The loss of his works is much to be regretted, since he was the inventor of a style—the _tempered_ style, as it was called by Dionysius—which, standing between the austerity of Antiphon and Thucydides, and the elaborate simplicity perfected by Lysias, combined the best qualities of both. He was thus a forerunner of Isocrates. In the fragment which is preserved, we find no trace of rare or poetical words or audacious compounds such as Gorgias used; none of the complicated sentences of Thucydides, and no forced antithesis; the diction is flowing, and the expression clear. He seems to have been the first writer to make a careful study of metrical effect, and is mentioned for his frequent use of the _paeon_ by Aristotle, who apparently classed him with those writers to whom diction is more important than ideas.[85] The fragment already mentioned purports to be the _exordium_ of a political speech: ‘I could have wished, men of Athens, that my lot had been cast amid those ancient times and conditions when the younger men were content to be silent, since circumstances did not force them to speak in public, and their elders were able administrators of the state....’ This is a conventional opening; a similar phrase of regret (ἐβουλόμην) begins the speech of Antiphon on the murder of Herodes,[86] and Aeschines has elaborated the same theme of the superiority of political life in the time of Solon in a way which leads us to suspect that he had the _prooemium_ of Thrasymachus in mind.[87] Of the works of Theodorus of Byzantium not a sentence remains. A contemporary of Lysias, he taught rhetoric and composed certain works on the subject.[88] He concerned himself with the proper divisions of a speech, adding a section of ‘further narrative’ (ἐπιδιήγηις) to the usual narrative, and ‘further proof’ (ἐπιπίστωσις) to proof.[89] It is for this over-subtlety that Plato ridicules the ‘cunning artificer of speeches’ from Byzantium.[90] § 2 Andocides was born about 440 B.C., a member of a family which had been distinguished for three generations. His great-grandfather, as he tells us, fought against the Pisistratidae; his grandfather Andocides was one of the envoys for the peace with Sparta in 445, and was twice subsequently a _strategus_; his father, Leogoras, is mentioned by Aristophanes as rearing pheasants.[91] The orator himself was a member of a ἑταιρεία or club—probably a social rather than a political club, as the only meeting mentioned was purely for convivial purposes.