Oratory, an inalienable inheritance of the Hellene even before Athena coached the crafty Odysseus, received at Athens a certain finality of form, or forms, that has imposed its influence upon the occidental, whether Roman or Englishman, lawyer or epideictic speaker. The unwritten word of statesmen like Pericles, fusing the persuasion of the politician with the keener rationalism of Anaxagoras and the raucous, but not wholly unpatriotic, opportunism of demagogues like Cleon or Hyperbolus, was paired with the more decently draped pragmatism of the Sophists, and resulted in the selected group of the “ten” orators, of the fifth and fourth centuries. There was the somewhat archaic Antiphon, the dignified criminal lawyer; Andocides, who brought his rough and ready style to bear upon burning questions of contemporary politics; Lysias, the son of an alien, but truly Attic, the younger friend of Socrates, the lucid narrator, the relentless prosecutor; Isæus, the capable testamentary barrister; Isocrates, who both saw the building of the Erechtheum and outlived the battle of Chæronea, and whose over-finished oratory transmitted the florid adornment of Gorgias to the schools in which Cicero was trained; Demosthenes, greatest of all, whether in private suits or in his arraignment of public foes, whose terrorizing cleverness was quick to strike or counter like the flashing arms of the athlete impeded with no ounce of florid superfluity; Æschines, his great antagonist; Lycurgus; Hyperides; and Dinarchus.