As we look back on the long line of rhetorical teachers, we can trace an increasing degree of narrowness and futility. The conditions of life in the city-state had made public speaking a practical and personal necessity. What Isocrates strove to do in his rôle as pamphleteer was to raise oratory from the personal to the national level, to connect education with statesmanship,[914] and to unify it by setting before it the ideal of a united Greece. The sphere of rhetoric in his view was wide and humane.[915] It is true that he himself was a theorist, unskilled in the practical issues of politics.[916] He was what Crito in the _Euthydemus_ called a ‘Boundary Stone’—one who tried to combine practical politics and philosophy, avoiding the extremes of each. His attempt was unpopular, though ultimately he succeeded, for his school became the university of Greece.[917] But the ideal which he put forward had a real inspiration, and had none of the cramping restrictions of later rhetoric. Moreover, he taught the unity of moral and intellectual education: ‘The more strongly a man desires to persuade his audience’ (the intellectual practice of the rhetorical school) ‘the more will he train himself in culture of mind and manners and in gaining the esteem of his fellow citizens.’[918] Speech is regarded as the instrument of Persuasion, from which all the blessings of human society proceed,[919] and its function is to advance civilization by educating the ignorant and testing the wise. Such was the high educational ideal of Isocrates, and we find much of it reflected in Cicero, his admirer and his imitator. The breadth of view is not impaired. For Cicero maintains that the power of eloquence is such that it embraces the rise, the force, the vicissitudes of all affairs, virtues, and duties; of everything in nature—character, mind, life. It defines the moral code, the principles of law and right. It regulates the State, and on every subject and in all its relations its words are many and eloquent.[920] There is the same attempt to connect rhetoric with politics, the same insistence that intellectual issues (_doctrina bene dicendi_) cannot be separated from moral ones (_doctrina recte faciendi_).[921] Wide and all-round knowledge is required of the orator: ‘mea quidem sententia, nemo poterit esse omni laude cumulatus orator, nisi erit omnium rerum magnarum atque artium scientiam consecutus.’[922] Yet Cicero was a panegyrist, and he followed the artificial rules of the game in exactly the same way as the Gallic rhetoricians of the third and fourth centuries did; and when he warns against spending too much time on philosophy,[923] which may be lightly learned, he says, we feel that he is giving rein to a natural Roman tendency to discount thought, and that this tendency proved the bane of rhetoric.