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.