The Isocratean ideal of eloquence, influential even upon its critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus, even upon so great an orator as Cicero,[8] became more sophistic in the practise of the schools. In the first century of our era sophistic had won its place, by the second century an eminence undisputed till Christian preaching returned to the sound ancient tradition. For sophistic is the historic demonstration of what oratory becomes when it is removed from urgency of subject matter. Seeking some inspiration for public occasions, it revives over and over again a dead past. Thus becoming conventionalized in method, it turns from cogency of movement to the cultivation of style. Cogency presupposes a message. It is intellectual ordering for persuasion, the means toward making men believe and act. Style, no longer controlled by such urgencies of subject, tends toward decoration and virtuosity. A necessary study in any rhetoric, it had been highly cultivated during Greek democracy; but under monarchy and Empire it became a preoccupation, almost a monopoly. Sophistic practically reduces rhetoric to style. The old lore of investigation (_inventio_), paralyzed by the compression of its trunk nerve, has little scope beyond ingenuity. Organized movement[9] (_dispositio_), similarly impaired at the source, tends to be reduced to salience and variety, or to be supplanted by pattern. Memory becomes verbal. But style and delivery, becoming the main reliance, are elaborated into a systematic technic to a degree almost incredible to-day. In sheer virtuosity the second sophistic has hardly a parallel in earlier or later centuries. It is more like the art of Paderewski or Bernhardt than like that of Demosthenes. B. THE SECOND SOPHISTIC[10] 1. Philostratus, _The Lives of the Sophists_[11] _The Lives of the Sophists_ by Philostratus derives the “new” sophistic of his day from the old. New, says he, it is not. We may call it a second sophistic; but it keeps an old tradition. Far from apologizing for sophistic, old or new, Philostratus is proud of it. He sets out to celebrate it as a great tradition. Gorgias is not defended from Socratic exposure; he is claimed as a distinguished ancestor.[12] That rhetoric is not what Aristotle urged, that it is after all sophistic, Philostratus assumes. Nor is the assumption merely provincial vanity; it was widespread and secure. There was no need to vindicate what was generally accepted. Moreover the facts justify not only the assumption of Philostratus, but his history. Though he is not historical in method, his assertion of continuity from Gorgias down to the platform artists of his day has been approved by studies really historical, and affirmed for the fourth century as well. _The Lives of the Sophists_, therefore, exhibit the second sophistic as the fixing of an old tendency in habitual practise and teaching.