CHAPTER IV.

GREEK CRITICISM AFTER ARISTOTLE. SCHOLASTIC AND MISCELLANEOUS.

DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICISM—THEOPHRASTUS AND OTHERS—CRITICISM OF THE LATER PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOLS: THE STOICS—THE EPICUREANS: PHILODEMUS—THE PYRRHONISTS: SEXTUS EMPIRICUS—THE ACADEMICS—THE NEO-PLATONTSTS—PLOTINUS—PORPHYRY—RHETORICIANS AND GRAMMARIANS—RHETORIC EARLY STEREOTYPED—GRAMMATICAL AND SCHOLIASTIC CRITICISM—THE PERGAMENE AND ALEXANDRIAN SCHOOLS—THEIR FOUR MASTERS—THE SCHOLIASTS ON ARISTOPHANES—ON SOPHOCLES—ON HOMER—THE LITERARY EPIGRAMS OF THE ANTHOLOGY—THE RHETORIC OF THE SCHOOLS—ITS DOCUMENTS—THE ‘PROGYMNASMATA’ OF HERMOGENES—REMARKS ON THEM—APHTHONIUS—THEON—NICOLAUS—NICEPHORUS—MINORS—GENERAL REMARKS ON THE ‘PROGYMNASMATA’—THE COMMENTARIES ON THEM—THE “ART” OF HERMOGENES—OTHER “ARTS,” ETC.—TREATISES ON FIGURES—THE DEMETRIAN ‘DE INTERPRETATIONE’—MENANDER ON EPIDEICTIC—OTHERS—THE ‘RHETORIC’ OR ‘DE INVENTIONE’ OF LONGINUS—SURVEY OF SCHOOL RHETORIC—THE PRACTICAL RHETORICIANS OR MASTERS OF EPIDEICTIC—DION CHRYSOSTOM—ARISTIDES OF SMYRNA—MAXIMUS TYRIUS—PHILOSTRATUS—LIBANIUS, THEMISTIUS, AND JULIAN.

The two remarkable books which have been discussed at length in the foregoing chapter represent, no doubt, the highest condition, [Sidenote: _Development of Criticism._] but certainly a condition, of Greek criticism in the second half of the fourth century before Christ. This criticism had not, indeed, yet assumed the position of a recognised art. It was at best a more or less dimly recognised function of Rhetoric, which on the one side was made to include a great deal which is not literary criticism at all, and on the other hand was made to exclude Poetics. But Rhetoric, from this time onwards, more and more tends to become the Art of Literary Criticism generally, and to absorb Poetics within itself. So that on the one hand we shall find, among the Latins, Quintilian, whose strict business is with the strictly oratorical side of prose rhetoric, dealing freely with poetry, and on the other, among the Greeks, Longinus (whose main subject is poetry), not hesitating to draw examples from prose. Nor may it be wrong to discern in this awkward separation of the two parts of criticism, and the yet more awkward adulteration of prose criticism with matters really foreign to it, an unconscious—nay, an unwilling—recognition of fact. For Poetry deals first of all with form, Prose with matter; though the matter can never be a matter of entire indifference to Poetry, and the form becomes of more and more importance as we ascend from the lower to the higher prose.

After Aristotle we fall back, for the ages immediately following, on the dreary and perilous chaos of fragments and titles. [Sidenote: _Theophrastus and others._] From the extant work, indeed, of his chief disciple, Theophrastus, we could guess that he dealt largely in Rhetoric. It is no rash conjecture that the famous _Characters_ themselves were intended, after a fashion of which we have but too many other examples, to provide orators and writers with cut-and-dried types on which to base their rhetorical appeals. Nay, we have titles as well as fragments of works of his bearing on the subject,—_on Style_, _on Comedy_,—but nothing whereon to base a real estimate.[58] And what is true of Theophrastus is true of hundreds of others. Only those who are fond of the pastime of letting down buckets into empty wells can derive the slightest satisfaction from knowing, or at least being informed, that Aristotle of Cyrene wrote a _Poetic_ of which we have nothing, and Phanias of Eresus a work _On Poets_ of which we have a couple of scraps.[59] It is certain that a very considerable literature, at least ostensibly critical, existed, dating from the third and later centuries.

Footnote 58:

As in other cases, Theophrastus has been criticised very largely on rather slim vouchers. For instance, the quotation (in Cic. Orat., 39) on the strength of which Mr. Nettleship, _Lectures and Essays_, ii. 47, speaks of him complimentarily, strikes me, I confess, as but a commonplace remark enough. It is that by Herodotus and Thucydides, “History was first stirred up to speak more freely and ornately.”

Footnote 59:

See for more, Egger, p. 347 _sq._

Two writers, later in time, not of much critical fertility but of some interest, will illustrate for us the attitude of two Greek [Sidenote: _Criticism of the later Philosophical Schools: The Stoics._] philosophical schools to criticism. None of these schools except the Peripatetics (and in a negative sort of way the Platonists) deserved very well of our Tenth Muse. The Stoics—when they were not in that mood of disdainful tolerance which is represented by Epictetus' doctrine of “the Inn,”[60] of less tolerance still and more disdain as shown by Marcus Aurelius,[61] or of affected contempt, almost pure and simple, as in Seneca,[62] which was their later attitude—seem in their earlier days to have devoted themselves with great vigour to grammatical investigations, and at all times to have affected the allegorical style. But we cannot wonder that they spent no pains on investigating, still less that they spent no pains on championing, that mixed intellectual and sensual pleasure which is the business and the glory of literature.

Footnote 60:

This doctrine, best known to English readers, perhaps, from Mr Arnold’s not quite fair application of it to Théophile Gautier, is of much more general application in the original (_Enchiridion_, cap. 52). Man being represented as a voyager to a far country, all occupations save duty and philosophy are really mere “inns on the journey,” pleasant perhaps for a night, but not good to stay in. “Eloquence” is specially dwelt on as one of these “inns.”

Footnote 61:

Who thanks Heaven (i. 17) that he did not make more progress in rhetoric and poetry.

Footnote 62:

_V. infra_, bk. ii. p. 245 _sq._

The attitude, however, of their principal antagonists is all the more surprising. The Cynic vulgarity and insolence could not be expected to busy itself profitably with letters, and, as we shall see shortly, the ancient Pyrrhonists have at least left us nothing to show that they could combine with their _Que sais-je?_ on philosophical points, the keen literary enjoyment and the discriminating literary appreciation of their great modern champion. But the attitude of the Epicureans to literature is one of the most surprising things in the history of ancient philosophy.

One might have supposed, not merely that a Hedonist philosophy would apply itself most joyfully and energetically to the investigation and the vindication of one of the greatest of all sources of _ataraxia_ and _aponia_,[63] but that it would do [Sidenote: _The Epicureans: Philodemus._] so with all the more vigour as thus vindicating itself from the common charge of esteeming only sensual pleasures. Yet, though the scanty wreckage of original Epicurean writing warns us not to be too peremptory, there is absolutely no evidence that Epicurus, or any of his followers, took this side. Nay, the whole evidence available is distinctly against any such supposition. Perhaps we could have no stronger testimony to the reluctance with which antiquity took the view of literature as a pleasure-giver, or rather to the rarity with which such a view even presented itself. If we were here indulging further in speculation, it might not be improper to suggest that the atomic and necessitarian theory of Epicurus deprived the operations of the artist of half their interest. But this would be to travel out of bounds. It is enough to say that Epicurus is accused of slighting critical discussion altogether, that his chief disciple Metrodorus appears to have written a book on poetry which was a general attack on it as a useless and futile thing, and that the fragments of Philodemus of Gadara, which have been salvaged from Herculaneum, go to support the same idea.

Footnote 63:

Freedom from trouble and pain; the former, especially, being the technical term for the Epicurean _nonchalance_.

At the same time, we must not lay too much stress on this. The charge against Epicurus and Metrodorus rests, mainly if not wholly, on the testimony of Plutarch, who, as we shall see, took the merely ethical view of literature, and is found in that treatise of the _Moralia_ in which he sets himself to prove that Epicureanism cannot even give the pleasure at which it aims And the tolerably abundant fragments of Philodemus[64] are, even after all the pains spent on them, in such a chaos that only extremely temerarious arguers will do more than take a vague inference from them. The remark which the latest editor of this puzzle has made about one book—"It is difficult to know whether Philodemus or his opponent is speaking"—applies, I should say, to almost all. Not only is this the case; but we can see, with hardly any danger of mistake, that if this difficulty were removed, and if we had the whole treatise fully and fairly written out before us, our state would be very little the more gracious. A very great, perhaps the greater, part of it seems to have been occupied with the discussion of one of those endless technical questions—"Is Rhetoric an _art_ or is it not?"—in which antiquity seems to have taken an interest, the utter unintelligibility of which to us is only tempered by the wise reflection that plenty of our questions to-day will seem equally “ashes, cinders, dust” to students two thousand years hence. The real and solid conclusion is, once more, that we have not lost nearly so much as we seem to have lost by the disappearance of these endless treatises on rhetoric and on poetry. It is possible, of course, that one in a thousand of them might have been another Περὶ Ὕψους: it is far more probable that not one would have been anything of the kind.

Footnote 64:

Ed. Ludhaus. Leipsic, 1892.

If Acatalepsy[65], the doxy of the Pyrrhonists, has been somewhat more fortunate in one way than her close connection [Sidenote: _The Pyrrhonists: Sextus Empiricus._] the Ataraxia of the Garden, she has paid for that fortune in another. Except in the magnificent poem of Lucretius, we have no complete document of Epicurean philosophy, and there the philosophy is utterly eclipsed, burnt up, washed away, by the blaze and the torrent of the poetry. No such disturbing element enters into the two very businesslike expositions of philosophic doubt which we possess in the _Pyrrhonic Sketches_ and the _Against the Dogmatists_ of Sextus Empiricus.[66] But, if the one writer is almost too much of a poet, the other is very much too little of a prose writer. Scepticism has assuredly no necessary connection with dulness, though it may have a good deal with levity. But Sextus Empiricus is one of the dullest writers of antiquity. There is not a spark, not a glimmer even, in his phrase, which is chiefly made up of the most damnable iteration of technical terms; his arrangement is desultory; and beyond a raking together of all the arguments, good, bad, and indifferent, for general or particular agnosticism, that he has read or can think of, he seems to find it impossible to go. At the same time, modern writers have found by no means a bad subject for such handling in the contradictions, the inconsistencies, the ineptitudes of literary critics: the eighteenth century especially, from the writings of the great Scriblerus to the _Pursuits of Literature_, is full of such things. And if there is little of the kind (for there is something) in Sextus, we may not improperly set it down to the fact that he found little to fasten upon.

Footnote 65:

The incomprehensibleness of things; the impossibility of certain knowledge.

Footnote 66:

Ed. Bekker. Berlin, 1842.

What he gives is contained in three of the four last sections of _Against the Dogmatists_, those dealing with Grammarians, Rhetoricians, and Musicians respectively. In the last, which is the shortest, I do not know that the example of childish cavilling quoted by Egger—that a bard was set to look after Clytæmnestra, and Clytæmnestra murdered her husband—is more or less childish than the solemn sophism (not quoted by him) with which the chapter and the book closes, to the effect that as there is no “time”[67] in the wide sense, so there can be no “time”—feet, rhythms, measures—in the narrow.

Footnote 67:

This is proved in the usual fallacy-fashion: Time must be past, present, or future. Admittedly, neither past nor future time _is_; present time is either divisible or indivisible, to each of which there is an objection.

The section on Rhetoric is also short, and turns almost wholly upon the old _aporia_ whether Rhetoric is an art or not, with others of a similar kind.

As for the grammatical section, that does touch us nearer; indeed, when Sextus divides Grammar into two parts, adopting for the second the definition of Dionysius of Thrace, that “Grammar is the knowledge[68] of what is said by the poets and prose writers,”[69] we seem to be almost at home. But in this expectation we should be counting without our host, the sceptical physician, and, indeed, without antiquity generally. We have first quibbling _à perte de vue_ about _empeiria_, then other definitions, then considerations of the mere grammatical elements. Only after a long time does Sextus come to the grammarian’s business of _interpreting_ the poets and prose writers. And then he not only seems to be dealing with men of straw, but answers them with, as Luther would say, a most “stramineous” argument. Poetry, it seems, they say (and it is fair to Sextus to admit that Plutarch and other people do in effect say this) is useful as containing wise saws and philosophical instances: grammar is necessary to understand poetry: therefore, grammar is good. He does not care actually to attack poetry, but observes that, in so far as it provides matter useful or necessary for life, it is always clear, and wants no grammatical exposition, while (662-663) whatsoever deals in unfamiliar stories, or is enigmatically expressed, is useless, so that grammar can do nothing useful with it. A subsequent contention, that grammarians know neither the matter nor the words of literature, though a little sweeping, might have chapter and verse given for it in the case of at least some critics. But when Sextus establishes his first point by triumphing over the poor grammarians for not having perceived in a Homeric epithet an allusion to a pharmaceutical property, and in Euripides a point of clinical practice (671), he is either making a heavy joke or is utterly off the critical standpoint.

Footnote 68:

ἐμπειρία.

Footnote 69:

συγγραφεῖς. The opposition is as old as Plato, though συγγραφεὺς is sometimes limited to “historian.”

A third school, in its various stages, has perhaps a better, if a vague, repute for attention to literature. Perverse as was in [Sidenote: _The Academics._] many respects the attitude of Plato to the subject in detail, it was impossible (or might have seemed impossible) that his doctrine of _psychagogia_,[70] and the magnificent eulogies bestowed in the _Ion_ and the _Phædrus_ on that poetry towards which he is elsewhere so severe, should not induce his followers—at whatever great a distance—to do likewise. It seems, however, to have been found easier by the earlier Academics to follow the crotchet than the enthusiasm, and many of the puerile and servile quibbles to which we have referred as appearing in Sextus Empiricus seem to be of Academic origin.

Footnote 70:

The “leading of the soul” to truths, and gifts, and pleasures. Aristotle likewise adopts the word: and indeed it contains in itself the soul of criticism, though in Plato himself it sometimes has an unfavourable meaning, of “allurement,” “seduction.”

The Neo-Platonists, at least, might be looked to with some hope. Their spirit at any rate was not negative, and they seem, [Sidenote: _The Neo-Platonists._] as a rule, to have been diligent and eager students of literature. But, on the other hand, their tendency towards mysticism, and also the strong colour which their philosophy took from the East, made them especially susceptible to the temptations of allegory, which, as we have seen and shall see, was a Delilah of criticism in almost all its stages in Greece. And when they escaped this they nearly always succumbed to the other temptations of merely grammatical and textual inquiries, or to those of an abstract and theoretical æstheticism, which leaves the actual estimation of literature as literature out of sight.

Thus, from the two great chiefs of the school, Plotinus and Proclus, we have short treatises on the Beautiful—by Proclus [Sidenote: _Plotinus._] in the form of a commentary (not complete) on the _First Alcibiades_ of Plato, while the tractate of Plotinus[71] attaches itself somewhat less closely to the _Hippias_. From the very first this latter keeps rigidly and laboriously to the abstract. Beauty, we are told, specially affects the sense of sight, but the ear perceives it in eloquence, poetry, and music. It is also in emotions, in virtue, in science. Is all this derived from one principle or from many? What is it, or what are they? But as there is both essential and accidental beauty, we must first settle what the attractive principle is. A shrewd question, and one which, if followed out in the proper direction, would lead straight to the best criticism of literature; but, unluckily, Plotinus does not so follow it.

Footnote 71:

_Enn._, vi. 1. Separately printed with Proclus, in an edition which I have not seen, by Creuzer, in 1814. M. Théry included a French translation in the rather capriciously selected but interesting appendix of _pièces justificatives_ appended to his _Histoire des Opinions_; and I believe there is another.

He proceeds to examine and expose the difficulties attending the proposition that beauty comes mainly or chiefly from proportion of parts. There must rather, he holds, be in the soul some faculty of perceiving the divine quality, whether manifested in proportion or in anything else. The beauty of bodily substances depends on their affinity with the divine: the beauty of things not recognised by the senses depends on their identity with it. In yet other words, and from a yet other point of view, Beauty is Good, Ugliness is Evil: the attraction of the first pair, the repulsion of the second, easily explains itself.

As for the organ wherewith beauty is perceived, it is the soul: the senses only apprehend shadow-beauties—reflections and suggestions of reality. The faculty must be cultivated; it must be refined by high thinking and plain living, and at last it will see that, though Good and Beauty are one, yet Beauty is in a lower sphere than Good—is, in fact, but an imitation of it.

All this is not merely Platonic—it is itself beautiful and good: it is noble, it is true, it deserves everything that can possibly be said in its favour. But for the actual purposes of literary criticism it is but as a sweet song in a foreign language. It will hardly help us in the very least degree to distinguish Shelley from the most estimable of minor poets, or Thackeray from the least estimable of minor novelists. It does, by way of illustration, touch literary criticism once itself, for it refers to “the admirable allegory” which represents Ulysses as using all his efforts to withdraw himself from the enchantments of Circe and the passion of Calypso, resisting all the enticements of bodily beauty and delight. To the greatest as to the least of Neo-Platonists the allegorical explanation is itself Circe, itself Calypso; and instead of endeavouring to escape from it, he willing meets it willing, and abides contented in those ever-open arms.

This is especially seen in the writings, known or attributed, of the most industrious and variously accomplished, if not the [Sidenote: _Porphyry._] most gifted, of the Neo-Platonists, Porphyry. Porphyry has to his credit two documents which, in title and subject, are undoubtedly literary, the _Quæstiones Homericæ_ and the _De Antro Nympharum_; while some would take away from Plutarch, and give to him, the work on Homer’s Life and Poems, which has undergone the indignity of being spoken of as “miserable” by M. Egger,[72] while, on the other hand, Archbishop Trench[73] gives the author, whoever he was, what would, if deserved, be the very high praise of having thus early “recognised very distinctly the charm which rhyme has for the ear.” If this were so, I should be inclined to put him together with Philostratus, as having at least stumbled on a great critical truth. But perhaps the words will hardly bear the burden, for the writer, quoting μελισσάων ἀδινάων ... ἐρχομενάων, adds, “These words and their likes add much grace and pleasure to the expression.”[74] And unluckily, the remark occurs only in an examination of Homer _by figures_, where this is taken as representing _homoeoteleuton_. Now, _homoeoteleuton_, though it is a sort of poor relation of rhyme, belongs to that branch of the family which more rightly bears the name of Jingle. However this may be, the treatise, as a whole, would scarcely add to the reputation either of Plutarch or of Porphyry.

Footnote 72:

_Op cit. plur._, p. 484.

Footnote 73:

_Sacred Latin Poetry_ (ed. 2, London, 1864), p. 30, _note_.

Footnote 74:

μάλιστα προστίθησι τῷ λόγῳ χάριν καὶ ἡδονήν.

The two more certain works, on the other hand, belong only to those outskirts of our subject which have been so often characterised. The _Questions_[75] busy themselves almost wholly with the text and the meaning, though it is fair to say that Porphyry is much above the usual scholiast in sense and judgment, and sometimes approaches criticism proper. This approach, however, is generally, if not always, displayed in the same direction as that of Aristotle’s extant _Homeric Problems_ (_v. supra_, p. 49 _sq._) and of many of the remarks made by the Master in the twenty-fifth chapter of the _Poetics_—the direction, namely, of solving material _aporiæ_, such as Aristotle’s own comment on ζωρότερον κέραιε, and Porphyry’s[76] on the demurrer why Penelope did not send Telemachus for aid to her own parents? The process, in short, illustrates frequently, if not always, that curious _swerving_ from the purely literary question which we so often notice. Almost any magnet is strong enough to draw the commentator away from that question. He will even ask, and gravely answer, the question, Why men, but not gods, are represented as washing their hands before dinner?

Footnote 75:

Ed. Schrader, 2 vols., Leipsic, 1890.

Footnote 76:

For this and the subsequent oddity see Schrader (_op. cit._, _Ad Odysseam_), pp. 40-43. The subject is dealt with, from another point of view, in a monograph by M. Carroll, _Aristotle’s Poetics in the Light of the Homeric Scholia_, Baltimore, 1895.

The _De Antro Nympharum_,[77] on the other hand, is the principal example, in intermediate times, of that allegorical interpretation or misinterpretation which, unless kept severely in order, is sure to usurp the place of the criticism to which it can at best be ancillary. From no other members of the school, so far as I know, have we anything that comes even as near to criticism as this.

Footnote 77:

My copy of this is the separate edition of Van Goens (Trajecti ad Rhenum, 1765). It can hardly be necessary to say that the subject is the famous and beautiful opening of _Od._ xiii. As for the treatment—the cave, the double entrance, the nymphs, the vases, the bees, are all allegorised to the _n_^{th}, pressed to death, broken on the wheel, sublimated to a non-essence in the Neo-Platonic laboratory.

But the Schools have led us far from our immediate context and subject, the literature of the three centuries after Aristotle. [Sidenote: _Rhetoricians and Grammarians._] From all this literature it cannot be said that one single text, of undoubted genuineness and substantive importance, preserves for us the critical views of the something like three hundred years which passed between the philosopher’s death in 322 B.C. and the flourishing of Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the third decade before Christ. Two things, however, may be said to be, in a round and general manner, ascertained as having either taken definite form or come into existence during this time; and though both are conditioned very uncomfortably by our lack of texts, they are both of the utmost importance to the history of Criticism, and they can both be spoken of, with caution, indeed, but with some general induction not too far from certainty. The one is the establishment of the teaching of Rhetoric in a form which underwent no very important modification for five or six hundred years, and no absolute revolution for fifteen or sixteen hundred. The other is the birth of Verbal Criticism—of the kind of criticism which long arrogated to itself something like a primary title to the name, and has, in the same or other forms, not yet quite given up its pretensions—under the auspices of Aristarchus and the great Alexandrian school of commentators. The importance assigned to these can be justified from the fact, whether that fact be or be not in itself distasteful, that of such ancient criticism as remains to us, by far the larger part is busied rather in these two directions than in that of Criticism proper. On the one hand, we have the huge body of work, not even so quite completely collected, which fills the seven thousand pages of Walz’s _Rhetores Græci_, and the less voluminous thesaurus which does duty for Roman effort on the same lines. On the other, we have the body (whether as great or greater its more scattered condition does not permit one to say certainly) of Scholia. And we constantly find—to our grief—that the better writers (of whom, at least in some cases, something survives to us) are apt to stray, in one or other of these directions, from the proper path of that criticism which, though it does not neglect either Rhetorical method or verbal minuteness, yet busies itself mainly with far other questions, asking, “Is this writer or this work, on the whole, good or bad as work or writer?” “What variety of the poetical or prosaic pleasure does he or it give?” “What are the sources, so far as they are traceable, of this pleasure?” “What is the special idiosyncrasy of the author or the book?” “What place do both hold, in relation to other books or authors of the same or other times, in the same or other languages?” It will not be otiose if we attempt to sketch, from the extant examples, what the Rhetorician and the Scholiast, as a rule, actually did, what aim they seem to have set before them, what connection with the best literary criticism they seem to have had.

We need not very greatly disturb ourselves at the fact that, of complete Rhetorical treatises, we have probably nothing between Aristotle and Dionysius, if even that attributed to the latter be genuine; and that modern investigations refuse indorsement to the genuineness of the _De Interpretatione_ attributed to Demetrius Phalereus,[78] which would, if it were genuine, be the oldest we have. For, from myriad petty indications, there is no reasonable reason for believing that a genuine _Rhetoric_ by Demetrius would be very different from that which is now attributed to some later Alexandrian writer. Rhetoric, as we have seen, had from the first been hampered by special attributions and limitations; nor (as so often happens in history) did these limitations cease, at any rate to some extent, to work when their causes ceased to exist. The sentry in St James’s Park, who continued to be posted till the other day at the garden-door of a certain house, because (as it was found out long after the reason had been forgotten) some Royal or Ambassadorial personage had been quartered there for a time generations earlier, was a great and admirable allegory—and in wiser days than our own would have remained undisturbed as such. Moreover, though the political importance of Rhetoric decreased, and the assemblies of Greece became mere parish councils; though the law courts went more and more either by fixed codes or personal influence; though philosophy became _phluaria_; Rhetoric, having once, with unconscious cunning, [Sidenote: _Rhetoric early stereotyped._] got Education practically into her hands, retained that powerful engine and all the influence that it confers. It would seem however that, pretty early, a very mischievous process of stereotyping took place. Grammar and Logic, the companions of Rhetoric, were to some extent saved by their having positive things to deal with—the facts of speech and the Laws of Thought. But Rhetoric dealt with fashion, opinion, etiquette: and except when, in the hands of superior persons like Dionysius and Longinus among the Greeks, like Quintilian among the Latins, it shook itself free and became the Literary Criticism that it ought to be, it became a rather parlous thing. It early developed the disease of technical jargon, in that specially dangerous form—recognisable perhaps in times nearer our own than those of Demetrius or even of Hermogenes—the form of giving wantonly new meanings to common words. It elaborated an arbitrary and baneful system of “common form”—of schemes, and types, and conventional schedules, into which, by a minimum of intellectual exertion, the orator or writer could throw what he wanted. On the one hand, it constantly increased and multiplied the Figures; on the other hand, it invented a system of things called _staseis_—"states of the case"—which attempted to classify and stereotype the matter of the orator’s brief, just as the Figures classified and stereotyped his oratorical means of dealing with it. In other words, and to adopt the terms of literary criticism itself, the stop-watch ruled supreme. In the more technical examples of Rhetorical art, such as those of the far later but characteristic Hermogenes, it is often difficult to find anything which touches literary criticism at all. Only the greater men, as has been said, were ever able to break free; and the sort of scorn with which they speak of their predecessors—Quintilian of the figure-mongers, Longinus of Cæcilius—is invaluable (especially as neither Quintilian nor Longinus seems to have been at all a bad-blooded person) as showing how irksome the traditional Rhetoric was felt to be by men who had in them the sense of literature.

Footnote 78:

_V. infra_, p. 103.

The Scholiast, on the other hand, if of a less traceable creation, is of almost equally old lineage, and he may conveniently [Sidenote: _Grammatical and Scholiastic criticism._] be dealt with, in such detail and variety as he requires, before the more formidable bulk of the School Rhetoricians occupies us. We have already seen, in glimpses, that the restless curiosity of the Greeks took very early to purely philological inquiry, to the separation and naming of parts of speech, to the codification of grammar. And it was impossible that a people furnished with such an admirable language and so early developing accomplishment, both in music and poetry, should not, at a stage proportionately much earlier than in other cases, discover and prosecute inquiries as to Prosody. To this day, Greek grammar is, to some tastes at any rate, the only grammar which is not too arbitrary or too jejune to excite any interest. The wonderful symmetry of Greek accidence, the mazy but by no means unplanned intricacy of Greek syntax, have had power to fascinate schoolboys who, both at that age and later, were merely bored by the arbitrary niceties of Latin, and refused to accept the attempts that have been made to impose an appearance of system on the antinomianism and the compromises of English. As for Greek metre, though the subject has not the historic interest—the interest of great yet not inexplicable changes—which belongs to the prosody of the two other languages just brought into comparison, it is capable of much more exact handling. And, in particular, the peculiar structure of Greek choric verse, that hitherto unparalleled blend which unites much of the liberty of prose with the ordered charm of poetry, gave practically endless occupation to intellects which would soon have been satiated with the comparative monotony of Latin, and which might have recoiled before the apparent lawlessness of English.

It is not very certain at what precise time these two studies (or, if we take prosody to be a part of grammar, this joint-study) began to occupy considerable numbers of professional students. But it must have been a tolerably early one, and by degrees the grammarian in his pure function, the scholiast in his applied one, became recognised personages.

The profession, so to speak, may be said (according to the common tradition, but with sufficient justice) to have been formally constituted in the third and second centuries [Sidenote: _The Pergamene and Alexandrian Schools._] before Christ, under the patronage of the successors of Alexander at the courts of Pergamus and Alexandria. To these schools belong the famous names of Zenodotus (the earliest, and belonging partly to the third century), of Crates of Mallos, and, above all, of Aristarchus. It is, perhaps, only at first sight surprising that, famous as the names are, they are for the most part names only. Not one single work, nor even any substantial passage of a work, by any of the three masters just mentioned, or by any of their contemporaries or near pupils, has come down to us, save in the case of one pupil of Zenodotus, more famous even than his master, the grammarian Aristophanes. Criticism indeed, it has been said, has, of all literature that is really literature, the most precarious existence. Still, we know a good deal about them from citations, allusions, and discussions in later writers, while of Aristophanes of Byzantium we have a fairly considerable collection of fragments.

The disappearance of texts, always lamentable, if not actually irremediable, is here more to be regretted than anywhere, because there is fair reason for believing that, at any rate, some of these grammarians were critics in the full and proper sense of the term. By far the greater part of their labours appears to have been directed to Homer, and there is no reason to contradict the general, the received, opinion that while the Pisistratean redaction is not quite certain in fact, and almost entirely unknown in nature, while it is certain that even Aristotle had before him a text differing remarkably from our own, the Alexandrian grammarians practically produced that which we have. It is accordingly from this time that the famous and formidable craft—science it would no doubt call itself—of textual criticism may be said to date; and from our information, second-hand as it is, we are enabled to recognise some types of textual critics which are not, and are never likely to be, obsolete. In Aristophanes, the spelling reformer, the practical originator of accents, it is not rash to see the great exemplar of the critic [Sidenote: _Their Four Masters._] of the purely philological kind, who busies himself with those literary matters which are most remote from literature proper, though no doubt he is a very valuable person when he is kept in his proper place. Zenodotus stands in the same relation to the lexicographical critic, and seems also to have been the father of all those who by “a critical text” mean a text arranged at their own discretion, passages being expunged, transposed, or corrected, not in accordance with any testimony as to what the author did write, but according to the critic’s idea of what he ought to have written—in other words, what the critic himself would have liked him to write, or would, if he could, have written in his place. Aristarchus appears to have deserved the primacy generally accorded to him by being more wisely conservative than Zenodotus, and less tempted to stick in the letter than the lesser Aristophanes; as well as by a general display, in his more literary remarks, of critical faculty greater than was possessed by either, and infinitely greater than that of the average scholiast. While the still earlier, and at least equally famous or notorious, name of Zoilus is of itself sufficient to show that the critic who is merely or mainly a snarler can at least boast that he is of an ancient house.

It would be rash to deny, and even unjust to doubt, that some of these famous critics, as well as others less known or not known at all, practised criticism in its best and widest sense, regulating texts by a sanely conservative acuteness, interpreting meanings and purpose with adaptable but not too fantastic compliance, annotating matter with intelligent erudition, and even achieving, as best they could, the explanation of the nature and success of their author’s literary appeal, and the placing of his work in the general map of literary history. Nay, there were actually, though our remains of them are but tantalising, literary historians of tolerably old date. But it is possibly neither presumptuous nor ungenerous to suspect that, if we had the whole works of Aristarchus before us, we should find in him (allowing for his grammatical tendency) at least as much shortcoming as we found, probably far more than we found, in Aristotle from the rhetorical side. For the old disability—the absence of comparison, the possession [Sidenote: _The Scholiasts on Aristophanes._] of not even a second literature for purposes of contrast—must have weighed upon Aristarchus just as it weighed upon Aristotle. And it is at any rate not uncharitable, it is merely a plain recognition of actual fact, to say that on the great mass of Greek grammatical criticism, as it comes down to us in the so-called scholiasts, the curse of the letter does undoubtedly rest. Nothing, for instance, is more curious than to read, from the critical point of view, the Scholia on Aristophanes,[79] some of which are undoubtedly among the oldest that we have on any author, except Homer. The commentators are irreproachable in noting the slightest grammatical peculiarity; they map out the metres with religious care. Difficulties of mere meaning they tackle with the same imperturbable seriousness, the same grave and chaste attention to duty, whether the _crux_ is a recondite “excursion into the _blue_,” or a mystery of the kitchen and the fishmarket, or a piece of legal technicality. They give careful and useful abstracts and arguments, dates now and then, sometimes not contemptible scraps of literary history. But of literary criticism proper, of appreciation of Aristophanes' ever fresh wit, of his astonishing intellectual alertness, of his wide knowledge, of his occasional bursts of magnificent poetry, there is not one word. You may spend hours, days, weeks almost over the huge collection; but the result will only be that, for this special purpose, page after page will be drawn blank.

Footnote 79:

I do not pretend to have extensively consulted or “compulsed” the learned and admirable labours of Mr Rutherford on this subject. But I have taken care to refresh and confirm old familiarity with Dindorf’s edition by reading that of Dübner with the additions in the Didot collection.

But it may be said, “The scholia on Aristophanes are confessedly[80] poor in literary annotation. Why do you take them [Sidenote: _On Sophocles._] as an example? Why not take in preference, or give in addition, one at least of those collections of scholia which the same authorities[81] accept as richer in the matter?” Very well: let us take those on Sophocles,[82] the admittedly richest of all. It will—or certainly may—seem at the opening as if a more promising “pocket” had been struck, for the first annotation on the _Ajax_ is busy with the arrangement and contents of the prologue, and its relation to what follows; and there is a good deal of similar matter throughout the commentary on this play at least. But when we come to read it in detail we find that its criticism is, at its widest departure from the mere explanatory _supellex_ of the ordinary scholiast, almost purely _theatrical_. For instance, here is the note on 66: “The introduction of Ajax is persuasive; for thus the pathos of the tragedy becomes greater, the spectators perceiving him now out of his mind, and a little later in his senses.”

Footnote 80:

See the useful and interesting, if rather widely titled, paper of Ad. Trendelenburg, _Grammaticorum Græcorum De Arte Tragicâ Judiciorum Reliquiæ_. Bonn: 1867.

Footnote 81:

Ibid., p. 1.

Footnote 82:

Ed. P. N. Papageorgius. Leipsic: 1888.

And again on 112: “He speaks as in other respects yielding to the goddess but in this opposing her, and the poet hence shows his disposition to be haughty (since the spectators are much disposed in favour of Ajax by his misfortunes, and all but wroth with the poet), that Ajax may seem to suffer justly from his want of submission to the divinity.”

We might quote the long and curious note on 134 as to the composition of the chorus from Salaminians; the criticism of the expostulation of the said chorus with the conduct of the Greeks to Ajax, 158; the still odder note on 201, as of one expounding to a very little school-child how Tecmessa and the Chorus exchange information; the formal explanation, on 342, why Teucer is introduced later than Tecmessa, and of the hero’s language to his captive mistress; the rationale, 770, of the arrival of the messenger; the description of the scene at 815. But the mere enumeration of such things as these should, without the expenditure of more space, be sufficient to show what the character of this annotation is. It is not so very different in places from the elaborate stage directions with which, for the last century, some playwrights, especially German and Scandinavian, have been wont to assist the imagination of their readers or hearers, or their own dramatic incapacity; and even when it goes beyond this, it hardly ever goes further than the explanation and justification of the _action_.

The same is, I think, almost without exception the character of the relatively considerable number of observations of a critical kind which I have noted on other plays. Sometimes they are actual directions to the actor—who is told on _Electra_ 823 that he “ought, at the moment of uttering the cry, to look up to heaven, and raise his hands”—sometimes, as on _Œdipus Tyrannus_ 141, the note is made that “this will stir the theatre.” But always, I think,—certainly in the vast majority of cases,—the critic abstains, with a rigidity which can only come from deliberate purpose (and this is unlikely), or from unconsciousness that the thing is likely to be required of him, from any comments on the beauty or appropriateness of the verse, on the idiosyncrasy of the phrase or its agreement with others, on the Sophoclean characteristics of the poetry, or even (except from the pure stage point of view) on the evolution of the characters. He has evidently learnt his Aristotle, and looks at the action first: he has not learnt him with a sufficiently independent intelligence to remember that even Aristotle does not look at the action only.

But the case becomes strongest when we come to what should be the stronghold of literary criticism in this quarter—the [Sidenote: _On Homer._] Scholia[83] on Homer himself. Here we have the thrice—nay, thirty times—decocted essence of the critical study of generations, centuries, almost millennia (certainly more than one millennium), of study of the writer who entered into Greek life, Greek thought, Greek education, as no book, save the English Bible, has ever entered into the life, the thought, the education, of any other country. We have it in ample bulk, of all ages, presented in that special fashion of comment on comment, of annotated annotation, which, whatever may be its merits or whatever may be its drawbacks, is at any rate suited to draw out examination of the common subject from almost every point of view.

Footnote 83:

Ed. Dindorf and Maass. Oxford, 6 vols., 1855-88.

And what do we find in this? We find, of course, verbal explanation in floods, in oceans, sometimes of the most valueless, often of the most valuable kind. We find laborious comment on etymology (not quite so often valuable as eccentric), on grammar (invaluable often), on mythology, &c., &c., giving us what, whether it be artistically worthy or worthless, we often could not otherwise by any possibility know. We get the most painstaking, if not always the most illuminative or illuminated, discussions of the poet’s meaning, handled simply, handled allegorically, handled “this way, that way, which way you please.” Not seldom, as elsewhere (in Eustathius, for instance), we get certain references to Figures and the technical rules of Rhetoric, which touch the outer skirts, the fringes, of literary criticism itself. But of that criticism, as represented even in Dionysius, much more in Longinus, the allowance is astonishingly small. You may read page after page, volume after volume, and find absolutely nothing, or next to nothing, of the sort. Take, for instance, the two volumes of Scholia on the _Odyssey_, as published by Dindorf—on the _Odyssey_, the very touchstone of all Greek literature for literary criticism, and one which proves the gold in Longinus at the very moment that it shows what we may think not so golden in him. You turn and turn. Besides the matter classified above, a great many extremely valuable, or at worst more or less curious, thoughts meet you. You will be informed (on Od. ii. 99) that “It is natural to women to dislike the parents of their husbands”; on vi. 137, that “All youth is fearful because of its want of experience, but especially female youth.” You will find examples of the puerile quibbling of Zoilus, such as that it was unlikely that exactly six sailors were taken from each ship; with the common-sense, if not much less puerile, retort that it is difficult to get ἑβδομήκοντα δύο into verse. But such things are no great windfall; and such others as the observation, at 391 of the same book, on the poet’s wonderful faculty and daring in making the sound suit the sense, and of showing in that sound “all the sorrow of the sight,” are very rare. They still more rarely soar above observations on special points, or reach criticism of general handling of the relations of one part of the story to another, of its pervading poetical quality and charm. For one note, vol. i. p. 425, a little farther on, as to the variety and aptness of the Homeric compound epithets for beasts, we shall find pages and sheets of mere trifling. And when we get a more thoughtful examination (see, for instance, that given as apparently Porphyry’s in the Appendix, ii. 789, on the conduct of Ulysses in selecting the persons to whom he shall first reveal himself), it strikes one at once that these, like the comments above cited on the _Ajax_, are comments on the _action_, on the dramatic structure, and not on the literary execution.

It is the same—it is perhaps even more the same—if we turn to the _Iliad_. The famous first words elicit naturally a good deal[84] of comment, which has some promise. Why did he begin with “wrath,” which is an ill-sounding word? For two reasons. First, that he might purify the corresponding part of the souls of his readers by the passions, &c. Secondly, that he might give his “praises of the Greeks” greater verisimilitude. Besides, this was the practical subject with which he was first to deal as in a kind of tragic prologue. Then there is an odd gradation of the states of wrath itself, from ὀργὴ to μῆνις. Next, an inquiry why the poet begins with the end of the war, and so forth. This, of course, is literary criticism of a sort, but on thin and threadbare lines enough; and there is not very much even of this. The scholiasts are far more at home with accentuation and punctuation; with the endless question of _athetesis_ (or blackmarking, as spurious); with such technical ticketings as at i. 366: “The trope is _anakephalaiosis_.[85] There are four kinds of narrative—homiletic, apangeltic, hypostatic,[86] and mixed”; or with such curiously unintelligent attempts to pin down poetic beauty as the note at i. 477 on ῥοδοδάκτυλος as a synecdoche, in which, by the way, even the colour-scheme seems to be misunderstood.

Footnote 84:

See Dindorf’s collection, enlarged with variants at the beginning of vol. v. by Maass.

Footnote 85:

_I.e._, “recapitulation.”

Footnote 86:

_I.e._, “in the nature of conversational address, regular history, or argument.” But it is often very difficult to translate these rhetorical terms exactly. _Hypostasis_ in particular is even more elusive in rhetoric than in theology.

At the close of these remarks on the Scholiasts I must enter in a fresh form the _caveat_ which has perhaps been wearisomely iterated, but which it is better to repeat too often than to suppress even in a single place where its omission might mislead. I am not finding fault with these laborious and invaluable persons for not doing what they had not the least intention to do. I am not (Heaven forbid!) arguing for any superiority in the modern critic over the ancient. I am only endeavouring to show that the subjects to which modern literary critics—who, as it seems to me, stick to their business most closely, and abstain most from metabasis ἐς ἄλλο γένος—pay most attention, were precisely those to which ancient critics, as a matter of fact, paid least. And this it is not only the right but the duty of the historian to point out.

Nor will it, I trust, while we are thus examining Miscellanea, be considered frivolous or superfluous to examine [Sidenote: _The Literary Epigrams of the Anthology._] that vast mass of information on Greek life and thought after the Golden Age which is called the _Greek Anthology_,[87] to see whether it can afford us any light. In this mass, with its thousands of articles ranging from exquisite to contemptible in actual literary quality, the range of subject is notoriously as wide as that of merit. The devotees of the Minor Muses of Hellas will “rhyme,” as we should say, anything from a riddle and an arithmetical conundrum, to Myron’s cow and the complimentary statues to the latest fashionable athlete. It would be odd, therefore, if books and authors escaped or were ignored, and they duly appear. In the battalions of _adespota_, besides a stray versification[88] of the rules for making iambics, and a wail[89] from some grammarian unnamed that he cannot write as well as Palladius or Palladas, we come to a considerable body[90] of literary epigrams arranged, by some one or other of the numerous ancient editors of the _Anthology_, in vaguely chronological order of subject. First, as in duty bound, come Linus and Orpheus, then a considerable batch on Homer, and then the long succession of poets and philosophers, dramatists and historians, to follow. For the most part, of course, the epigrams contain generalities and commonplaces, but with more or less of the neatness and prettiness that we associate with the very name of the _Anthology_; sometimes they go a little closer to the matter, as in the piece (523 of Jacobs) on Erinna’s much-praised “Distaff.” As we have only five[91] (and those not consecutive) out of the three hundred verses which this girl of nineteen years composed, it would be rash as well as unkind to question the judgment of the epigrammatist that they are “equal to Homer.” But it may safely be said that the judgment itself is in a rudimentary style of criticism. It is natural, but rather “tell-tale,” that the critic-poets always, when they can, take some non-literary point—Anacreon’s fondness for wine, the equality in number of the Muses and the books of Herodotus, the supposed physical and moral shortcomings of Aristotle, and the like. But sometimes they go higher. There is plenty of spirit and sense in the epigram on Panætius for pronouncing the _Phædo_ spurious,—as is well known, this idlest of critical debauches was at least as great a favourite with the ancients as with the moderns (548). Sometimes we get valuable testimony as to popular judgments—the unfeigned admiration which was felt for Menander, though the sounder critics might put him below Aristophanes; the mighty repute of Aristides of Smyrna (see p. 113) who is pretty certainly _not_ the Aristides congratulated ironically in another epigram as never having less than seven auditors—the four walls of the room, and the three benches in it. Perhaps Claudian is a little overparted with the “mind of Virgil and the Muse of Homer.” But all decadences are given to exaggeration of this kind; and the reviews of the closing years of the nineteenth century in England will furnish much more extravagant instances of comparison.

Footnote 87:

I use the ed. of Jacobs, Leipsic, 1794, 10 vols. (nominally 3 vols. of Commentary, in 7 parts, 4 vols. of text, and 1 of Indices).

Footnote 88:

Ep. Adesp., 454, ed. cit., Text, iv. 214.

Footnote 89:

Ibid., Ep. 468, p. 218.

Footnote 90:

Ibid., p. 221 _sq._

Footnote 91:

_V._ Bergk, _Poet. Lyr._, iii. 143.

The work of known, or at least named, individuals is less noteworthy in bulk, and not much more so in kind and degree. The right happy industry of Meleager appears to have helped in preserving for us no small proportion of the minor work of the great men of old. But his own quintessenced and not seldom charming pen is devoted to subjects always less solemn, and sometimes very much less worthy, than literature. These elders themselves (as indeed we should expect) meddle with literature but rarely; while their successors, the early Alexandrians, are less copious than we might have expected. Simmias of Thebes (perhaps not the same who outraged[92] the feelings of neo-classic critics, from Addison downwards, two thousand years later, by composing verse-eggs and -hatchets) has left us a couple of elegant and regular, though rather vague and slight, epigrams on Sophocles;[93] Philiscus of Miletus, who was at least old enough to be a pupil of Isocrates, a pompous eulogium of Lysias;[94] while no less a person than Thucydides has the credit of one[95] on the Third Tragedian, which if extravagant in tone is neat in expression. Of the compliments[96] to Aristophanes and Sappho, which are similarly attributed to Plato, the former, with its consecration of the soul of the great comic poet as the _temenos_ of the Graces, is far the better. But the nearest approach to literature among the verses attributed to Plato’s mightiest rival is a quaint bundle (no small one)[97] of epitaphs on the Homeric heroes. Of course these attributions are in all cases very doubtful, and possibly not in a single one correct; but the fact of them for literary history remains the same.

Footnote 92:

He is generally called Simmias the _Rhodian_. But some speak of the two as identical.

Footnote 93:

Ibid., i. 100.

Footnote 94:

Ibid., i. 101.

Footnote 95:

Ibid., i. 102.

Footnote 96:

Ibid., i. 102, 103.

Footnote 97:

Ibid., i. 111-117. There are 48 of them. Aristotle had versatility enough to do them, but they do not _read_ like him.

If we turn to others, we shall draw some of the most flourishing coverts in vain, but find something elsewhere. Erycius of Cyzicus[98] has a spirited retort to an insulter of Homer, and a generous eulogium of Sophocles—it is noteworthy that these two most unite the Anthological, as the general, suffrage. Palladas handles Homer’s dealings with women,[99] elsewhere[100] jests ruefully about having to sell his books, even Callimachus and Pindar, and moralises[101] the story of Circe, rather stupidly, but in a fashion for which he might find only too many compurgators in antiquity. Pollianus[102] rallies (not disagreeably) the stealers of Homeric tags and phrases; and a certain Cyrus accomplishes[103] a mild couplet to complete his own witty conceit of erecting a statue of Pindar at a bath. The long and curious poem[104] of Christodorus Coptites on the statues in the Gymnasium of Zeuxippus naturally has a great many literary allusions. Agathias—a somewhat major star than most of these, and one whose pursuits earned him the special surname of Scholasticus—has, so far as I remember, only two literary epigrams[105] on statues of Æsop and Plutarch. Another “Scholasticus,” scarcely distinguished more by the name of Thomas, announces that he has three “stars in rhetoric”—Demosthenes, Aristides, and Thucydides[106]—praising especially the pains of the first, but seeming actually to prefer the two latter. Leon, the philosopher, has a little handful[107] of epigrams on books, chiefly of science and philosophy, and a Homeric cento not more respectable than such things usually are.

Footnote 98:

Ibid., iii. 12.

Footnote 99:

Ibid., iii. 117.

Footnote 100:

Ibid., iii. 124.

Footnote 101:

Ibid., iii. 137.

Footnote 102:

Ibid., iii. 146.

Footnote 103:

Ibid., iii. 160.

Footnote 104:

Ibid., iii. 161-177.

Footnote 105:

Ibid., iv. 16.

Footnote 106:

Ibid., iv. 95.

Footnote 107:

Ibid., iv. 97-100.

The great name of Theocritus is attached[108] to pieces, not inelegant but very distinctly _banal_, on Anacreon, Epicharmus, Archilochus, Hipponax; and that of the lesser Alcæus (not the great one of Mitylene, but the much lesser Messenian) to some praises of Homer,[109] of Hesiod,[110] and again of Hipponax. Dioscorides[111] extols Sappho, defends the much-injured Philænis against those who (to judge from confirmatory testimony to the same effect elsewhere) played upon her the same ignoble trick by which a certain Frenchman, in days nearer our own, tried to blast the fair fame of Luisa Sigea of Toledo. He is complimentarily orthodox as to Sophocles, but not much less complimentary to Sositheus, of whom we know little, and to Macho, of whom, thanks to Athenæus, we know that he exercised his wits upon putting naughty anecdotes into uncommonly pedestrian verse. An epigram of the Grammarian Crates[112] refers to the controversy on the respective merits of Chœrilus, Antimachus, and Homer, and would have been very welcome if it had given us some information on that matter; but as it is, the subject is a mere pretext to enable Crates to “talk greasily.” Antipater of Sidon,[113] starting from the childish debate about the birthplace of Homer, turns it into something better by his conclusion—

“Thy country is great Heaven: there was to thee No mortal mother, but Calliope”;

and he subsequently celebrates Sappho, “Erinna of few verses,” and Pindar, returning to the same subjects (except Erinna) in another batch, and adding a group on Anacreon (who, as fertile in commonplaces, is a favourite subject of the Anthologians), Stesichorus, and Ibycus.

Footnote 108:

i. 98.

Footnote 109:

i. 238.

Footnote 110:

i. 241.

Footnote 111:

i. 250-252.

At least three epigrams of a different sort rather make us regret that there are not more of the same kind, instead of the iteration of stock phrases. The first,[114] by Herodicus of Babylon, is a smart onslaught on the “fry of Aristarchus,” the “mono-syllabists” who care for nothing but ΣΦΙΝ and ΣΦΩιΝ and ΜΙΝ and ΝΙΝ. The second,[115] by Antiphanes, hails the “busybody race” of grammarians who “dig up the roots of other people’s muses,” with a great many more abusive but not quite inappropriate epithets and comparisons. The third,[116] by Philippus, is perhaps the best of the three, girding at the “whelps of Zenodotus” with a kind of combination of the other two, which is very likely actual and intentional. Philip (_v. infra_) was a careful student of the elders of his craft. Antipater of Thessalonica[117] has quite a group of literary epigrams. He celebrates the Nine Poetesses, takes part in the Antimachus-Homer debate, refusing the Colophonian primacy, but granting him second rank and the praise of rough vigour (“the Hammer on the anvil of the Pierides”), &c., and honours Aristophanes. Homer once more occupies Alpheus of Mitylene[118] and Antiphilus of Byzantium,[119] while Philippus of Thessalonica[120] devotes a “pretty but slim” comparison with flowers to the principal bards of the Anthology itself.

Footnote 112:

ii. 3.

Footnote 113:

ii. 18, _sq._

Footnote 114:

ii. 64.

Footnote 115:

ii. 189.

Footnote 116:

ii. 207.

Footnote 117:

ii. 101, 102.

Footnote 118:

ii. 116.

Footnote 119:

ii. 157.

Footnote 120:

ii. 194.

This same Philippus has also a not unhappy conceit[121] about Hipponax bidding the usual passer-by at his tomb “not wake the sleeping wasp, Whose shafts fly straight although his metres limp.” A pale addition to the garland of Sophocles comes from the doubtless alien hand of Stratyllius Flaccus,[122] and Hesiod supplies only a play on words to the better artistry of Marcus Argentarius,[123] while the accident of our order of reading—a genuine accident—finishes a volume, and the tale, with the marvellously lame and only epigram of a certain Pinytus[124] on no less a person than Sappho.

Footnote 121:

ii. 219.

Footnote 122:

ii. 240.

Footnote 123:

ii. 244.

Footnote 124:

ii. 264.

A very thankless wretch would he be who was not grateful for any legitimate excuse to wander once more through the length and breadth of the enchanted gardens of the Anthology. But the reperusal can only strengthen the opinion already formed that on the actual “evaluation of π” in criticism the Greek mind, whether wisely or unwisely, was not strongly set. Nothing can be clearer than that the forms, the range, the etiquette, so to speak, of the compositions which are here grouped, invited criticism in the graver way as thorough as that which Ben Jonson gives to Shakespeare, Camden, and a dozen others; in the lighter as sharp, and at the same time as piercing, as that of Piron on La Chaussée. But it was not the mode, and they were not in the vein. With rare exceptions they obeyed the classical principle of taking the accepted, the obvious, the orthodox, and dressing it up in their best way. It by no means follows that they were not right; but it does follow that they leave us a little unsatisfied. To tell us that Homer is great, Sappho lofty, Sophocles perfect, Aristophanes witty, is (to use the old comparison of George Gascoigne) to praise the “crystal eye” and the “cherry lip” of any gentle-woman. And so we may turn to the division of Greek literature most opposite to the Anthology itself.

Before considering in some, at least, representative detail the vast and arid province of the technical Greek Rhetoric, it may be [Sidenote: _The Rhetoric of the Schools._] well, or rather is absolutely necessary, to resume the consideration of what Rhetoric really meant. As we have seen, it was at the beginning a strictly practical Art of Persuasion by Oratory; and if it tended to embrace and absorb all or most other arts and sciences, this was partly because the orator would certainly have to deal with many, and might have to deal with all, of these, partly because it was always more or less a political art, an art of public business. For the Greek politician, like others, was expected to be a Jack-of-all-trades.

But even while this practical object continued, the Greek passion for abstracting and refining tended to turn practice into theory, while the Greek love of sport, competition, public display, tended further to turn this theory into the code of a very elaborate game. Obviously enough, as the practical importance of oratory declined, the technical and “sporting” interest of Rhetoric got more and more the upper hand. Rhetoricians specialised their terminology, multiplied their classifications, and drew their rules ever finer and finer, just as croquet-players narrow their hoops and bulge out their balls, just as whist-players split and wire-draw the broad general principles of the play of Deschapelles and Clay into “American leads,” and an endless reverberation of “calls” and “echoes.” We possess a very large, and a more curious than interesting, collection of the technical writings of this half craft, half sport, and a collection, rather less in proportion, but a little more interesting, of examples of the finished handiwork or game. To both of these we must now turn, premising that the technical part has not very much, and the finished examples surprisingly little, to furnish to the stricter literature of our subject. Why, then, do we deal with it? Because even abused Rhetoric is always Literary Criticism in a more or less degraded and disguised condition. The degradation can be remedied, the disguise thrown off, whenever the hour and the man arrive. Rhetoric, in her worst moods, keeps the tools ready, keeps them almost too sharply ground, if she does not put them to the right use.

As Rhetoric preserved her authority not merely to the latest classical times but right through the Middle Ages, and even at [Sidenote: _Its documents._] the close of the latter escaped, at the cost only of some minor changes and additions, the decay which fell upon the rest of Scholastic learning, it is not surprising that the _Rhetores Græci_ received early attention from the young art of Printing. Had not Aldus, in 1508-1509, collected them in two folio volumes, it is perhaps rather unlikely that we should have had any more modern collections at all. For technical Rhetoric fell into even more disfavour than Logic with the rise of physical science and materialist philosophy in the seventeenth century; and though, in some applied senses of the word, it has never fallen into complete disuse, it has never, as Logic has, recovered position in its stricter and more formal forms. It was therefore no small feat, even of German industry, when, some seventy years ago, Christian Walz of Tübingen undertook a new edition,[125] which, though some additions and improvements have since been made by Spengel[126] and others, remains the main standard and thesaurus. Its ten stout volumes, of some seven thousand closely printed pages, have probably been read through, and line by line, by hardly a single person for each decade of the seven during which it has been before the world. For not only is the bulk enormous, but the matter is extremely technical; there is endless repetition, commentaries on commentaries on commentaries forming no small part of the whole, while the minute definition and special terminology[127] require extremely careful reading. I shall not pretend to have read every word of it myself; but I have read a very great deal of it, and everything that follows can be guaranteed as drawn at first hand.

Footnote 125:

9 vols. (really 10, vol. vii. being in two large parts), Stuttgart, Tübingen, London and Paris, 1832-36.

Footnote 126:

Spengel’s handy collection (3 vols., 4 parts), which has now been for some years in process of re-editing in the _Bibliotheca Teubneriana_ by Römer and Hammer, omits the scholia on Hermogenes, but includes divers all-important, if elsewhere accessible, texts, such as Aristotle and Longinus, and adds some minor things.

Footnote 127:

It is not, I hope, illiberal to remark that our excellent “Liddell & Scott” is perhaps more to seek in rhetorical terminology than anywhere else. (At least it certainly was so up to the 7th or penultimate edition: I have not yet worked with that of 1896.) Ernesti’s _Lexicon Technologiæ Græcorum Rhetoricæ_ (Leipsic, 1795) is, for all its 105 years, still almost indispensable to the student, more so even than the corresponding and somewhat younger Latin volume (Leipsic, 1797). Even these fail sometimes.

The original treatises of the collection form its smallest part, and none of them is very early; indeed, of the earlier formal Rhetoric, as has been said, Aristotle is almost our only representative, though, luckily, he is worth all the others. If the περὶ ἑρμηνείας, or _De Interpretatione_, which goes by the name of Demetrius, had been rightly referred (in accordance with nearly all the MSS., as far as the name goes, and with the assent of so distinguished and acute a scholar as Petrus Victorius in regard to the person) to Demetrius of Phalerus,—the Athenian statesman and orator of the latter half of the fourth century B.C., the antagonist of his namesake the City-Taker and lover of Lamia, the scholar of Theophrastus, the schoolfellow of Menander, the probable consulting founder of the Alexandrian library—its interest of authorship would be only inferior to that of the work of the greatest writers. But the allusions and citations in the treatise itself (unless we suppose it to have been edited and interpolated to an extent such as to make it useless as a document) are such as to put this attribution out of the question. And while Dionysius and others have been put forward as possible claimants, there seems no reason to doubt that the most probable author is to be found in some Alexandrian grammarian or sophist of the name of Demetrius (perhaps the one actually named by Diogenes Laertius as having written rhetorical treatises), who may have lived under the Antonines. There is, therefore, no reason for disturbing Walz’s actual order.[128]

Footnote 128:

He does not give, but Spengel does, the _Rhetoric to Alexander_ (v. _sup._, p. 17 _note_), attributed to Anaximenes; and the same is the case with a short fragment, Περὶ ἐρωτήσεως καὶ ἀποκρίσεως, which is an excursus on Arist., _Rhet._, iii. 18. It is purely _barristerial_.

His first volume is composed of divers more or less original treatises, which are of the kind called προγυμνάσματα, “Preliminary Exercises,” and which in most cases actually bear that title. The first is by the famous Hermogenes (_ob._ _c._ 170 A.D.), the Phœnix of rhetoricians pure and simple, who became a master at fifteen and an idiot at five-and-twenty, whose “heart was covered with hair,” and whose works not only followed him, but were followed by libraries-full of scholiasts and commentators. The next, itself a sort of adaptation of Hermogenes, is by Aphthonius of Antioch, a teacher of the beginning of the fourth century A.D., who had the rather curious good fortune not merely to secure a long vogue in the late classical ages, but to be current in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Theon, an Alexandrian, but not the father of Hypatia, follows, with the less-known names of Nicolas, Nicephorus, Adrian, Severus, and the better known George Pachymeres, as well as another collection by an anonym. Of these, the works attributed to Adrian and Severus are not called προγυμνάσματα, but in the first case μελέται, in the second διηγήματα καὶ ἠθοποΐαι.[129] The most famous and popular of the sets, those of Hermogenes and Aphthonius, are very short, and, like that of Georgius Pachymeres, do not exceed fifty pages. The others are longer, and in the case of the work of Nicolas, some three times as long.

Footnote 129:

_Meletæ_ are properly “complete declamations,” not, as are the _Progymnasmata_, exercises in _parts_ of oratory, The others are some of these parts only.

The opening of the Progymnasmata of Hermogenes is a curious and slightly bewildering mixture of definition, literary [Sidenote: _The_ Progymnasmata _of Hermogenes_.] history, and the kind of “Manual for Young Writers” (_lege_ orators), which, after long disuse, has recently begun to be prepared for the aspiring journalist. The first chapter is on Fables. They are supposed to be good things for the young. They have various authors and titles, but there is a tendency to give the name of Æsop to all of them. They are not true to fact; but should be plausible, and can be made so by suiting the action to the characters and making the peacock stand for beauty and vanity, the fox for wisdom, the ape for mimicry. Sometimes you should give them shortly, sometimes spin them out. (Example given.) You may put them in different places of your speech, and they will do instead of an actual example.

The second chapter is of Narration (διήγημα), which is distinguished from Fable as being the story of something which has either actually happened or is told as if it had. Homer and Herodotus are both “narrators.” There are five kinds of it (one thinks of Polonius)—the directly declaratory, the indirectly ditto, the elenchtic, the loose, the periodic—with examples of each kind.[130] The first is good for story, the second for debate, “the elenchtic [confuting] is rather for elenchs,” and the loose for epilogues, as being pathetic.

Footnote 130:

This is an early example of the confusion and cross-division which has infested formal Rhetoric to the present day. For the first three heads are purely material, the last two grammatical-formal; so that, instead of ranking side by side, _each_ of 1, 2, 3 should rank under _each_ of 4, 5. Cf. Professor Bain’s _Rhetoric_, vol. i., where similar cross-division more than once occurs.

We might at very little expense of trouble, if at much of space, go through the whole of the little treatise and show how the hairy-hearted one of Tarsus deals in the same way with “Uses,”[131] Maxims, Refutation and Confirmation, Commonplace, Encomium, Comparison, Character-drawing,[132] Ecphrasis,[133] Thesis,[134] and Introduction. But the examples given will suffice. Each chapter consists of a definition, a division, sometimes very finely drawn, of kinds, examples, and generally a scrap of advice as to how, when, and where to introduce them.

Footnote 131:

χρεῖαι, rather “maxims” than “uses” in the theological sense. Hermogenes exhausts his special gift in distinguishing them from the more general maxim or γνώμη.

Footnote 132:

The ἠθοποΐια above referred to. It has a special reference to the drawing-up of speeches suitable to such and such a character in such and such a situation.

Footnote 133:

Description of the graphic and picturesque kind.

Footnote 134:

Subject or question in the wide sense.

The good and the evil of this kind of thing, as well as its special bearings on literary criticism, are not difficult to discern. [Sidenote: _Remarks on them._] It necessitates the narrowest and most accurate investigation of the kinds and characteristics of literature, of literary means, of “composition,” in the wide and the narrow sense. It confers on apt students, besides the mere ability to play the special game of artificial oratory, a great acuteness of analysis. It entirely avoids, no doubt, the danger which is charged constantly, and sometimes not without a certain justice, on the more æsthetic kind of literary study and literary criticism—the danger of desultory chatter. It has, in short, though to a less degree, the virtues of Formal Logic. And if the subject of Education, and fresh nostrums in it, were not a weariness to all intelligent mankind, one might say that not a few things in our present curricula might with advantage be excluded to make room for a course (with some due alterations) of Rhetoric according to Hermogenes. But, at the same time, its own shortcomings and its own dangers are equally obvious. The greatest of them—indeed one which in a manner swallows up and contains within itself all the others—is the almost irresistible temptation to regard literature as something according to scheme and schedule, something that the pocket ivory rule of the architect, and his neatly latticed paper, and a short handbook like this before us, will enable you to despatch and dispose of. Acute as are the divisions and definitions, they are dead things; and nothing that imitates and follows them can be really alive.

Aphthonius adopts the same divisions of Progymnasmata, save that he makes them fourteen instead of twelve, by [Sidenote: _Aphthonius._] separating ἀνασκευὴ [rebutting] from κατασκευὴ [confirming], and adding a section on Blame. His object was evidently to make even the business-like handling of his predecessor more precise still; and the long and revived popularity which, as has been said, he achieved, was not an undue reward for one of the most craftsmanlike crambooks that ever deserved the encomium of the epithet and the discredit of the noun. Aphthonius substitutes for the simple heading “Of Myth,” &c., “_Definition_ of Myth,” &c.; and though he still keeps his sections very short, he manages, instead of the rather brachygraphic indication of examples in the text, to give an appendix of complete if miniature pattern at the end of each section—a fable of the ants and grasshoppers, urging youth to industry, for the first; the story of the rose and its acquiring redness from the blood of Aphrodite when she struck her foot against its thorns in trying to shield Adonis from Ares, for the second; and so on. In every respect, Aphthonius has studied clearness, and he has certainly achieved it. If it were not for the dangers of the whole method, and especially that greatest one, of encouraging the mistake of classification for fact, terms for things, orderly reference to a schedule for æsthetic appreciation, he would deserve very hearty applause. And even as it is, one could, as has been said above, see the study which he facilitates substituted for any one of at least a dozen subjects of our modern overcrowded curriculum with a great deal of equanimity. Short as the piece is, some of the examples, such as the encomia of Thucydides and of Wisdom, are compositions of considerable finish. But it is significant that in the first there is, strictly speaking, no literary criticism at all, and that even the inevitable comparison with Herodotus is poorly shuffled off with the stock reproach that Herodotus writes to please, Thucydides to speak the truth.

Theon, with greater space at his command, employs a different method. It is uncertain whether he preceded or followed [Sidenote: _Theon._] Aphthonius; but the former theory is favoured by the fact that he, like Hermogenes, has twelve subjects only, those which Aphthonius put asunder being still united. He begins with a general disquisition on, and encomium of, the Progymnasmata, widening them somewhat, so as to bring in Figures to some extent, but also describing some of these as “contentious” or “disputed.” Then he has a rather curious chapter, nearer to our special purpose than usual, showing how, not merely the great orators, but the great writers of old, used these forms, or rather things which can be brought under these forms, citing the famous speech of Sophocles as to his emancipation from love in the _Republic_, the fable of the flute-player in Herodotus, others in other historians, and a very great many more things, not a few of which are lost. This enumeration is not only interesting as pointing to these _desiderata_, but as showing how unhappy the Greek was unless he could arrange and classify and ticket, as well as, distinguish and enjoy, the parts and characteristics of literature. The spirit is not dead yet: it has prompted a much-respected living author on Rhetoric to describe _In Memoriam_ as “a combined Hyperbole of Affection and Sorrow.” And this may undoubtedly be said in its favour, that its exercise does really require and promote a certain intellectual alertness and activity. But the question is, Do this alertness and this activity exert themselves in actual progress, or in mere marking-time? Is the comprehension (one can hardly even ask Is the enjoyment) of _In Memoriam_ furthered by its orderly arrangement in the case generally labelled “Hyperbole,” and in the compartment labelled “Combined Hyperboles,” and in the further pigeon-hole labelled “Of Affection and Sorrow”? Is it really important to decide whether Sophocles’s variation on “sour grapes” is a χρεία or an apophthegm, and which are the most remarkable examples of διήγημα in the orators and the historians respectively? Such things may appear to some specially and fatally to underlie the Platonic curse on the appearance of knowledge without the reality. But they have, as we see, very strong and long prescription, and there are still some who bitterly resent the exclusion of them from the teaching, not merely of technical Rhetoric, but of literature—who regard a system of “leaden rules,” of individual appreciation without classes and compartments and indorsements, as dilettante, unscientific (which it would certainly allow itself to be), and effeminate. Between the two, opinion, a little assisted by Logic and History, must be left to decide.

Theon’s handling of the Progymnasmata (which he often speaks of without the _pro_) is, as has been said, much fuller than those of Hermogenes and Aphthonius. He does not, like the latter of these, give a regular formal pattern of each kind; but he has a great many illustrative references to literature, and he has a good deal of discussion on what may be called the philosophy of the several kinds. Nor is it unnoteworthy that in dealing with Commonplace he drops the “common,” substitutes _prosopopœia_ for _ethopœia_, and introduces the curious new heading of “Law.” On the whole, Theon is more “for thoughts” than either of his forerunners;[135] he might profit a clever boy more, and he has much more numerous and deeper glimmerings of insight into the purely critical side of the matter. But he lacks system, and this, in dealing with a subject which is systematic or nothing, is a drawback.

Footnote 135:

Speaking of Walz’s order: I have little doubt myself that he preceded Aphthonius in time.

There was a rhetorical Nicolaus (indeed the name was very common) who was a student of Proclus; but the author of the [Sidenote: _Nicolaus._] _Progymnasmata_ we possess seems to have flourished later, under the Emperor Leo and after him. For some reason or none, MSS. of him seem to be specially found at Oxford. They are merely examples, several of each kind, and sometimes minutely subdivided, there being, for instance, separate patterns of mixed, unmixed, logical, and practical “Use.” They form, in fact, a curious bundle, and by no means a very small one, of partial declamations in common form, the examples of _Ethopœia_ being especially remarkable: “What sort of things Niobe would say,” “What Menœceus the patriotic suicide,” “What Cassandra at the sight of the horse,” &c. No less than fourteen in all are given.

This is also the principle of the _Progymnasmata_ of Nicephorus Basilicus, a notary (not the son-in-law chronicled by [Sidenote: _Nicephorus._] Scott) of Alexius Comnenus, who gives no less than three-and-twenty Ethopœiæ on subjects Pagan and Christian. In fact, these two collections, which together fill some two hundred and fifty well-packed pages, may be regarded rather as rhetorical reading-books, designedly intended to possess a certain interest, than as anything else. Familiarity with them would be likely to produce much the same sort of literary facility, and in a sense “correctness,” as that which we find in the minor French writers of the eighteenth century. It could, after mere childhood (when it might insensibly inculcate some good principles and some sound models), have little other good effect.

The few μελέται of Adrianus, the successor and funeral eulogist of Herodes Atticus, are whole declamations, not [Sidenote: _Minors._] brought under any of the heads. The _Diegemata_ and _Ethopœiæ_ of Severus, after what has been said of these kinds, will need no special characterisation; and the _Progymnasmata_ of George Pachymeres (who was nearly contemporary with Dante) and of the Anonymus are, like so many of the others, pure examples, indeed (as the former are well called in one MS.) _Meletæ_ on the Progymnasmata themselves.

No great resumption or amplification of the scattered comments already made on these works can be necessary. They form a by no means contemptible group of "Composition [Sidenote: _General remarks on the Progymnasmata._] books," creditably distinguished from some more modern examples of the same kind by being busy with something better than mere grammar, but not as a rule showing any of that conception of style which is visible as early as Dionysius, distinct in Quintilian, and present in a form at once vigorous and exquisite in Longinus. They are by no means ill calculated to excite an interest in literature, and even to facilitate the production, in not contemptible form, of certain kinds of it. But there is upon all of them the curse of beginning at the wrong end—of constructing an elaborate skeleton system of forms, and kinds, and sub-kinds, and then classifying literature under these, instead of beginning with the literature, separating the good from the bad, and examining, as far as may be possible, the sources of goodness and badness. A man trained in them would have many advantages over our heaven-born, but hardly even earth-instructed, reviewers and students of literature. But he would be very apt to miss the finer touches, to lose the nobler gusts, of literature; and he would be especially disposed towards that worst disease of criticism, so often manifested in its history, which leads men to ignore, or even blaspheme, great work, because it refuses to be classified, or to obey the arbitrary rules which have been foisted into, or encrusted upon, the classification.

Not from such a point of view did the still later teachers, who set themselves to comment on the comment of Hermogenes [Sidenote: _The Commentaries on them._] and Aphthonius, regard their authorities. The second volume of Walz—a stout one of nearly seven hundred pages—is entirely occupied with scholia on Aphthonius alone, at the rate, that is to say, of about fourteen pages of margent to one of text. This flood of words about words has been too much for the patience even of the editor, who gives specimens only of some, and in just wrath labels one as “a futile opuscule botched together with utter stupidity.” Much, indeed, is of the usual kind which we associate with _scholia_—verbal interpretation, sometimes not useless, but as a rule singularly pedestrian and uninspired, introduced with a monotonous rattle of _clichés_ and catchwords. But there are also better things, and the so-called “Homilies” of Doxopater, besides being of very considerable bulk (they fill some four hundred pages, not of mere scrappy annotation but of substantive commentary), attest the intelligence as well as the industry of their author, a Byzantine of the eleventh century. But they are (necessarily, no doubt) cribbed and cabined by the circumscriptions of their text.

In the third volume we return to comparatively original work, with Hermogenes once more at the head of the authors. [Sidenote: _The "Art" of Hermogenes._] We have left the vestibule—the Progymnasmata—and are now in the main courts of pure Rhetoric herself. Much more than half the volume is occupied by the four divisions of the master’s _Technic_: the first of “_Staseis_,” the second, in four parts, of “Inventions,” the third of “Ideas,” and the fourth of “Cleverness[136] of Method.” One synopsis of about a hundred pages, an anonymous epitome of fifty, with eleven shorter epitomes, and other tractates, scarcely averaging a dozen pages each, complete the volume.

Footnote 136:

δεινὸς and δεινότης are good examples of the difficulty of getting exact English equivalents for Greek rhetorical terms. Some prefer “vehemence” or “intensity,” but neither of these will suit universally. The word seems to refer to the orator’s power of suiting his method to his case, to alertness and fertility of resource.

There is no doubt that the manual of Hermogenes is the text-book of later Greek Rhetoric. Five mortal volumes of Walz, one of nearly nine hundred pages, are occupied by scholia upon it, two of these being devoted to the _Staseis_ alone; and it seems to have been the model subject even of those who did not ostensibly range themselves as its commentators. The book of the _Staseis_, which produced fifteen hundred pages of extant and printed commentary, has itself but fifty or sixty, the great bulk of the treatise being contained under the heads of “Inventions” and “Ideas.” There is a table of contents, but it may be feared that this will be of but partial service to any one not acquainted with the technicalities of the subject. Others may indeed be relieved by the names of well-known Greek orators and historians, who appear to be discussed under “Ideas,” and even by those of some commonly known Figures in the last division. But on the whole Terminology revels in all her wildest Greek luxuriance. Hypodiæresis and Prodiegesis guard the labyrinth with Antenclema and Procatastasis[137] ready at hand; more familiar words have obviously assumed new senses; and it is not even the very easiest thing to acquire a distinct and satisfactory idea of the connotation of the great section-headings themselves, while, when that idea is at last attained, we may find that it is for our special purpose irrelevant, or nearly so.

Footnote 137:

“Distribution of the indictment”; “preliminary statement”; “acknowledgment with justification”; “introduction to narrative,” are attempts at Englishings of these.

The best instance stands, at the very threshold of the investigation, in the very name of those _Staseis_ which, as we have seen, attracted the commentators as a candle does flies. Στάσις is a term which appears impossible to translate into any single English word, even in that legal vocabulary to which (far more than to anything having to do with literature) it really belongs. Its Latin equivalent is _status_ or _constitutio_:[138] M. Egger renders it in French as _état de cause_; Liddell and Scott do not attempt to render it at all; but it and its Latin equivalents have been variously translated as “state of the case,” “issue,” “point.” Sometimes it seems as if it might be not impossibly translated “plea.” Hermogenes (who plunges at once, after his fashion, into a wilderness of the most wiredrawn distinctions) gives no general definition, but says that στάσις ὁρικὴ is “the search for a name for a thing,” and instances the case of a man who has stolen the private property of a priest. Is this Sacrilege or Theft? The opening for hair-splitting which such an inquiry gives is, of course, a very wide one, and Hermogenes simply revels in the indulgence thereof. But for us there is hardly a blade of pasture in the field on which centuries of commentators browsed so greedily.

Footnote 138:

Quintilian adds _quæstio_ and _quod in quæstione appareat_ to these, and explains στάσις itself as so called _vel ex eo quod ibi sit primus causæ congressus vel quod in hoc causa consistat_. The kinds and sub-kinds of στάσεις were luxuriously wallowed in: and ὁρικὴ, and στοχαστικὴ, _negotialis_ and _comparativus_, with a dozen others, can be investigated by those who choose.

Εὑρέσις again may be “for thoughts.” Again we can find no single word for them, how much less for such niceties as _procatastasis_ and _prodiegesis_? The term covers the additions to the case introduced by the speaker’s own invention, and ranges over a vast variety of subtleties, ending with a treatment of some Figures. The examination of “Ideas”[139] shifts to the qualities of the speech or speaker—clearness, purity, dignity, energy, brilliancy, and very many others, ending with that survey of great speakers and writers which has been noted. And finally the treatise on “Cleverness of method” contains, not only more figures, but a profusion of mostly brief and rather desultory cautions. Throughout the book the author seems in a sort of paroxysm of distinction and nomenclature: he is always striving to make out some one thing to be at least two things, and to fit each of the two with some technological form.

Footnote 139:

In the sense, of course, of “kind,” not of “notion.” Indeed one Scholiast on Hermogenes defines it as ποιότης λόγου τοῖς ὑποκειμένοις ἁρμόδιος προσώποις τε καὶ πράγμασιν.

We turn, naturally enough, to the dealings with great writers mentioned above to see what this method, of analysis pushed to the verge of mania, will give us. They are very short—not in all filling twenty pages—and, as we might have expected, they contain little more than simple reference to the technicalities on which so much time has been spent. Literary criticism, in short, becomes a form of chemical analysis. We all know how this runs, as posted up, say, outside the walls of a pump-room. The water contains iron so many grains, sulphur so much, chlorine so much, nitrates a trace, and so forth. So here. Lysias has moderate ἐπιμέλια, only a trace of γοργότης, a certain amount of περιβολή κατ’ ἔννοιαν, but hardly any of it κατὰ μέθοδον, very little that is axiomatic, but a great deal of cleverness of method. On the other hand, Isæus has a great deal of γοργότης,[140] more abundant ἐπιμέλεια, and so with other things. He is not so good as Demosthenes (who, be it observed, is Hermogenes' ideal), but much better than Lysias, though he has not so much clearness of method, yet still a good deal. Of the historians, Xenophon is very particularly ἀφελὴς and also “sweet,” &c., &c.

Footnote 140:

Generally rendered “nervousness,” though Ernesti prefers “celerity.” is “diligent exactness”; περιβολὴ κατ' ἔννοιαν, “argumentative exaltation of the subject”; ἀφελὴς is “simple.” By this time, and indeed long before, a regular cant of criticism had sprung up. Mr Nettleship once made a useful list of its terms (_v. infra_, bk. ii. p. 219).

Perhaps the following sentence may serve as well as any other as an example of the method of Hermogenes. It is from the fourth chapter of the third book, περὶ εὑρέσεων:—

“Since many have set out many things about epicheiremes[141] and have spent much speech on this, and nobody has been able to bring it home to the mind clearly, I shall endeavour, as clearly as I can, to decide what is the invention of the epicheireme which constructs the _kephalaion_ or the _lusis_, and what the invention of the _ergasia_ which constructs the _epicheireme_, and what the invention of the enthymeme which constructs the _ergasia_.” I quote this with none of that ignorant scorn of terminology, as such, which authorities so different as Hamilton and Mill have justly denounced in reference to the common eighteenth-century judgments of the schoolmen. But it will be obvious to anybody that this kind of writing tends to the construction of a sort of spider’s web of words, the symmetry and exactness of construction whereof are in inverse ratio to substance and practical use. It may catch flies; it undoubtedly gives a sense of ingenuity and mastery to the spider. But it has extremely little sweetness: it rather obstructs the light: and it is not capable of being put (for it will not even staunch wounds) to any of those practical purposes which objects possessing very little sweetness, and no light at all, not unfrequently subserve.

Footnote 141:

A peculiar form of enthymeme, falling short of complete demonstration. ἐργασία is “handling” or “workmanship,” with a special connotation.

We shall still have something to say of Hermogenes when we come to the conclusion of this Rhetorical matter; but for the [Sidenote: _Other “Arts,” &c._] present it is necessary to pass on to the writers associated with him in this third volume of Walz. The _Art of Rhetoric_ of Rufus, whose age and identity are quite unknown, is a very brief and rather slight skeleton, with classifications, definitions of terms, and a few examples. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is the addition of a fourth kind—historic—to the usual three—forensic, and symbouleutic, and epideictic. The very common habit, to which reference has been already made, of taking examples almost indiscriminately from orators and historians, has evidently a logical connection (whether of cause or effect) with this. An anonymous “Synopsis” is busied with Hermogenes only. Joseph the Rhacendyte, who seems to have been a thirteenth-century man and a native of the “little isle” of Ithaca, is much fuller, has written an argument of his book in about 150 iambic trimeters, of a kind which would bring severe tribulation on the British schoolboy, and is noteworthy (though he would be more so if it were not for his late day) because he has evidently reached the stage where Rhetoric is recognised as the Art of Literature. His chapter-headings have the curious confusion and jumble which characterises much, if not most, Rhetoric since the strict oratorical side was lost sight of,—he has one on epistolary writing, one even on verse: and from several points of view his interest is not infinitesimal. It is very far from superfluous to note, though it may be impossible to discuss in detail, the significance of the fact that while another Anonym gives us four parts of a perfect speech—proem, _diegesis_, _agon_, and epilogue, a third notes _eight_ parts of rhetorical speech—conception, style, figure, method, clause, composition, punctuation, and rhythm.

For, arbitrary and “cross,” in the technical sense, as these divisions are (and as, it may be noted in passing, are all subsequent attempts to produce things of the same kind), they testify to a salutary sense of dissatisfaction. They make tacit or more than tacit acknowledgment that something must be put in the place of the old, defunct, purely oratorical Rhetoric—nay, that that Rhetoric itself was incomplete, and would have needed extension even if it had not been defunct of its old office. Of still further Anonyms one (only partly given in Walz) is interesting because it attempts a kind of historical introduction; another is couched in “political” (accent-scanned) verses, with curious refrains in the different sections, and with odd prose insertions, as are the acknowledged epitomes of Tzetzes and Psellus. The remainder of the volume consists of a brief dictionary of figures, a treatise of some interest on “Rhetorical Metres” by a certain Castor, and a brief _ecthesis_ or exposition of rhetoric generally.

The enormous collection of the scholia on Hermogenes fortunately requires no detailed notice.[142] At most could we pick out a few isolated passages bearing more or less directly on our subject, and even these would be of scarcely any value, seeing that the authorship and date of most of them are quite unknown, and that hardly any can be said to possess that intrinsic literary interest which might make questions of date and authorship unimportant.

Footnote 142:

An exception, for reasons to be given later, will be made in favour of the work of John the Siceliote (see chap. vi. of this book, p. 187 _sq._)

The eighth and ninth volumes (really the ninth and tenth) present matter of more individual interest—the eighth because of the principal subject, which with comparatively little alteration is treated by a great number of authors, the ninth for other reasons. This subject—a subject which was to exercise a disastrous attraction on the Rhetoric of the Renaissance and even of later times—consists of the famous, or infamous, Figures.[143]

Footnote 143:

About half of the eighth volume, however, is occupied by a long distribution of “questions” (ζητήματα) into heads, by one Sopater, who gives many specimen declarations. And it is followed by a short treatise, assigned to a certain Cyrus, on difference of _stasis_, and by a collection of problems for declamatory use.

We know from a contemptuous phrase of Quintilian (see _post_) that long before his time the facility of compounds in [Sidenote: _Treatises on Figures._] Greek had induced the Greeks to multiply Figures beyond all sense and endurance. Yet as we have partly seen, in the so numerously attended school of Hermogenes, these famous playthings, though not exactly neglected, did not receive the first attention. Others, however, made up for any apparent neglect of them. We have, specially devoted to the subject, under the head of σχήματα or of τρόποι, some fifteen or sixteen treatises—some by named authors, others anonymous. The first, by a certain Alexander, divides Figures as usual into those of the meaning and those of the style, and enumerates twenty of the former and twenty-seven of the latter; Phœbammon deals more shortly with a somewhat smaller number of figures, brought under more general heads; and Tiberius the rhetorician confines himself to the figures in Demosthenes. Herodian has a very large number of _poetical_ examples—a device which, as we shall see, served to keep Rhetoric nearer and nearer to literature as time went on. The little treatise of Polybius of Sardis deals less with figures individually than with figurativeness; while an Anonymus, neglecting to some extent the usual phraseology, but reducing the usual procedure unawares to the absurd, manages to give a vast number by taking individual expressions from Homer and making a figure out of each. Zonæus follows more succinctly on the lines of Alexander; another Anonymus busies himself with Synecdoche only, and yet another adopts the dictionary arrangement, as do divers others with Tropes. One of the best pieces of the whole is the treatise of Georgius Choeroboscus, a writer of the fourth or fifth century. It is short, and deals with only a few figures; but these are the important ones, the definitions are mostly clear and sensible, and the examples, though not numerous, are well chosen.

The ninth volume opens with the not unimportant work to which reference has been made above, the _De Interpretatione_ [Sidenote: _The Demetrian_ De Interpretatione.] of Demetrius the Uncertain. But it also contains six other works on various divisions of Rhetoric, one of which is at least interesting for the great name of Longinus attached to it (as some would have it with greater certainty than in the case of the work that we would rather wish his), and others for other matter.

Demetrius takes a somewhat independent view of his subject, which he puts on a level with Poetics, but does not call Rhetoric. As Poetry, he states, deals with—or at least is distinguished and divided by—metres (this _netteté_ is refreshing, and we shall go farther to fare very often worse), so what are called clauses[144] divide and distinguish the interpretation of prose speech. Then, directing attention directly to clauses, he illustrates their kinds from the respective beginnings of the histories of Hecatæus and the _Anabasis_ of Xenophon, and prefers (though not to the exclusion of what he does _not_ prefer) short clauses to long. From clauses he goes to periods, discussing and analysing their composition rather narrowly, and then returns to parallel clauses, whence striking off to _homœoteleuta_ he continues his treatise under a great number of similar heads, betraying the slightly heterogeneous and higgledy-piggledy arrangement which, as we have said already, is so apt to beset these writers on Rhetoric. But he maintains throughout a creditable desire to identify his subject with the Art of Prose Composition, and not merely with Persuasion, or with the composition of an extremely artificial kind of prize essay on lines more artificial still.

Footnote 144:

τὰ καλούμενα κώλα

The rhetor Menander, who has left us a treatise on the third division of rhetorical speeches, Epideictic (generally subdivided [Sidenote: _Menander on Epideictic._] into encomia and invectives), is thought to have lived at the end of the third century. From the first his treatment is of considerable literary interest, because he handles the sources of the material of these curiously artificial compositions. First, he takes the hymns about the gods, and here, according to the way of his class, he rushes at once into a classification. There are, it seems, nine kinds of hymns—Cletic, apopemptic,[145] physic, mythic, genealogical, artificial, prayerful, deprecating, and mixed—the appearance of which last heading, here and elsewhere, always makes one wonder how a person of any logical gifts could write it down without seeing that he made his whole classification ridiculous if not fraudulent thereby. Then he quotes a great number of authors, ranging them under the heads. A separate chapter is next given to each kind, still referring to many authors, but unluckily seldom or never citing the actual passages. Next he passes to the Praising of Cities, that very important part of the bread-study of the travelling rhetor, who had to make himself welcome by accommodating his lectures to local patriotism, as we see, for instance, in Dion Chrysostom (_v. infra_). Hardly in the whole of this dully fantastic division of literature shall we find anything quainter than the sections devoted to this subject. If the city is a landward one, you will point out how safe it is from piratical attacks; if it is on the coast, you will dwell on the splendours and advantages of the sea. “How to praise Harbours,” “How to praise Gulfs,” “What is the best fashion of encomium for an Acropolis?”—these actual headings meet us. At even fuller length the orator is told how to praise not merely the site but the population and its origin, the neighbours (perhaps dispraising them might come in best here), the customs, and so forth. In short, the little treatise reminds one most of those modern cookery-books which—assuming the housewives who will read them to be of Paraguayan kin, and to continue idiots—give not only prescriptions for dishes but lists of dinners and rules of etiquette. One hardly wonders that a man like Lucian, of mother-wit compact to the finger-tips, should have soon left a profession in which the average practitioner seems to have been taken for granted as next door to a fool, without either common-sense or imagination enough to meet the most obvious requirements of his business.

Footnote 145:

_I.e._, “invocatory” and “dimissory or exorcising.”

One MS. of Menander stops here, but another gives us much more of the same kind, dealing with the βασιλικὸς [Sidenote: _Others._] λόγος—flattery of kings—with epithalamia, with consolations, _et cetera_. The general scheme is much the same, and at least does not disincline us to believe it from the same hand. The short treatise of Alexander on Rhetorical Starting-points is very technical and not very profitable; but it falls in with the Menandrine books in showing how this business of flattery—the reducing to system of the “dodges” of the auctioneer or the advertising agent—was, latterly at least, the mainstay of the rhetorician. The two books of Aristides' _Art of Rhetoric_, on the other hand, busy themselves not with the epideictic but with the political speech, and deal chiefly with its technical qualities, our old friends. Apsines deals with the exordium only, and Minucianus with the epicheireme or imperfect rhetorical argument. Between them comes the treatise attributed to Longinus by some, and for that reason, if for no other, worth a little fuller examination.

“That[146], so to speak, there is nothing better in man’s possession than memory, who in his senses will deny? Some indeed praise Oblivion, as Euripides—

‘O blessed forgetfulness of woes,’

as he calls it. But I should say that Lethe and the outgoing of memory help us little or nothing, hurt the best and greatest things of life, defraud and keep us short of happiness. For the most hateful of sins and crimes, ingratitude, we find oft occurring when memory’s powers fail; but he who remembers benefits is neither ungrateful nor unjust. When men forget the laws and the doctrines that keep us straight, needs must they become poor creatures, and bad, and shameless. Yea, all folly and all inculture of soul occur through forgetfulness. But he who remembers best is chiefly wise.”

Footnote 146:

Walz, ix. 570. Aldine, p. 717, and at p. 100 of Egger’s pocket edition of Longinus. Dickens was not much of a lover of the classics, but he would hardly have disdained this as a motto for _The Haunted Man_.

This may not itself be the very crown of wisdom; it is not Plato; it is not even _Ecclesiasticus_. But it is at any rate the work of a man who can look a little beyond _stasis_ and _diegema_. As if we were to have nothing certain from this great critic, the attribution of this treatise also to him is only based on a conjecture of Ruhnken’s, itself depending on a citation by the commentator John of Sicily in the thirteenth century. It is devoted to the subject of Εὔρεσις—so badly translated by “Invention”—and it treats of its subject under the heads of _prosopopœia_, starting-points, elocutory mimicry, memory, topics [Sidenote: _The_ Rhetoric _or_ De Inventione _of Longinus_.] drawn from things connected with the chief good, and passion. There is a fairly wide range of literary reference, though few citations are given at length. And it is only fair to bear in mind that even in the Περὶ Ὕψους, short and broken as it is, there are signs of a certain weakness for Figures and other technicalities, indications that in his more professional moments, and when inspiration deserted him, even the author of that wonderful little masterpiece might have approached (though he never could long have been satisfied with) the endless, the fruitless, the exasperating _distinguo_ which seemed to be art, and wisdom, and taste, to Hermogenes and the rest. And though one cannot quite agree with Walz that there is in this _De Inventione_ a “doctrine drawn from Homer and the poets, elegantly and equably disposed,” yet one must admit that the handling shows something different from, and above, the heartbreaking jargon-mongering of the usual rhetorician. What follows is not the style of the Longinus that we know; it seems to come short of his manly sense almost as much as of his far-reaching flights of poetical appreciation. But it is a long way from the mere arrangement of compartments and ticket-boxes, and the mere indulgence in a kind of game of rhetorical “egg-hat” in and out of them when they are made.

Enough, perhaps, has been said of the defects of this great mass of composition, both from the point of view of our special [Sidenote: _Survey of School Rhetoric._] investigation and from more general ones. It remains to say something of its merits from the former. As will have been seen, the relations of the rhetoricians to literary criticism differ at first sight surprisingly—less so, perhaps, when they come to be examined. Sometimes the general literary view seems to be almost entirely lost in a wilderness of details and technicalities. But sometimes also the merely forensic tendency disappears, the merely technical one in the narrow sense effaces itself, and we have an almost pure treatise on Composition, limited it may be by arbitrary restrictions, conditioned by professional needs, but still Composition in general—that is to say, after a fashion, and in a manner, Literature. Every now and then, as we saw above, the writer rises to the conception of Rhetoric as Prosaics—as the other half of that Art of Literature of which Poetics is the one. And—a less good thing, but also not without its good side—we even find glimpses and glimmerings of the notion, to be taken up and widely developed later, of Rhetoric as _including_ Poetics.

But the best and most important part of the matter has yet to be summarised. The technical study of Rhetoric, even when pushed to the extremities of the terminological and classifying mania, encouraged and almost necessitated constant overhauling of actual literature for examples, and encouraged the characterisation of famous authors from this point of view. Even the orators by themselves formed no inconsiderable or undistinguished _corpus_ of Greek prose literature. But, as we have seen, it was customary, even for very strict formalists, to include the historians whose connection with the orators was so close; and it was very difficult to exclude philosophical writers, especially Plato. A man must have been of preternatural stolidity if he could ransack Demosthenes and Isæus, Herodotus and Thucydides and Xenophon, Plato, and the school philosophers whom we have so freely lost, and if he did not in the process develop some notion of prose literary criticism at large, nay, formulate some rules of it. And, as we have also seen from the very first, poetry was by no means barred. The orator might very often quote it; he was constantly to go to it for suggestions of subject or treatment, beauties of style, examples of figure and form. Therefore, directly if not indirectly, the rhetorical teacher and the historical student accepted the whole of literature for their province.

Of the actual _results_ of this enormous period, the best part (even if we cut off the Dark Ages) of a thousand years of [Sidenote: _The Practical Rhetoricians or Masters of Epideictic._] elaborate concentration upon an extremely artificial art, our remains are in proportion much less than we should expect; in fact, it is hardly too much to say that they are less than those of the technical books which taught how to produce them. It is scarcely fair to call Dionysius of Halicarnassus a rhetorician, though he sometimes goes near to being one. He is a serious teacher of Rhetoric, not a giver of displays in it, a real literary critic, a laborious historian. Plutarch is saved from inclusion in the class by the very same characteristic which interferes so sadly with his literary criticism as such. He is too practical, too keenly interested in life, too busy about the positive sciences of ethical and physical inquiry, to devote himself to rhetorical exercises of the pure declamatory kind. That Lucian did so devote himself for no inconsiderable time, we know from his own description of his breaking away from the Delilah Rhetoric; and there are scraps of purely or mainly rhetorical matter in him even as it is. But though it be perfectly possible to serve two mistresses, no man ever could have, for his Queens of Brentford, Irony and the falser and more artificial kind of Rhetoric. The two are irreconcilable enemies: they would make their lover’s life an impossible and maddening inconsistency. We must therefore look elsewhere, and in writers on the whole lesser, for the artificial Rhetorical composition which is of interest to us, not merely inasmuch as it sometimes deals with or comes near to literary criticism itself, but as it is, even on other occasions, a valuable and undeniable evidence as to the state of universal _crisis_, the condition of literary taste, at its time. We shall find such witnesses in Dion Chrysostom for the late first and early second century; in Aristides of Smyrna and Maximus Tyrius for the second exclusively; in Philostratus for the end of the second and the beginning of the third; while to these we may perhaps add Libanius and Themistius for the fourth, with the imperial rhetorician Julian to keep them company.

Of these, Dion Chrysostom is not merely the earliest in date, but, on the whole, the most important to literature. He [Sidenote: _Dion Chrysostom._] appears to have been a distinguished and rather fortunate example of a “gentleman of the press” (as we should now say) before the press existed. He travelled over a great part of the Roman Empire in the pursuit of his profession as Lecturer—that perhaps comes nearest to it—and would appear to have been well rewarded. The description of his morning’s employment, which begins his study of the three Poets' plays on _Philoctetes_,[147] is one of the most interesting passages in the later and less-known classics, and so is worth giving here, though it exists in at least one unlearned language: “I rose about the first hour of the day, both because I was poorly, and because the air was cooler at dawn, and more like autumn, though it was midsummer. I made my toilette, said my prayers, and then getting into my curricle, went several times round the Hippodrome, driving as easily and quietly as possible. Then I took a walk, rested shortly, bathed and anointed myself, and after eating a slight breakfast, took up some tragedies.” The careful “study of the body,” the quiet affluence of a well-to-do professional man, and the attention to professional work without any hurry or discomfort, are all well touched off here; and what follows gives us, as it happens, the closest approach to our subject proper to be found in the considerable collection of Dion’s Orations, or, as they have been much more properly called, Essays. There are, however, others which are more characteristic of this division of literature, and we may deal with these first.

Footnote 147:

_Dion Chrys. Op._, ed. Reiske (Leipsic, 1784), ii. 266. M. Egger (p. 441 _sq._) has translated the whole Oration (p. 11), but by no means literally.

The whole conception of the kind of piece, of which Dion himself has left us some fourscore examples, is a curious, and to merely modern readers (nor perhaps to them only) something of a puzzling one. It is called an Oration because it was intended to be delivered by word of mouth; but it often, if not usually, has no other oratorical characteristic. The terms “lecture” and “essay” have also been applied to it incidentally above, and both have some, while neither has exact, application. Except that its subject is generally (not always) profane, it has strong points of resemblance to some kinds of Sermon. Classified by the subject, it presents at first sight features which look distinct enough, though perhaps the distinctness rather vanishes on examination. Not a few of the examples (and probably those which were more immediately profitable, though they could not be used so often) are what may be called local panegyrics, addresses to the citizens of Corinth, Tarsus, Borysthenes, New Ilium, in which their historical and literary associations are ingeniously worked in, and the importance of the community is more or less delicately “cracked up.” Others are moral discourses on Vices and Virtues, others abstract discussions on politics, others of yet other sorts. But the point in which they all agree, the point which is their real characteristic, is that they are all rather displays of art, rather directly analogous to a musical “recital” or an entertainment of feats of strength and skill, than directed to any definite purpose of persuasion, or to the direct exposition of any subject. The object is to show how neatly the speaker can play the rhetorical game, how well he can do his theme. Each is, in fact (what Thucydides so detested the idea of his history appearing to be), a distinct _agonisma_, a competitive display of cleverness and technical accomplishment.

Nothing perhaps is more tedious than a game that is out of fashion; and this game has been out of fashion for a very long time. Moreover, it has been out of fashion so long, and its vogue depended upon conditions now so entirely changed, that it is for us occasionally difficult, even by strong effort of mental projection into the past, to discover where the attraction can ever have lain. Equally good style (and Dion’s is beyond question good) could surely have been expended on something less utterly arbitrary and unreal. Nor do these reflections present themselves more strongly anywhere than in regard to the pieces which touch more directly on our subject. Take, for instance, the Trojan oration, which has for its second title “That Troy was not captured.” It is supposed to be addressed to the citizens of the New Ilium, and to clear away the reproach of the Old. The means taken to do this are mainly two. In the first place, the authority of an entirely unnamed Egyptian priest, the author of a book named unintelligibly, is invoked as giving the lie direct to Homer, and supporting himself on the documentary evidence of _stelæ_, which (unluckily) had perished. The second argument (obviously thought of most weight) is an elaborate examination of the Homeric narrative itself from the point of view of what seems probable, decent, and so forth to Dion the Golden-mouthed. Some of the objections are new; most of them very old. Is it likely that a lady who had the honour of being the bedfellow of Zeus would be doubtful of her beauty if an Idæan shepherd did not certify to it? Would a goddess have given such improper rewards to Paris, and put herself in such an ugly relation to Helen, who, by one story, was her sister? What a shocking thing that the poet should constantly speak well of Ulysses and yet represent him as a liar! How could Homer have had any knowledge of the language of the gods, or have seen through the cloud on Ida? And so forth, for some sixty mortal pages.

From such a procedure no literary criticism is to be expected; and, as has been said, the difficulty is to discern what was its original attraction. As a serious composition it is clearly nowhere; as a _jeu d’esprit_, the rules of the game quite puzzle us, and the spirit seems utterly to have evaporated. The Olympic[148] “On the Idea of God” has been cited by some as a contribution to our subject, and certainly contains some remarks about Plato and about Myths—interesting remarks too. In substance it is a supposed discourse of Phidias to the assembled Greeks on the principles he had in mind in the conception of his statue of Zeus; but its most interesting passage is a comparison of poetry and sculpture. The mixture of dialects in Homer is compared to the making up of the palette and the use of “values” in painting; the selection of archaic words to the choice of the virtuoso lighting on an antique medal. The variety of epithet and synonym for the description of natural and other objects is contrasted with the restraint and simplicity of the sculptor’s art. The passage is a really remarkable one, and stands almost alone, in elaboration if not in suggestion, as the forerunner of a kind of criticism, fruitful but rather dangerous, which has often been supposed to have originated with Winckelmann and Lessing and Diderot in the last century. But it stands almost alone.

Footnote 148:

Orat. xii. Reiske, i. 370 _sq._

The greater apparent promise of the paper on the synonymous plays is less well fulfilled. Dion seems to imply that this was the only instance where the Three competed on the very same subject, and he finds in the three pieces agreeable instances of the well-known general characteristics of their authors—the grandeur, simplicity, and audacity of Æschylus; the artifice, variety, rhetorical skill of Euripides; the mediocrity (in no evil sense) and the charm of Sophocles. He has also some interesting remarks on the chorus, together with some others less interesting, because more in the common style of ancient criticism, on impossibilities, improbabilities, breaches of usage and unity, and the like. Dion, in fact, goes so far as to express an indirect wish that the chorus were cut out of tragedy. He had, no doubt, lost the sense of the religious use which certainly existed in Æschylus, and perhaps survived in Sophocles; he could not but observe the combination of nullity and superfluity (which may too often be detected even in these great poets) of the chorus, if regarded as anything else than an intercalated lyric of the most exquisite beauty; and he of course saw that the choruses of Euripides were often as merely _parabasic_, as entirely separated from all strict dramatic connection, as any address to the audience in Aristophanes himself.

On the whole, it may best be said of the Golden-mouthed that, in other circumstances, and if he had cared, he might have made a critic perhaps better than Dionysius, and perhaps not so very far below Longinus; but that, as a matter of fact, neither time, circumstances, nor personal disposition attracted him, save here and there, to the subject.

There is another author, not far removed in age from Dion Chrysostom, whom I should be sorry to pass without at least [Sidenote: _Aristides of Smyrna._] as minute an examination. Had we only the notices of him which exist, with a few fragments, there is perhaps no Greek writer from whom it would be reasonable to expect an abundance of literary criticism, of a type almost as startlingly modern as that of Longinus himself, with more confidence than that with which we might expect it from Aristides of Smyrna.[149]

Footnote 149:

One would not suppose that the later Greek rhetoricians were so fascinating as to be _introuvables_; but this is very nearly the case. Aristides himself is very scarce and very dear. Maximus Tyrius and Themistius refuse themselves to the seeker, except after long waiting; and as for Libanius, Messrs Parker of Oxford inform me that they have for years been vainly searching for a complete copy of Reiske’s edition, while an incomplete one of which they knew was snapped up before I could get it. I can only suppose that the editions which Reiske himself and Dindorf edited, at the end of the last century and early in this, were printed in small numbers, and have been gradually absorbed into public libraries. In these latter I have never myself been able to work, except under compulsion, and then with no comfort. Why Herr Teubner, the Providence of inopulent or leisureless students, has been so slow to come to their help in these cases, I do not know.

Longinus has been blamed by M. Egger[150] for comparing[151] this rhetorician with Demosthenes. But the excellent historian of Greek criticism must have forgotten the epigram, quoted elsewhere,[152] in which Aristides is frankly ranked, not merely with Demosthenes but with Thucydides, as a writer, as well as the other testimonies, both of antiquity and of the Renaissance, which are conveniently collected in an article of Jebb’s edition, to be found in that of Dindorf.[153] It is true that Dindorf himself speaks contemptuously of his client, but Dindorf was too deeply sworn a servant of strictly classical Greek to tolerate the pretensions of a _précieux_ of the Antonine age. As a matter of fact, not only is Aristides a good, though by no means easy,[154] writer of Greek, but both the qualities and the defects of his writing and the causes of his difficulty are such as ought to have disposed him to literary criticism in the best sense. This hardness does not arise from irregular syntax, nor from any of the commoner causes of “obscurity.” What makes it necessary to read him with no common care and attention is, in the first place, the cobweb-like subtlety, not to say tenuity and intricacy, of his thought; and, in the second, his use of not ostensibly strange or archaic language with the most elusive _nuances_ of difference from its common employment.

Footnote 150:

P. 481, _op. cit._

Footnote 151:

The reading in Long., Frag. 1, is disputed, some suggesting _Hyperides_. But Sopater, in commenting on Aristides, attests the admiration of Longinus.

Footnote 152:

_V. supra_, p. 82.

Footnote 153:

3 vols., Leipsic, 1829. The collection is at iii. 772. Although Dindorf says scornfully, _neque enim is scriptor est Aristides cui diutius quis immoretur_, would that all editors gave editions as well furnished!

Footnote 154:

Any one who has experienced a humiliating sense of initial bafflement may be encouraged, as the present writer was, by the round declaration of such a scholar as Reiske, that of all the Greek he had ever read outside of the speeches of Thucydides, Aristides was the most difficult. Ed. cit., iii. 788.

Now these are characteristics which are by no means uncommonly found in persons and in times friendly to criticism. And the love of Aristides for literature (at least for the rhetorical side of it) is not only outspoken, but to all appearance unfeigned. His devotion is not merely valetudinarian, but voluntary. If there is a rhetorical extravagance in the phrase, there is a more than rhetorical sincerity in the sentiment of his declarations that, while others may find love or bathing or drinking or hunting sweet, speeches[155] are his sole delight: they absorb all his friendship and all his faculties; they are to him as parents and children, as business and pastime. It is about them that he invokes Aphrodite: he plays with them and works with them, rejoices in them, embraces them, knocks only at their doors. Elsewhere, “the whole gain and sum of life to man is oratorical occupation”; and elsewhere again, “I would rather have the gift of speech, with a modest and honourable life as man best may, than be Darius the son of Hystaspes two thousand times over: and everything seems to me little in comparison with this.”

Footnote 155:

The excellent Canterus, who has strung these passages in his Prolegomena (iii. 779), would fain translate οἱ λόγοι “literature”; but it is pretty certain from the context that Aristides was thinking of rhetorical literature only.

This is something like a “declaration.”

Nor, on merely running down the list of the fairly voluminous extant works of Aristides (especially when the inner meanings, which do not always appear in the titles, are grasped), do matters look unpromising. The majority of the pieces are indeed pure epideictic—discourses to or about the gods, a mighty “Panathenaic” (the _chef d'œuvre_, with only one rival, of the author)—panegyrics of Smyrna, Rome, and other places, “Leuctrics” (_i.e._, debating-society speeches, on the side of the Lacedæmonians, on the side of the Thebans, and neutral), arguments for and against sending assistance to the Athenian expedition at Syracuse, all the stock—a stock surprise to us—of this curious declamation-commonplace. But there are four pieces (between them making up the stuff of a good-sized volume) in which, from such a man, literary criticism might seem to be inevitable. They are the περὶ τοῦ μὴ δεῖν κωμῳδεῖν[156] (a discourse whether comedy shall be permitted or not), the long Defence of Rhetoric (περὶ ῥητορικῆς)[157] against Plato’s attacks, especially in the _Gorgias_, the very much longer and oddly named ὑπὲρ τῶν τεττάρων,[158] an apology for Miltiades, Themistocles, Pericles, and Cimon, which completes this, and the still more oddly named περὶ τοῦ παραφθέγματος[159] (“Concerning my blunder”), which meets, with not a little tartness and wounded conceit, but with a great deal of ingenuity, the suggestion, through a third person, of some “d——d good-natured friend,”[160] that Aristides had committed a fault of taste by insinuating praises of himself in an address to the divinity. We turn to these, and we find as nearly as possible nothing critical. Glimmers of interest appear, as in the description of historians (ii. 513), as “those between poetry and rhetoric,” but they are extinguished almost at once. It would be quite impossible to treat the comedy question from a less literary standpoint than that of Aristides; we might have Plutarch speaking, except that the writing is more “precious” and _point-de-vice_. The “Apology for my blunder” consists mainly in a string, by no means lacking in ingenuity, of citations from poets, orators, and others, in which they indulge, either for themselves or their personages, in strains somewhat self-laudatory. As for the more than four hundred pages of “On Rhetoric” and “For the Four,” they also avoid the literary handling, the strictly critical grip of the subject, with a persistency which, as has been observed in other cases, is simply a mystery, unless we suppose that the writer was either laboriously shunning this, or quite unconscious of its possibility and promise. Pages after pages on the old _aporia_ whether Rhetoric is an art or not, sheets after sheets on the welldoing of the Four, on Plato’s evil-speaking, we have. But, unless I have missed it, never a passage on the magnificent literature with which Rhetoric has enriched Greece, on the more magnificent rhetoric which the accuser of the brethren has himself displayed in accusing her. To a man of the subtlety of Aristides, of his enthusiasm for literature, of his _flair_ for a popular and striking paradox, one would imagine that this beating up of the enemy’s quarters would be irresistibly tempting. But it is certainly not in his main attack: and though, in the vast stretch of wiredrawn argument and precious expression, one may have missed something, I do not think that it is even in the reserves or the parentheses.

Footnote 156:

Ed. cit., i. 751.

Footnote 157:

Ibid., ii. 1.

Footnote 158:

Ibid., ii. 156-414.

Footnote 159:

Ibid., ii. 491-542.

Footnote 160:

There is enough of the spirit of Sir Fretful in Aristides here to make the quotation irresistible.

There are perhaps few, at least among the less read Greek writers, who, in small compass and at no great expense of trouble, throw more negative light on Greek criticism than [Sidenote: _Maximus Tyrius._] Maximus Tyrius.[161] This rhetorician or philosopher (he would probably have disclaimed the first epithet and modestly demanded promotion to the second) has left us, in a style as easy as that of Aristides is difficult, and showing at least a strong velleity to be Platonic, some forty essays, or dissertations, or theses. They are on questions or propositions of the usual kind, as these: “Pleasure may be a good but is not a stable thing.” “On Socratic Love” (an amiable but slightly ludicrous example of whitewashing everybody, from Socrates himself to Sappho). “On the God of Socrates and Plato,” &c., &c. Several of them might, at any rate from the titles, seem to touch our subject; two at least might seem to be obliged to touch it. These are the Tenth (in Reiske’s order), “Whether the poets or the philosophers have given the soundest ideas of the gods?” and the Twenty-third, “Whether Plato was right in banishing Homer from his Republic?” Yet, apt to slip between our fingers as we have found and shall find apparently critical theses of this sort, hardly one (at least outside Plutarch) is so utterly eel-like as those of Maximus of Tyre. As to the first,[162] he suggests that the very question is a misunderstanding—as no doubt it is, though not quite in his sense. Philosophy and poetry are really the same thing. Poetry is a philosophy, “senior in time, metrical in harmony, based on fiction as to its arguments.” Philosophy is a poetry “renewed in youth, more lightly equipped in harmony, more certain in sense.” They are, in short, as like as my fingers to my fingers, “and there are ænigmas in both.” If you are wise you will interpret the poets allegorically, but go to the philosophers for clear statements. And we must allow, to the credit of the former, that there is no poet who talks such mischievous nonsense as Epicurus.

Footnote 161:

Ed. Reiske (after Davies and Markland), 2 vols. (or at least parts), Leipsic, 1774.

Footnote 162:

Ed. cit., Part i. pp. 166-187.

This is all that, as a critic, Maximus has to say on this head; and though at least equally ingenious in evasion, he gives us nothing more solid in the debate on Homer and Plato.[163] He speaks, indeed, words of sense (by no means always kept in mind by critics) as to the absolute compatibility of admiration of Homer with admiration of Plato. But his argument for this, and at the same time the whole argument of the essay, is only a kind of “fetch.” Homer was banished from the Platonic Republic not because Plato thought him bad _per se_, but because the special conditions of the Republic itself made Homer an inconvenient inmate. He was not qualified for admission to this particular club: that was all. Equally far from our orbit is a third essay, the Thirty-second,[164] the subject of which is, “Is there any definite philosophic opinion[165] in Homer?” Elsewhere Maximus has refused to include literary criticism where it might justly have been expected: here (with, it must be admitted, much countenance from persons in more recent times, and especially in the present day) he determines to import into literary criticism things which have no business there. He begins, indeed, with a hearty and not unhappy eulogy of Homer himself for his range of subject and knowledge: but the rest of the piece is little more than an application of the theory laid down earlier, that philosophers and poets are only the same people in different coats, of antique or modern cut as the case may be, dancing to different tunes, and gesticulating in a different way. It may be so; but whether it is or not, Maximus has nothing more to tell us in our own division.[166]

Footnote 163:

Ibid., Part i. pp. 437-452.

Footnote 164:

Ibid., Part ii. pp. 115-136.

Footnote 165:

Literally any _heresy_—αἵρεσις.

Footnote 166:

The seeker will be even more disappointed if he follow up the quest to Diss. 37 (Part ii. p. 196): “Whether the liberal arts (ἐγκύκλια μαθήματα) contribute to virtue?” Only geometry and music, and mainly the latter, receive attention, though Rhetoric and Poetics are mentioned.

There are not many positions in literary history more apparently covetable than that of being the first certain authority [Sidenote: _Philostratus._] for a definition of Imagination which (in a sense different from Sir Thomas Browne’s) “antiquates antiquity,” which anticipates Shakespeare, which has been piously but vainly thought to have been first reached in criticism by Addison, and which, in its fulness, and as critically put, waited for the Germans of the late eighteenth century, if not for their greater scholar Coleridge, to display it in perfection. When it is added that this person was a professional rhetorician, that he had sufficient original, or at least mimetic, skill to supply the pattern of

“Drink to me only with thine eyes,”

and of others of the prettiest if not the greatest things in literature, with sufficient appreciation of arts other than literature to have left us a capital collection of descriptions of painting,—it may seem that great, or at least interesting, literary criticism must have proceeded from him.

Yet whoso shall go to the work of Flavius Philostratus[167] in search of this will be wofully disappointed, unless (and perhaps even if) he have the wisdom necessary to the acceptance of what the gods provide, and the more or less resigned relinquishment of what they do not.

Footnote 167:

Ed. Kayser. 2 vols., Leipsic, 1871.

Philostratus is in fact a writer of considerable charm. The _Life of Apollonius_ is readable, not only for its matter and its literary associations with Keats through Burton; and the smaller _Lives of the Sophists_ are not unimportant for literary history. The _Eikones_ are perhaps the best descriptions of pictures before Diderot,[168] and the _Letters_ are really nectareous. Gifford, when deservedly trouncing Cumberland (_alias_ Sir Fretful Plagiary) for finding fault with Jonson because he made up the exquisite poem above cited from Philostratus, would have done better to vindicate the original as well from Cumberland’s bad taste and ignorance. “Despicable sophist,” “obscure collection of love-letters,” “parcel of unnatural, far-fetched conceits,” “calculated to disgust a man of Jonson’s classical taste,” are expressions which, as Gifford broadly hints, probably express not so much Cumberland’s own taste as that of his grandfather Bentley, who, if one of the greatest of scholars, was sometimes, if not always, one of the worst of literary critics. But Gifford, who, with all his acuteness, wit, and polemic power, represented too much the dregs of the neo-classic school on points of taste, was probably of no very different opinion. The fact is that, not merely in the passages which Ben has adapted, sometimes literally, for this marvellous cento, but in many others, the very wine, the very roses, of the luscious and florid school of poetical sentiment are given by Philostratus himself.

Footnote 168:

Achilles Tatius is later, and very likely imitated Philostratus. The two together perhaps give the best examples of _ecphrasis_ (see Index).

But if they are his own, and not, as seems more likely, prose paraphrases of lost poems by some other, he was not one of the “poets who contain a critic.” Not only does he put the remarkable definition[169] of φαντασία, which it is not clear that even Longinus fully grasped, in the mouth of Apollonius; but it is very noticeable that Apollonius is there speaking _not_ of literary art, but of sculpture and painting. In the description of paintings themselves there is no criticism. And perhaps among the numerous examples which we have of the strange difference of view between the ancients and at least some of ourselves on the suggestiveness of literature, there is no passage more striking than the _Heroic Dialogue_[170] on the subject of Homer between a Phœnician stranger and a vine-dresser at Eleus in the Thracian Chersonese, where Protesilaus was supposed to be buried. The stuff of this fantastic piece is the information, about the matters of the Trojan war, supposed to be supplied to the vine-dresser by Protesilaus himself. There is one passage of literary estimate of the ordinary kind, but the whole is one of those curious corrections of Homeric statement which served as the ancestors of the new and anti-Homeric “tale of Troy” in the Middle Ages, and which are among the numerous puzzles of ancient literature to us, until we have mastered the strange antique horror of fiction as fiction. We cannot conceive any one—after childhood—otherwise than humorously attempting to make out that Sir Walter Scott did injustice to Waverley, and that in the duel with Balmawhapple the Baron was only second, not principal, insinuating that the novelist has concealed the real secret of Flora’s indifference to her lover, which was that she was determined, like Beatrix Esmond, to be the Chevalier’s mistress, or declaring that Fergus, instead of being captured and executed, died gloriously in a skirmish omitted by historians, after putting the English to flight. But this is what the ancients were always doing with Homer; and it is scarcely too much to say that until this attitude of mind is entirely discarded, literary criticism in the proper sense is impossible.

Footnote 169:

_Vit. Ap._, vi. 19, ed. cit., i. 231: “Imagination, a wiser craftsmistress than Imitation, has done this; for Imitation will fashion what she sees, but Imagination what she has not seen, for she will _suppose_ it according to the analogy of the real. Moreover, sudden disturbance (ἔκπληξις) will put Imitation’s hand out (ἔκκρούει), but not Imagination’s, for she goes on undisturbed to what she herself hypothetically conceived.” This _is_ Shakespeare’s Imagination, whereof the lunatic, the lover, and the poet are all compact; it is not Addison’s, which deals only with things furnished by the sense of sight.

Footnote 170:

Ed. cit., ii. 128-219. The piece is sometimes cited as “Heroic_a_.”

The relatively considerable space, some six or seven pages, which is allotted to Libanius in Egger’s book, may have encouraged [Sidenote: _Libanius._] readers to expect some considerable contribution to critical literature from that sophist and rhetorician. But a careful reading of the French historian’s text will show that he has really nothing to produce to justify the space assigned: and an independent examination of Libanius himself (which, as hinted already, is not too easy to make[171]) will more than confirm this uncomfortable suspicion. Libanius is enormously copious, and he is not exactly contemptible,[172] seeing that he can apply the sort of “Wardour Street” Attic, in which he and the better class of his contemporaries wrote, to a large number of subjects with a great deal of skill. But the curse of artificiality is over everything that he writes:[173] and, to do him justice, his writings proclaim the fact beforehand with the most praiseworthy frankness. They belong almost entirely to those classes of conventional exercise of which full account has been given, and will be given, in the present Book and its successor. They are _Progymnasmata_, _Meletæ_, “orations,” that is to say, rather more practical compositions of the same class, ethical dissertations, letters of the kind in which A writes that B is a new Demosthenes, and B replies that A really is a second Plato. The Progymnasmata include all the kinds mentioned earlier in this chapter, fables and narrations, uses and sentences, encomia and ethopoiæ and the rest; the Meletæ range from the complaint of a parasite who has been done out of his dinner, through all manner of historical, mythical, and fantastic cases, to the question whether Lais (after being exiled) had not better be recalled as a useful member of society. But literary criticism is _nullibi_. If it were anywhere we should look for it in the comparison of Demosthenes and Æschines which figures among the _Progymnasmata_, in the _Life_[174] of the first-named orator and the arguments to his speeches, and perhaps in the _Apologia Socratis_. In the first there is not a _scintilla_ of the kind: the comparison wholly concerns the lives, characters, and successes of the two. In the _Apologia_ there is pretty constant reference to Socrates' conversation, with some to that of others, Prodicus, Protagoras, &c. But any literary consideration is avoided with that curious superciliousness, or more curious subterfuge, which we have noticed often already, and which is so rigid and so complete that it suggests malice prepense—a deliberate and perverse abstention. The “editorial” matter (to vary a happy phrase of M. Egger) on Demosthenes is even more surprisingly barren,—mere biography, and mere reference to the stock technicalities and classifications of _stasis_ and the like, practically exhaust it. I do not know how far the fact that he composed, in answer to Aristides,[175] a defence of stage dancing or pantomime, may by some be reckoned to him as literary righteousness. In his wordy _Autobiography_[176] I can find nothing to our purpose: and though, in the difficulties of study of him referred to, I daresay I have not thoroughly sifted the huge haystack of the _Orations_, I think there is very little more there. The _For Aristophanes_[177] has nothing to do with the Aristophanes we know or with literature, except that it seems to have been the speech in which Julian (_v. infra_, p. 126) discovered such wonderful qualities.

Footnote 171:

Besides the difficulty of obtaining Reiske’s ed., there is the further one that it is not complete. The _Letters_ have to be sought in that of Wolf (Amsterdam, 1738), which is neither in the Library of the University of Edinburgh, nor in that of the Faculty of Advocates, nor in that of the Signet, so that it had to be run to earth in the British Museum, though I have since found a copy for sale. And even this combination is, I think, not exhaustive. The _Progymnasmata_, _Meletæ_, _Dissertationes_, &c., were published by Claude Morel, Paris, 1606; and there are many other editions of parts, but none of the whole.

Footnote 172:

See Photius on him, _infra_, p. 181.

Footnote 173:

De Quincey’s truculent attack on Greek rhetoricians generally (_Essay on Rhetoric_: _Works_, x. 31, 32) is less unjust to Libanius than to any one.

Footnote 174:

For mere completeness' sake I may refer here to other scholiastic _Lives_, of which the best known perhaps is that of Thucydides by Marcellinus. I do not think it rash to say that they all more or less bear out the contention put above as to the _scholia_ generally.

Footnote 175:

Not to the piece mentioned above (p. 115), but to a lost oration. His own is at iii. 334 (Reiske).

Footnote 176:

I. 1, Reiske.

Footnote 177:

I. 442, Reiske.

The “Monody” and the “Funeral Oration” on Julian himself may again excite expectation, for the dead Emperor was certainly a man of letters; but they will equally disappoint it. The quaintly named “To Those Who Do Not Speak” (pupils of his who on growing up and entering the senate or other public bodies prove dumb dogs) might help us, but does not. Libanius merely exhorts these sluggards, in the most general way, to be good boys, to pay less attention to chariot-racing and more to books. By far the larger number of the “Orations” are on political or legal subjects, and it would be unreasonable to expect critical edification from them; but even where it might seem likely to come in, it does not. The “Against Lucian” (Reiske, vol. iii.) is in the same case as the “For Aristophanes.” The not uninteresting oration in defence of the system of his School (No. LXV., the last of Reiske’s third volume) constantly refers to a matter which might be of great concern to us—the difficulty which schoolmasters or professors had at this time in keeping their pupils up to the mark in the _two_ languages and literatures, Greek and Latin. But the discourse is not turned our way.

Nor do the _Letters_, our last resort, furnish us with much consolation. Their enormous number—there are over 1600 in Wolf’s edition of the Greek originals, while the _editio princeps_ of Zambicarius, in Latin only, adds problems of divagation and duplication to the heart’s content of a certain order of scholar—is to some extent mitigated by their usual brevity. But this very brevity is often an aggravation not a mitigation of teen. Very many are mere “notes,” as we should say, written, indeed, with the pomp and circumstance of the epistoler-rhetorician, but about nothing or next to nothing. Very often Libanius seems to be unconsciously anticipating the young person who said that he did not _read_ books, he wrote them. Sometimes, at least, an apparently promising reference leads to a bitter disappointment, as in the case of that to Longinus. The reader—his appetite only whetted by the exertion of rectifying a miscitation in Wolf’s _Preface_ (it quotes the Letter as 990, while it is really 998)—at last approaches his quest, and reads as follows: _To Eusebius_, “The speech [or book] which I want is _Odenathus_, and it is by Longinus. You must give it me, and keep your promise.” This is indeed precious; though a remembrance of the information, epistolary and other, vouchsafed in many modern biographies, may moderate sarcastic impulses. No sarcasm, but profound sympathy, should be excited by the professor’s constant complaints of headache; yet again they are unilluminative for our purpose. In fact, such examination as I have been able to give to these Epistles shows that it is unreasonable to demand from them what they have no intention to supply. Very likely there are passages in this mass, as in that other of the Orations, which might be adduced: but I am pretty sure that they would not invalidate the general proposition that, to Libanius also, those who want literary criticism proper need not go. Perhaps the nearest approaches to it are such things as the curious mention to Demetrius (128, Wolf, p. 67) of parts of an artificial epistolary discourse of his friend’s which he, Libanius, received when he had pupils with him, and, after being much bored by their recitations, read to them instead of lecturing himself.

The titles at least of his correspondent Themistius[178] are sometimes a little more promising, and Themistius, a man of considerable [Sidenote: _Themistius._] and varied public employment, might seem less likely to indulge in the excesses of mere scholastic exercise which Libanius permitted himself. But, on the whole, we shall have to acknowledge that this other famous rhetorician also is drawn practically blank for our purpose. “The Philosopher,” “The Sophist,” “How a man should address the public”—these are subjects on which one might surely think that a little criticism would break in somehow and somewhere. But it never does. To Themistius, as to so many others, the great writers of old are persons worthy of infinite respect, to be quoted freely, but to be quoted as a lawyer quotes this or that year-book, report, decision, for the substance only. The general banality of his literary references may be tested by anybody who chooses to refer to his citations and discussions of various authors in the _Basanistes_ (Orat. xxi., _ed. cit._ in note, p. 296), or more succinctly still, to the reference to “golden Menander, and Euripides, and Sophocles, and fair Sappho, and noble Pindar” in the pleasant little piece, “To his Father,” which comes before it.

Footnote 178:

_Orationes_, ed. Dindorf (Leipsic, 1832). Reiske, in a passage quoted at p. xii. of this, rates Themistius as, among other things, _vanus jactator philosophiæ suæ, specie magis quam re cultæ, ineptus et ridiculus vexator et applicator Homeri et veteris historiæ, tautologus et sophista_, &c. On the other hand, Sigismund Pandolf Malatesta, in 1464, carried off his bones from Sparta and buried them magnificently at Rimini as those _Philosophorum sua tempestate principis_. But it was for the Aristotelian _Paraphrases_, apparently, that the lover of Isotta revered Themistius. I have not neglected these (ed. Spengel, 2 vols., Leipsic, 1866), but being exclusively on the logical, physical, and metaphysical works, they yield us little that I can discover. I think Reiske is harsh, but not absolutely unjust.

It is no doubt extremely unjust to argue from the performance of the pupil to the quality of the teacher; but we may at least say that, if there was any stronger critical tendency [Sidenote: _Julian._] in Libanius or Themistius than appears in their own works, it is not reflected in one of their most diligent and distinguished pupils.[179] The references to literature in the extant works[180] of Julian the Apostate are, in a certain sense and way, extremely numerous; in fact, it was almost vital to the odd mixture of dupery and quackery which had mastered him that he should be constantly quoting classical, if only because they were heathen, authors. His _Orations_[181] are crammed with such quotations. Moreover, we have from him a declaration in form of love for books. “Some,” he says, at the beginning of his epistle (the ninth) to Ecdicius,[182] “love horses, some birds, some other beasts; in me from a child there has raged a dire longing for the possession of books.” But in this, as in other cases, Desire seems rather to have excluded Criticism. One is rather annoyed than edified by the banal reference, at the beginning of the _Misopogon_,[183] to his having seen “the barbarians beyond the Rhine singing wild songs composed in a speech resembling the croakings of rough-voiced fowls, and rejoicing in this music.” If only the princely pedant would have copied a few of these croaks, and studied them, instead of trying to put back the clock of the world! His compliments and thanks to Libanius himself for the above-mentioned speech (Ep. 14) are of the most hackneyed character. He read it, he says, nearly all before breakfast, and finished it between breakfast and _siesta_.[184] “Thou art blessed to write thus, and still more to be able to think thus! O speech! O brains! O composition! O division! O epicheiremes! O _ordonnance_! O departures of style! O harmony! O symphony!” To which we may add “O _clichés_! O tickets! O [in Mr Burchell’s rudeness] Fudge!”

Footnote 179:

I do not know that Julian was in strictness a “pupil” of Themistius, but the tone of the long epistle to him, ed. cit., _inf._, i. 328, is at least half pupillary. Himerius, another contemporary sophist to whom Photius (_v. infra_, p. 183) devotes some attention, was certainly Julian’s tutor. We have some of his work (ed. Wernsdorf, Göttingen, 1790 and later), but I have found little to the present point in this, which is mostly pure epideictic or didactic.

Footnote 180:

Ed. Hertlein, 2 vols. or parts (Leipsic, 1875-76).

Footnote 181:

Ed. cit., i. 1-327.

Footnote 182:

Ibid., ii. 487. The numbers of the epistles will sufficiently indicate the whereabouts of the remaining citations from them.

In Ep. 24 there is a playful and pleasant discourse on the sense of the epithet γλυκὺς given by the poets and others to figs and honey, but it is only a trifle; and in 34, to Iamblichus, it is noteworthy how entirely the philosophic interest of literature overshadows, or rather how completely it blocks out, the literary whole. In 42, on education, and literature as its instrument, the old Plutarchian view[185] is refurbished, almost without alteration, and with only a fling or two at the Galilæans as an addition; while in 55 Eumenius and Pharianus are explicitly adjured “not to despise” logic, rhetoric, poetics, to study mathematics “more carefully,” but to give their whole mind to the understanding of the dogmas of Aristotle and Plato. This is to be “the real business, the foundation and the structure and the roof,” the rest are πάρεργα. The assertion is of course the reverse of original; but at this juncture it is all the more valuable to us, as a sort of summary and clincher at once of a large and important part of ancient opinion. In the borrower of it, as in those from whom it was borrowed, literary criticism, to full purpose and with full freedom, simply could not exist.

Footnote 183:

Ibid., p. 434.

Footnote 184:

πρὶν ἀναπαύσασθαι.

Footnote 185:

See next chapter.