Phocion, Demades, and Dinarchus, from among the contemporaries of Demosthenes, lived to see their city under Macedonian rule, but they left no successors. There were few opportunities left for an orator. The ecclesia, when it met on sufferance, could debate only on matters of domestic import; and proposals to improve the water-supply, or erect statues to a tyrant, give less scope for eloquence than the great issues of peace and war which had formerly been the subject of their deliberation. Men of political ability had no scope when politics were dead. In the courts, too, there could be no public cases of great interest comparable with the case of the _Crown_ or the impeachment of Demosthenes. Private cases, in which aspiring politicians had hitherto found it convenient to try their strength, were more suited to the attainments of professional lawyers, and these cases must have greatly decreased in numbers and importance when all the dependencies of Athens were taken from her.[492] The oratory of display, brought to perfection by Isocrates, had likewise but few openings. No orator could rise at the Olympic Festival to summon all Greeks to brotherhood in arms; no funeral speech could move a people to tears or exalt them to enthusiasm when battles were waged by mercenaries and war declared not by a nation but by a foreign prince. The art of rhetoric was still practised, but already Aristotle, by going back to first principles, had composed the first and last scientific treatise on this subject, and shown that it must be put into its true place as a branch of philosophy, to be studied in combination with its counterpart, Dialectic.[493] Political theory, which figures prominently in Isocrates and Demosthenes, had likewise become the property of the philosophical schools.