that 

 Alexandria can base ii - claims to our gratitude ; 

 it is on all that the librarians of Alexandria did to 

 preserve the stores of classical literature. 



Succeeding ages produced several respectable 

 prose-writers Pausanias the archaeologist, Arrian 

 ' the second Xenophon,' Josephus the historian 

 and two great prose-writers, Plutarch and Lucian ; 

 but in poetry they were yet more Iwrren than the 

 Alexandrine period. Again, a string of lexico- 

 graphers and grammarians Julius Pollux, Hesy- 



