Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1876 Excerpt:...A disciple of the sophistical argument. x x rhetoric learned to deal copiously and skilfully with those commonplaces of argument which would be available in almost any case. His education taught him to prefer general argument to argument from particular 'circumstances, unless these were especially easy to manipulate. We see this in Antiphon's First Tetralogy: it is a model exercise in making the utmost of abstract probabilities as inferred from facts which are very slightly sketched. In the speech On the Murder of Herodes the statement of the facts is hurried over, and there is no attempt at a close and searching analysis of them. But for a speaker unskilled in rhetorical commonplace the particulars of any given subject would be everything. Picturesque narration, shrewd inference from small circumstances, lively illustration of character would naturally be his chief resources. And so it is with Andokides. His strength is in narrative, as the strength of Antiphon is in argument. Andokides relies on his case, Antiphon on his science; it is only Lysias who hits the masterly mean, who makes his science the close interpreter of his case, who can both recount and analyse. But, although the narrative element in Andokides exceeds the just proportion always observed by Lysias, it is, from a BfJ%doh literary point of view, a great charm. The speech wr'aiive. On the Mysteries is full of good bits of description, lively without set effort to be graphic. For instance, the scene in the prison, when Andokides was persuaded to denounce the real mutilators of the Hermae:--'When we had all been imprisoned in the same place; when night had come, and the gaol had been closed; there came, to one his mother, his sister to another, to another his wife and children; and there aros...