HEREDITARY DESCENT IN ANCIENT GREECE. 19 



themselves to defend their own causes before the law 

 courts, that they were not only pleased, but de- 

 manded, to be addressed in the style exemplified in 

 these marvellous oratorical compositions. Contrast 

 that ability of the average Athenian free population 

 with that of our leisured and propertied class ! Look 

 into the libraries of our wealthier citizens ! Go into 

 the mansions and club-rooms and lyceum-halls of 

 people who, in Athens, would have been free-born ! 

 Have we an Athenian intellectual taste ? Are we as 

 keen, even in the modern Athens, as men were on 

 these slopes around the Acropolis on which we stand? 

 Remember that in the ancient days there were no 

 newspapers. Demosthenes' orations were often not 

 only editorials, but telegraphic despatches. When 

 Cicero appeared before the people in the Roman 

 forum, and said of the conspirator Catiline, "Abut, 

 excesit, evasit, erupit" ("He has gone, he has es- 

 caped, he has broken forth"), that was news. Now, 

 what if there had appeared that morning an editorial 

 in the Roman Times, Tribune, or Advertiser, giving 

 the same incident? Cicero, no doubt, would have 

 been shorn of many of his thunderbolts. The news- 

 paper was not a rival of the platform in classic days, 

 nor was the book to such an extent as it is now. 

 Therefore the orator was inspirited as he is not in 

 modern times. There never will come a day, perhaps, 

 when oratory will have again such power as it had in 

 Athens, arid once at Rome. Look into the average 

 book-stalls, and especially into our railway collections 

 of rubbish, and into popular, or Congressional, or 



