Islanders sell their children to pay taxes. II. 12 (238). (Pollux.) The Thebans accuse the Messenians of ingratitude. II. 15 (244). (Ptolemy.) Callias tries to dissuade the Athenians from burning the dead. II. 20 (256). (Apollonius of Athens.) The citizens of Catana. Demades against revolting from Alexander while he is in India. II. 27 (296). (Hippodromus.) FICTITIOUS THEMES The adulterer unmasked. I. 25 (132). (Polemo.) The instigator of a revolt suppresses it. I. 26 (136). (Secundus.) The ravished chooses that her ravisher be put to death. II. 4 (188). (Antiochus.) A tyrant abdicates on condition of immunity. (_Ibid._) The man who fell in love with a statue. II. 18 (250). (Onomarchus.) The magician who wished to die because he was unable to kill another magician, an adulterer. II. 27 (292). (Hippodromus.) Evidently the themes were generally the same as those of the _declamationes_ celebrated by Seneca.[20] Some of them were identical. Such subjects give the oratory of the imperial centuries, both Greek and Latin, the air of athletics, and make its teaching seem largely gymnastic. Gregory Nazianzen, indeed, calls the sophists “oratorical acrobats.”[21] But instead of dismissing sophistic with so obvious a sarcasm, we may learn something from its delight in verbal artistry. For what, then, ultimately do we blame them? For their absolute emptiness of thought? But who shall say that they were trying to think, or that they were asked to think?... a kind of eloquence, and also a system of education, of which we have not any longer even the notion; for it rested on a sentiment which has disappeared, _the absolute and disinterested love of speaking well_—disinterested not always, indeed, as to personal advantage, but always as to thought. Who knows whether thought was for them anything else or anything more than a simple _motif_, a theme to be developed, something which sustained the discourse without imparting to it any value, something like the libretto of an opera?[22] Since the oratory of display is still with us, the second sophistic should be taken to heart as a complete historic demonstration of what must become of rhetoric without the urgencies of matter and motive. Philostratus has no qualms. For him _declamatio_ (μελέτη), far from being merely a school exercise, is a form of public speaking on a par with any other. It is even _the_ form of his sophists. He pays little attention to any other except encomium, which is also a school exercise. Reading the past with the eyes of the present, he finds it in Gorgias,[23] who elaborated “encomia of the Medic trophies.” “Medics” (Μηδικά), dilations on the old glories of the Persian wars, were the favorite subjects of _declamatio_. This is evident both from their frequent recurrence and from Lucian’s satire.[24] Scopelian, Philostratus thinks, was best