CHAPTER I

THE SOPHISTIC TREND IN ANCIENT RHETORIC

REFERENCES AND ABBREVIATIONS

Ameringer Ameringer (T. E.), _The stylistic influence of the second sophistic on the panegyrical sermons of St. John Chrysostom_, Washington, 1921 (Catholic University of America Patristic Studies).

ARP Baldwin (C. S.), _Ancient rhetoric and poetic_, New York, 1924.

Boulanger Boulanger (A.), _Ælius Aristide et la sophistique dans la province d’Asie au ii siècle de notre ère_, Paris, 1923.

Burgess Burgess (T. C.), _Epideictic literature_, University of Chicago Studies in Classical Philology III (1902), 89-251.

Campbell Campbell (J. M.), _The influence of the second sophistic on the style of the sermons of St. Basil the Great_, Washington, 1922.

Guignet Guignet (M.), _St. Grégoire de Nazianze, orateur et épistolier_, Paris, 1911.

Hubbell Hubbell (H. M.), _The influence of Isocrates on Cicero, Dionysius, and Aristides_, New Haven (Yale dissertation), 1914.

Méridier Méridier (L.), _L’influence de la seconde sophistique sur l’œuvre de Grégoire de Nysse_, Paris, 1906.

Wright Wright (W. C), _Philostratus and Eunapius, the lives of the sophists_, with an English translation, London and New York, Loeb Library, 1922.

A. THE TWO HISTORIC CONCEPTIONS OF RHETORIC

Plato’s distrust of rhetoric is a permanent reminder. It is so significantly typical that it recurs throughout the history of education, and must recur. Again and again educational practise has found that it cannot do without rhetoric; again and again educational theory has grudgingly inquired what to do with it. For distrust of rhetoric may be more than the impatience of the philosopher with the orator, of speculation with ordered presentation, of the quest for truth with persuasion. This is involved too; for philosophers have often been impatient of presentation. They have wished to think aloud, or to question and answer, or merely to analyze for themselves, without being held to consecutive explanation. Plato himself falls short of discerning the importance of making truth available and effective for the mass of men incapable of scientific analysis; and this is the ground of Cicero’s rejoinder.[1] But Plato’s distrust is more deeply of rhetoric as he heard it taught. Even in his day Greek rhetoric was largely sophistic, the rhetoric of personal display and triumph. In the _Gorgias_[2] Socrates admits the function of a nobler rhetoric, but cannot find it in use. In the _Protagoras_[3] he asks the vital question, “_About what_ does the sophist make a man more eloquent?” In the _Phædrus_, which discusses rhetoric more specifically, his satire is most evidently of sophistic. To this the ultimate objection is moral. A man should train himself “not with a view to speaking and acting before the world, but for the sake of making himself able ... to please the gods.”[4] Plato challenges not merely the method of the sophists, but their ideal. Since rhetoric has almost always had some part in education, and since it always ultimately involves morality, Plato raises a leading question.

The ultimate, the only final answer to Plato’s challenge is the _Rhetoric_ of Aristotle. This proceeds from a conception not only larger than the sophistic of Gorgias and Protagoras, but also significantly divergent in aim. The true theory of rhetoric as the energizing of knowledge, the bringing of truth to bear upon men,[5] is there established for all time. Aristotle amply vindicated rhetoric by defining its place among studies, its necessary correlation with inquiry and with policy, its permanent function. He settled the question of rhetoric philosophically. He established its theory. But this theory was oftener accepted than followed. The sophists had, indeed, been put in their place more surely by Aristotle than by Plato; but they continued to thrive, until ancient rhetoric became more and more sophistic.

The conception animating the practise and the teaching of sophistic, far from being limited to antiquity, is medieval as well, and modern. Apparently it is permanent. Rhetoric is conceived by Aristotle as the art of giving effectiveness to truth; it is conceived alike by the earlier and the later sophists and by their successors as the art of giving effectiveness to the speaker. The conceptions are not contradictory. The second may be theoretically included within the first; and actually Demosthenes may learn something from Isocrates. But to embody them in educational procedure, to carry out either as the controlling idea of a course of study, is to discover that sooner or later they become practically incompatible. Ingenuous youth will be devoted either to energizing truth or to exploiting itself. There will come a parting of the ways; for the two conceptions are divergent. What Aristotle discerned as differentiating is differentiating still. The flaw in sophistic is moral. It may not impair technical training; but by deviating motive it tends to impair education.

For Aristotle’s theory is a touchstone. To recall rhetoric to the true function discerned by him has repeatedly been the object of reform in teaching. What has intervened to deviate rhetoric and frustrate its best use has again and again been the preoccupation with giving effectiveness not to the message, but to the speaker. Ancient sophistic is thus typical. It is not merely historical; it is historic. The false conception divined by Plato, and exposed finally by Aristotle’s demonstration of the true conception, led ancient rhetoric through empty personal triumphs into an elaborate art of display, devoid, at its worst, of other motive. As sophistic spread, as its idea of rhetoric became dominant, ancient education was narrowed;[6] and ancient oratory eddied in shallows until it found a new course with the new motive of Christian preaching.

In exorcising the false conception Aristotle removed the false sophistic emphasis from style. He does not despise, nor even slight, technic. He finds analysis of sentence rhythms necessary. But his goal in this, as in his analysis of figures, is beyond the technical means of securing particular effects. He does not classify figures for reference; he seeks in both phrase and cadence the function; and he discusses neither until he has spent some two-thirds of his treatise on the function of rhetoric as a whole course of study. This he finds philosophically necessary. Otherwise rhetoric cannot be justified; otherwise, he clearly implies, it is narrowed and degraded. For him rhetoric is so inextricably moral that it should never be divorced from subject matter of real significance.

But what subject matter of real significance has oratory when it is barred from discussion of present policy? Here appears a strong external cause of the spread of sophistic. The sophistical trend, already marked, was furthered by the narrowing of public discussion. Of the three fields[7] of oratory distinguished by Aristotle, deliberative, forensic, and occasional, the first was restricted by political changes. It faded with democracy. So later it faded at Rome, and still later in other realms. Deliberative oratory presupposes free discussion and audiences that vote. The steady increase of government from above administered by an appointed official class hastened also the tendency of the second kind of oratory, forensic, to become technical, the special art of legal pleading. Thus the only field left free was the third, occasional oratory, encomium, or panegyric, the commemoration of persons and days, the address of welcome, the public lecture. A favorite field even in Plato’s time, it is in any time the freest field for imaginative and emotional appeal and for personal triumphs. Thus it was early and assiduously cultivated by the sophists. Though it opens, on the other hand, the highest reaches of eloquence, though Isocrates is more than a sophist and Lincoln’s Gettysburg address is as far from sophistic as possible, still its becoming the main field of Greek oratory gave the lead to sophistic. In such conditions sophistic could control education; and its control of education reacted upon the conditions to make a vicious circle. Oratory and the training for it became preponderantly an art of display; and the rhetoric finally bequeathed by the ancient schools was sophistic.

In sum, the sophistic tendency, which may be found in any highly developed literature, was confirmed in Greek by causes both intrinsic and extrinsic. Becoming a habit, it became a scheme of education. Against this Plato represents Socrates in fundamental opposition. Aristotle does more than oppose it; he establishes constructively a rhetoric whose persuasion shall be more than personal appeal and personal triumph. But the rhetoric nobly and philosophically conceived by him did not succeed in supplanting the tendency seen at its best in Isocrates. The conception of Isocrates in Philostratus, though inadequate, is not wrong essentially.

The siren which stands on the tomb of Isocrates the sophist—its pose is that of one singing—testifies to the man’s persuasive charm, which he combined with the laws and habits of rhetoric. Balances, antitheses, rimes, though he was not their discoverer but only the skilful user of what had been discovered already, he put his mind to, and also to amplitude, rhythm, sentence-movement, beat. These things prepared the diction of Demosthenes, who was a pupil, indeed, of Isæus, but a disciple of Isocrates. Philostratus, _Lives of the Sophists_, I. 17 (Wright’s translation, page 50, modified).

The Isocratean ideal of eloquence, influential even upon its critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus, even upon so great an orator as Cicero,[8] became more sophistic in the practise of the schools. In the first century of our era sophistic had won its place, by the second century an eminence undisputed till Christian preaching returned to the sound ancient tradition.

For sophistic is the historic demonstration of what oratory becomes when it is removed from urgency of subject matter. Seeking some inspiration for public occasions, it revives over and over again a dead past. Thus becoming conventionalized in method, it turns from cogency of movement to the cultivation of style. Cogency presupposes a message. It is intellectual ordering for persuasion, the means toward making men believe and act. Style, no longer controlled by such urgencies of subject, tends toward decoration and virtuosity. A necessary study in any rhetoric, it had been highly cultivated during Greek democracy; but under monarchy and Empire it became a preoccupation, almost a monopoly. Sophistic practically reduces rhetoric to style. The old lore of investigation (_inventio_), paralyzed by the compression of its trunk nerve, has little scope beyond ingenuity. Organized movement[9] (_dispositio_), similarly impaired at the source, tends to be reduced to salience and variety, or to be supplanted by pattern. Memory becomes verbal. But style and delivery, becoming the main reliance, are elaborated into a systematic technic to a degree almost incredible to-day. In sheer virtuosity the second sophistic has hardly a parallel in earlier or later centuries. It is more like the art of Paderewski or Bernhardt than like that of Demosthenes.

B. THE SECOND SOPHISTIC[10]

1. Philostratus, _The Lives of the Sophists_[11]

_The Lives of the Sophists_ by Philostratus derives the “new” sophistic of his day from the old. New, says he, it is not. We may call it a second sophistic; but it keeps an old tradition. Far from apologizing for sophistic, old or new, Philostratus is proud of it. He sets out to celebrate it as a great tradition. Gorgias is not defended from Socratic exposure; he is claimed as a distinguished ancestor.[12] That rhetoric is not what Aristotle urged, that it is after all sophistic, Philostratus assumes. Nor is the assumption merely provincial vanity; it was widespread and secure. There was no need to vindicate what was generally accepted. Moreover the facts justify not only the assumption of Philostratus, but his history. Though he is not historical in method, his assertion of continuity from Gorgias down to the platform artists of his day has been approved by studies really historical, and affirmed for the fourth century as well. _The Lives of the Sophists_, therefore, exhibit the second sophistic as the fixing of an old tendency in habitual practise and teaching.

During the second, third, and fourth centuries, and throughout the Roman world, rhetoric meant a sophistic generally constant. The leanings of particular schools, such as Stoic Pergamum, were not wide enough to bring new departures. They were merely shifts of emphasis within a common doctrine and practise. The cult of “Atticism” was too artificial to check the general tendency to “Asianism.”[13] What was learned at Athens could be practised at Rome; and neither Athens nor Rome dimmed the glory of Smyrna and Antioch.[14] The schools of Bordeaux were to become essentially like those of Gaza and Carthage. The same “Gorgian figures” were learned by St. Augustine in Latin Africa, by St. Gregory Nazianzen in the Greek East, and by the pagan Libanius. Greco-Roman rhetoric was as pervasive as Roman law and almost as constant.

2. The Character of Sophistic

a. VIRTUOSITY

In estimating this rhetoric, then, little allowance need be made for place or date.[15] Its main characteristics were so constant as to stand out clearly. The most obvious arise from the general aim of virtuosity. This is the constant assumption of Philostratus. Individual triumphs were not so much triumphs of individuality as outstanding exhibitions of skill in working out a pattern. In method, in composition, there was little difference between a teacher’s assignments to his amateur pupils and his own professional orations.[16] Sophistic is largely an oratory of themes.

(1) _Declamatio_[17] (μελέτη)

THEMES OF THE SOPHISTS CELEBRATED BY PHILOSTRATUS

HISTORICAL OR SEMI-HISTORICAL THEMES

The Lacedemonians deliberate concerning a wall. I. 20 (70).[18] (Isæus; so Aristides, II. 9 (220).)

Demosthenes swears that he did not take the bribe.

Should the trophies erected by the Greeks be taken down?

The Athenians should return to their demes after Ægospotami.

Xenophon refuses to survive Socrates.

Solon demands that his laws be rescinded after Pisistratus has obtained a bodyguard. I. 25 (122-132). (Polemo.)

The Cretans maintain that they have the tomb of Zeus. II. 4 (188). (Antiochus.)

Scythians, return to your nomadic life. II. 5 (194). (Alexander of Seleucia; so Hippodromus, II. 27 (296).)

The wounded in Sicily implore the Athenians who are retreating thence to put them to death with their own hands.

Pericles urges them to keep up the war even after the oracle declares Apollo’s support of the Lacedemonians. (II. 5; both also of Alexander.)

Isocrates tries to wean the Athenians from their empire of the sea.

Callixenus is upbraided for not having granted burial to the Ten.

Deliberation on affairs in Sicily.[19]

Æschines, when the grain had not come.

Those whose children have been murdered reject a treaty of alliance. II. 9 (220, seq.) (Aristides.)

Hyperides, when Philip is at Elatea, heeds only the counsels of Demosthenes. II. 10 (230). (Hadrian of Tyre.)

Islanders sell their children to pay taxes. II. 12 (238). (Pollux.)

The Thebans accuse the Messenians of ingratitude. II. 15 (244). (Ptolemy.)

Callias tries to dissuade the Athenians from burning the dead. II. 20 (256). (Apollonius of Athens.)

The citizens of Catana.

Demades against revolting from Alexander while he is in India. II. 27 (296). (Hippodromus.)

FICTITIOUS THEMES

The adulterer unmasked. I. 25 (132). (Polemo.)

The instigator of a revolt suppresses it. I. 26 (136). (Secundus.)

The ravished chooses that her ravisher be put to death. II. 4 (188). (Antiochus.)

A tyrant abdicates on condition of immunity. (_Ibid._)

The man who fell in love with a statue. II. 18 (250). (Onomarchus.)

The magician who wished to die because he was unable to kill another magician, an adulterer. II. 27 (292). (Hippodromus.)

Evidently the themes were generally the same as those of the _declamationes_ celebrated by Seneca.[20] Some of them were identical. Such subjects give the oratory of the imperial centuries, both Greek and Latin, the air of athletics, and make its teaching seem largely gymnastic. Gregory Nazianzen, indeed, calls the sophists “oratorical acrobats.”[21] But instead of dismissing sophistic with so obvious a sarcasm, we may learn something from its delight in verbal artistry.

For what, then, ultimately do we blame them? For their absolute emptiness of thought? But who shall say that they were trying to think, or that they were asked to think?... a kind of eloquence, and also a system of education, of which we have not any longer even the notion; for it rested on a sentiment which has disappeared, _the absolute and disinterested love of speaking well_—disinterested not always, indeed, as to personal advantage, but always as to thought. Who knows whether thought was for them anything else or anything more than a simple _motif_, a theme to be developed, something which sustained the discourse without imparting to it any value, something like the libretto of an opera?[22]

Since the oratory of display is still with us, the second sophistic should be taken to heart as a complete historic demonstration of what must become of rhetoric without the urgencies of matter and motive.

Philostratus has no qualms. For him _declamatio_ (μελέτη), far from being merely a school exercise, is a form of public speaking on a par with any other. It is even _the_ form of his sophists. He pays little attention to any other except encomium, which is also a school exercise. Reading the past with the eyes of the present, he finds it in Gorgias,[23] who elaborated “encomia of the Medic trophies.” “Medics” (Μηδικά), dilations on the old glories of the Persian wars, were the favorite subjects of _declamatio_. This is evident both from their frequent recurrence and from Lucian’s satire.[24] Scopelian, Philostratus thinks, was best

in Medics, in the Darius and Xerxes things, I mean; for, to me at least, he of all the sophists seems to render these best and to set a tradition of rendering for his successors. I. 21 (84).

Ptolemy of Naucratis, however, was nicknamed Marathon.[25] The wonder is that the nickname was sufficiently distinctive.[26]

(2) Improvisation and Memory

The vogue of such subjects does much to explain the otherwise incredible accounts of improvisation. “Propose a theme,” the sophist’s challenge which Philostratus traces back to Gorgias,[27] becomes less startling when we find that the theme, as well as the treatment, might come from stock. Even so the readiness and fluency seem phenomenal and were the great boast. See Mark of Byzantium recognized by pupils in the school of Polemo.

Accordingly when Polemo asked for themes to be proposed, they all turned towards Mark.... Mark, lifting up his voice and tossing his head, said: “I will both propose and execute.” Thereupon Polemo ... discoursed at him long and wonderfully on the spur of the moment; and when he had declaimed and heard Mark declaim, he was both admired and admiring. I. 24 (104).

Aristides was exceptional in declining to speak thus; and Philostratus thinks the less of him.[28] Generally improvisation was expected as a mark of virtuosity.[29] The _locus classicus_, perhaps, of improvisation, the most daring and phenomenal virtuosity, is ascribed by Eunapius to Prohæresius.

Then from his chair the sophist first delivered a graceful prelude ... then with the fullest confidence he rose for his formal discussion. The proconsul was ready to propose a definition for the theme, but Prohæresius threw back his head and gazed all round the theater ... and beheld in the farthest row of the audience, hiding themselves in their cloaks, two men, veterans in the service of rhetoric, at whose hands he had received the worst treatment of all, and he cried out: “Ye gods! There are those honourable and wise men! Proconsul, order them to propose a theme for me. Then perhaps they will be convinced that they have behaved impiously.”... Whereupon, after considering for a short time and consulting together, they produced the hardest and most disagreeable theme that they knew of, a vulgar one, moreover, that gave no opening for the display of fine rhetoric. Prohæresius glared at them fiercely, and said to the proconsul: “I implore you to grant me ... to have shorthand writers assigned to me.”... Then he said: “I shall ask for something even more difficult to grant ... there must be no applause whatever.” When the proconsul had given all present an order to this effect ... Prohæresius began his speech with a flood of eloquence, rounding every period with a sonorous phrase.... As the speech grew more vehement and the orator soared to heights which the mind of man could not describe or conceive of, he passed on to the second part of the speech and completed the exposition of the theme. But then, suddenly leaping in the air like one inspired, he abandoned the remaining part, left it undefended, and turned the flood of his eloquence to defend the contrary hypothesis. The scribes could hardly keep pace with him, the audience could hardly endure to remain silent, while the mighty stream of words flowed on. Then, turning his face towards the scribes, he said: “Observe carefully whether I remember all the arguments that I used earlier.” And without faltering over a single word, he began to declaim the same speech for the second time. (Wright’s translation, 493.)

This performance is extraordinary only in degree. That of Isæus, as reported by Pliny,[30] seems the same in kind; and so, apparently, are many other recorded triumphs. Taken together, they reveal strict limits. The improvisation was mainly of style. It consisted in fluency of rehandling, of variations upon themes, and in patterns, so common as to constitute a stock in trade. It permitted the use over and over again not only of stock examples and illustrations, but of successful phrases, modulated periods, even whole descriptions. It was the art of a technician, not of a composer.[31] Memory, too, thus trained, was no longer the orator’s command of his material;[32] it was the actor’s command of words. Though a sophist might, indeed, be a thinker, he hardly needed to be for the purposes of his oratory. His fluency was typically not in seizing and carrying forward ideas and images, but in readiness to draw upon a store.

(3) Delivery

The character of this oratory is further expressed in the records of its delivery. Even more than modulation Philostratus exhibits sonority and force. Polemo’s delivery was thrilling as an Olympian trumpet.[33] Scopelian imitated the volume of Nicetes and had the sonority of Gorgias.[34] Favorinus fascinated even those who did not understand Greek.[35] The carrying voice spoke in marked rhythms. Gesture, pushed sometimes to the extent of acting, was habitually demonstrative. Sitting at first, the orator might then leap to his feet, smite his thigh, walk, stamp, sway as a Bacchante. If such theatrical delivery seems to moderns of the West more violent than it seemed to its own audiences, it has never been extinct; and any one familiar with the oratory of display in any time will recognize the sophist’s heavy frown, his mien of deep thought, his air of authority.[36] Chaucer’s Pardoner speaks for the whole sophist line:

I peyne me to han an hauteyn speche.

_Canterbury Tales_, C. 330.

Such weight and vehemence of delivery, sometimes conceding a benignant smile, oftener relying on arrogance,[37] was the bodily expression of the impressiveness (δεινότης) cultivated no less assiduously in style. The sophist was over-expressive lest for a moment he should cease to be impressive. The audience need not be held to any course of thought; it must not be held too long by any one device of style; but it must unflaggingly admire. It must be spellbound. The constant implication of Philostratus probably echoes the ideal of orator and audience alike: behold a great speaker!

b. DILATION

Such oratory must be dilated, even inflated. That it was so in fact any one may satisfy himself who has the patience. The amplification[38] practised by Cicero and taught by Quintilian, though in print it may seem over-anxious, is an oratorical necessity. It is not merely Greek expansiveness; for it moves also the more stinted Latin. In any language it must almost always be practised as a means to oral clearness.[39] But sophistic amplification has no such warrant. It is often purely decorative. Instead of marking a stage of progress, it often merely dwells on a picture, or elaborates a truism, or acts out a mood. It is there for itself, expecting its own applause. Many of the figures of speech are devices of dilation; for sophistic is an art not only of elaboration, but of elaborateness.

(1) _Ecphrasis_

Without enumerating devices that constitute a large part of sophistic, we may see the characteristic dilation at the full in the single form known as ἔκφρασις.[40] An ecphrasis is a separable decorative description, usually of a stock subject. “I will draw this for you in words,” says Himerius,[41] using the formula of introduction, “and will make your ears serve for eyes.” The natural beauty of a prospect or of the human body is detailed for admiration, even oftener the artistic beauty of statue or temple. The orator turns on, as it were, a storm, a feast, the prospect of a city. The essentially artificial character of the ecphrasis is obvious in the favorite exercise of word-painting a peacock.[42] Apparently a boy could carry this peacock from school to the platform and continue to use it with merely verbal variations.

Of course the ecphrasis might rise to a higher level. So it did often. An accomplished orator might make it splendid, even really moving. Oratory cannot afford to neglect the appeal of oral description. None the less the ecphrasis had two essential vices. First it was extraneous, separable, detachable, a clear sign that sequence did not count. Secondly, instead of following the Aristotelian counsels of specific concrete imagery, it habitually generalized and rapidly became conventional.

Ecphrasis is no less significant for poetic. A form of Alexandrianism[43] avoided by Vergil and adopted with enthusiasm by Ovid, it perverts description because it frustrates narrative movement. The habit of decorative dilation in oratory confirmed a decadent habit of literature.[44] That the habit is decadent even when indulged with more taste is suggested by certain passages in De Quincey, in Pater, most clearly perhaps in that English sophist Laurence Sterne. Among the ecphrases of the _Sentimental Journey_ is one that he executed upon a theme taken from the most expert mocker of the sophists, Lucian,[45] and has made quite typical of the soothing rhythms and the elegant dilation of sophistic eloquence.

The town of Abdera, notwithstanding Democritus lived there, trying all the powers of irony and laughter to reclaim it, was the vilest and most profligate town in all Thrace. What for poisons, conspiracies, and assassinations, libels, pasquinades and tumults, there was no going there by day; ’twas worse by night. Now when things were at their worst, it came to pass that the Andromeda of Euripides being represented at Abdera, the whole orchestra was delighted with it. But of all the passages which delighted them, nothing operated more upon their imaginations than the tender strokes of nature which the poet had wrought up in that pathetic speech of Perseus, “O Cupid! prince of gods and men.” Every man, almost, spoke pure iambics the next day, and talked of nothing but Perseus’ pathetic address—“O Cupid! prince of gods and men!” In every street of Abdera, in every house—“O Cupid! Cupid!” in every mouth, like the natural notes of some sweet melody, which drop from it whether it will or no, nothing but “Cupid! Cupid! prince of gods and men!” The fire caught; and the whole city, like the heart of one man, opened itself to love. No pharmacopolist could sell one grain of hellebore; not a single armorer had a heart to forge one instrument of death. Friendship and Virtue met together and kissed each other in the street. The golden age returned and hung over the town of Abdera. Every Abderite took his oaten pipe, and every Abderitish woman left her purple web, and chastely sat her down, and listened to the song. “’Twas only in the power,” says the fragment, “of the god whose empire extended from heaven to earth, and even to the depths of the sea, to have done this.”