A classic of a different kind is the orator Demosthenes (385-322), whose _Philippics_ (or orations against King Philip of Macedon) are perhaps his best written speeches, and are models of oratory for all time. Philip was insidiously preparing to take over Greece, and Demosthenes fierily denounced him to the apathetic people. He does not use florid rhetoric, but a terse, strong, direct, and simple speech. This and his other speeches are literary masterpieces and are, in their plain, forcible style, considered “matchless eloquence.” Before this a long series of philosophers had begun to use the now perfected Greek language, and the works of some of these are classics. Socrates wrote nothing--Plato gives us his ideas--and the books of the great majority of them have not been preserved. Epicurus, who comes nearest of them all to modern scientific thought, wrote three hundred works, but not one of them has been preserved. We have, in fact, only the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Plato (427-347), a pupil of the famous Socrates, mainly expressed his ideas by means of dialogues between imaginary or real Athenian characters. In the Greek some of these dialogues (the _Phaedo_, _Phaedrus_, _Timaeus_, _Critias_, _Symposium_, etc.) are considered to belong to the finest prose-literature of the world, and the famous Greek scholar Dr. Jowett has given us a wonderful translation (in five volumes) of them all. Plato usually writes about religion and morality, but he was also the first social idealist, with very advanced views, and in his _Republic_ he sketches an ideal commonwealth. While Plato is the finest writer of all philosophers--and by far the easiest to read--his successor Aristotle (384-322) was the most learned man (in his time) of all writers and possibly the greatest thinker of all time. These wonderful Greeks were pioneers in everything. While some created the epic, the lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, etc., Aristotle created philosophy as a system of knowledge. The titles of his greater works (_Physics_, _Metaphysics_, _Ethics_, _Logic_, _Poetics_, etc.--he invented these divisions of knowledge) show the vast range of his learning and thought, but his books are scarce and are read only by students of philosophy. After the days of the philosophers Greece degenerated. The only other Greeks who could be deemed classics are the moralist and philosopher Plutarch (died 106 A. D.) and the very unmoral and witty satirist Lucian, whom we treat a little later. Plutarch’s _Lives_ (of famous Greeks and Romans) are a biographical classic, but he was a very religious priest of Apollo and wrote much also on morals, and religion. After these the only great Greek writers were of Alexandria, but these are better known in mathematics and philosophy than as literary classics. Euclid’s _Geometry_, certainly a classic of its kind, also belongs to Alexandria, but was written in the third century before Christ. §2. ROMAN LITERATURE