Yet though this is an important point, and has been rather too commonly overlooked, it is no doubt inferior in gravity to the universally recognised fact that the importance of speechcraft proper, of oratory, was in Greece such as it is now only possible dimly to realise. Every public and private right of the citizen depended upon his power to speak or the power of somebody else to speak for him; a tongue-tied person not only had no chance of rising in the State, but was liable to be insulted, and plundered, and outraged in every way. To some it has seemed that the great and almost fatal drawback to that Athenian life, which in not a few ways was life in a sort of Earthly Paradise, was the incessant necessity of either talking or being talked to. It was therefore not in the least wonderful that the first efforts—those of the Sicilian sophists (or others)—to reduce to something like theory the art of composition, of arranging words effectively, should be directed to _spoken_ words, and to spoken words more particularly under the all-important conditions of the public meeting and the law court—by no means neglecting the art of persuasion, as practicable in the Porch, or the Garden, or the private supper-room. That prose literature—that all literature—has for its object to give pleasure dawned later upon men. Aristotle and persons much earlier than Aristotle—Corax and Tisias themselves—would probably have acknowledged that prose, like poetry, ought to please, but only as a further means to a further end, persuasion. Its object was to make men _do_ something—pass or negative such a law, bring in such a verdict, appoint such an officer, or (in the minor cases) believe or disbelieve such a tenet, adopt or shun such a course of conduct. Even in poetry, as we have seen, the ethical preoccupation partly obscured the clear æsthetic doctrine—you were to be purged as well as pleased, and pleased in order that you might be purged. But in prose the pleasure became still more subsidiary, ancillary, facultative. You were first of all to be “persuaded.”