Nor is it merely in regard to the political questions of the day that Isocrates performs the part of a journalist. He deals also with the social life of Athens. He expresses the feeling with which men of the old school observed a deterioration of manners connected, in their views, with the decay of Conservative elements in the democracy. He shows us the throngs of needy citizens, eagerly casting lots outside the law-courts for the privilege of employment as paid jurymen—while at the same time they are hiring mercenary troops to fight their battles abroad. He pictures the lavish display which characterized the festivals of the improvident city—where the amusement of the public had now become a primary art of statesmanship—when men might be seen blazing in gold spangled robes, who had been shivering through the winter in rags. He brings before us the young men of a degenerate Athens—no longer engaged in vigorous exercises of mind and body, in hunting or athletics; no longer crossing the market-place with downcast eyes, or showing marks of deference to their elders—but passing their hours in the society of gamesters and flute-players, or lazily cooling their wine in the fountain by the Ilissus. He is, in brief, a voice of public opinion on all the chief matters which come within the province of the publicist. In order that such a writer should have an influence similar to that of a newspaper, it was enough that copies of his writings should be sufficiently multiplied to leaven the conversation of the market-place and of private society. Every possessor of a copy was a centre from which the ideas would reach the members of his own circle. And there is good evidence that, in the fourth century B.C., the circulation of popular writings throughout the Hellenic world was both wide and rapid. The copying industry, in the Greece of that age, doubtless fell far short of the dimensions to which the labor of cultivated slaves (the _literati_) afterwards raised it at Rome—where we hear of Augustus, for instance, confiscating no fewer than two thousand copies of a single work—the psuedo-Sibylline books. But it was still amply sufficient to warrant a general comparison, in the sense just defined, between the influence of such a writer as Isocrates, and that of a modern journalist.