§§ 203-205, recapitulation; §§ 206-212, further incrimination of Demosthenes, and §§ 213-214, of Ctesiphon. §§ 215-229, chiefly refutation of charges against Aeschines. §§ 230-259, further general discussion of the illegality of the measure and the unworthiness of Demosthenes. The final appeal to the past—‘Think you not that Themistocles and the heroes who fell at Marathon and Plataea, and the very graves of our ancestors, will groan aloud if a crown is to be granted to one who concerts with the barbarians for the ruin of Greece?’ ends abruptly and grotesquely with an invocation to ‘Earth and Sun and Virtue and Intelligence and Education, through which we distinguish between the noble and the base.’ It reminds us strangely of the invocations put into the mouth of Euripides by Aristophanes.[298] CHAPTER IX DEMOSTHENES § 1. _Introduction_ The art of rhetoric could go no further after Isocrates, who, in addition to possessing a style which was as perfect as technical dexterity could make it, had imparted to his numerous disciples the art of composing sonorous phrases and linking them together in elaborate periods. Any young aspirant to literary fame might now learn from him to write fluent easy prose, which would have been impossible to Thucydides or Antiphon. If the style seems on some occasions to have been so over-elaborated that the subject-matter takes a secondary place, that was the fault not so much of the artist as of the man. Isocrates never wrote at fever-heat; his greatest works come from the study; he is too reflective and dispassionate to be a really vital force. With Demosthenes and his contemporaries it is otherwise; they are men actively engaged in politics, actuated by strong party-feeling, and swayed by personal passion. This was the outcome of the political situation: just as feeling was strong in the generation immediately succeeding the reign of the oligarchical Thirty at Athens, so now, when Athens and the whole of Greece were fighting not against oligarchy but the empire of a sovereign ruler, the depths were stirred. A new feature in this period is the publication of political speeches. From the time of the earliest orator—Antiphon—the professional _logographoi_ had preserved their speeches in writing. The majority of these were delivered in minor cases of only personal importance, though some orations by Lysias and others have reference indirectly to political questions. Another class of speeches which were usually preserved is the _epideictic_—orations prepared for delivery at some great gathering, such as a religious festival or a public funeral. Isocrates was an innovator to the extent of writing in the form of speeches what were really political treatises; but these were only composed for the reader, and were never intended to be delivered.