CHAP. II. ORIGIN AND EARLY HISTORY OF GREEK PROSE COMPOSITION. 1. FIRST ESSAYS IN PROSE WRITING LONG PRECEDE A POPULAR PROSE LITERATURE. LAWS. RHETRÆ OF LYCURGUS. DRACO. SOLON. PELOPONNESIAN ARCHIVES. 2. RISE OF POPULAR PROSE COMPOSITION. CADMUS. PHERECYDES. ACUSILAUS. EUMELUS. ARISTEAS. EPIMENIDES. 3. RESTRICTION OF EARLY GREEK POETICAL HISTORY TO MYTHICAL SUBJECTS. 4. CAUSES OF THAT RESTRICTION. SIMILAR RESTRICTION OF EARLIEST PROSE HISTORY. FIRST APPLICATION OF PROSE TO PHILOSOPHICAL SUBJECTS.- 5. GEOGRAPHY THE MOTHER OF AUTHENTIC HISTORY. ARISTEAS OF PROCONNESUS. ANAXIMANDER AND HECATEUS OF MILETUS. SCYLAX. 6. GENEALOGICAL LITERATURE. FIRST ESSAYS IN AUTHENTIC HISTORY. CHARON OF LAMPSACUS. OTHER EARLY HISTORIANS. – 7. GREEK TECHNICAL CHRONOLOGY. EARLIEST CHRONOLOGERS. CHARON OF LAMPSACUS. HELLANICUS. OLYMPIC REGISTER. -8. DEFINITION AND ORIGIN OF THE OLYMPIC ERA. HIPPIAS. ARISTOTLE. TIMÆUS. -9. OLYMPIAD OF CORCEBUS. OLYMPIAD OF IPHITUS AND LYCURGUS. IDENTITY OF THE TWO. 10. PHILOSOPHICAL LITERATURE. ITS SLOW PROGRESS. 11. RHETORIC. THEAGENES OF RHEGIUM. RHAPSODISTS. SICILIAN MASTERS. SOPHISTS. DEFINITION AND CHARACTER OF. 12. GORGIAS. PROTAGORAS. PRODICUS. HIPPIAS. EARLY ATTIC ORATORS. THRASYMACHUS. THEODORUS. GRAMMATICAL WORKS.-13. MISCELLANEOUS PROSE LITERATURE. FABLE. SOP. OTHER BRANCHES OF POPULAR PROSE.-14. GREEK PROSE STYLE. STYLE AS DEPENDENT ON DIALECT. EARLY IONIC PROSE. ITS VARIETY OF USAGE. 15. ATTIC PROSE. 16. STYLE AS DEPENDENT ON STRUCTURE AND COMPOSITION. "SENTENTIOUS STYLE. 17. "PERIODIC STYLE. GORGIAS. LYSIAS. PERFECTION OF ATTIC STYLE. LATER VICISSITUDES OF IONIC STYLE. A DEFECT OF THE CLASSICAL ATTIC STYLE, - 1. In the present chapter it is proposed to trace the origin of Greek prose writing, and the several stages of its progress down to the close of the fifth century B. C.; that being the epoch at which we first find it generally adapted to the various orders of polite com position, as comprised under the heads of History, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Miscellaneous literature. The inquiry into the rise and early practice of prose writing has been commonly confounded with that relative to the cultivation of prose as a branch of popular composition. The two questions are however essentially distinct, and a right understanding of the distinction is indispensable to the accurate treatment of this entire subject. order says in prose writ The ing long precede a prose lite Attention has already been directed1 to the causes First eswhich obtained for poetry a precedence in the of cultivation over the sister style of literature. harmony of metrical numbers was required, not only popular to gratify the taste of a primitive audience, but also rature. as an aid to the memory of the author, in an age when other means of preserving his works were unknown or scanty. The same cause would naturally tend to retard any more general application of the art of writing to the art of poetry, even after the technical facilities for the purpose became more plentiful. The two essential requisites of a national literature, promulgation and preservation, being already in a great degree provided for in the manner most agreeable to the primitive public, there was the less inducement to resort to more artificial expedients; although it is probable that these also would, from the earliest epoch at which a supply of them was at hand, be turned to account for the private convenience of professional reciters. Prose composition on the other hand offered no aid to the memory, and in its pristine form no charm to the imagination. It must therefore have been dependent, from the first, for its transmission, or indeed 1 Vol. I. p. 145. sq. for its very existence, on the art of writing. It was in fact, in its origin and essence, the first application of that art to purposes of utility; and writing being itself, in the strictest sense, an art of practical utility, invented for the recording of what could not be recorded by other means, it follows that the use of writing and the composition of prose must have been coeval. From the earliest existence of the former art, all documents of importance connected with civil government or social life, laws, state decrees, chronological records, private contracts, or epistolary communications, would as a general rule be embodied in prose, and by consequence committed to writing. Such documents would thus, in the natural course of events, become comparatively abundant, long before it occurred to the public which framed them to treat, in the same unattractive forms of language, those subjects of a more ideal character which had, in the spirit of the age, been set apart as the more peculiar province of poetry. Prose writing consequently, in this more elementary sense, may be assumed not only to have been practised in Greece centuries before the first dawn of a popular prose literature, but even to have preceded any general use of the art of writing in poetry, already provided with a more congenial mode of preservation. It may claim therefore to rank as the most antient branch of literature, taking the term literature in its primary sense of an application of letters to the record of facts or opinions. The epoch at which this application first took place in Greece remains, like the first introduction of writing, involved in obscurity. This much however may safely be asserted, that by whatever sage or hero the alphabet was communicated to the Hellenes, whether by Cadmus, Danaus, Palamedes, or some other more real personage unrecorded, from that epoch the Hellenes must have been in the habit of writing prose. The first successful essays in popular prose literature cannot, on the other hand, be traced beyond the sixth century B. C., an age many generations posterior to that at which, on any reasonable estimate, those primitive improvers can be supposed to have lived. But the use of writing for strictly useful or necessary purposes, from the 9th or 10th century B. C. downwards, is established on other than mere speculative or fabulous data. The dispatches alluded to by Archilochus1 as habitually conveyed by the Spartan scytale in his time were assuredly written in pithy Laconic prose; nor can there be any reasonable doubt that the letters which Homer in the Iliad describes as carried by Bellerophon from Prœtus of Corinth to the king of Lycia, and as fraught with many calumnious imputations against the bearer, were, in the poet's estimation of them, if not in reality, primitive specimens both of alphabetic writing and of prose composition.2 The codes of the early Greek lawgivers quoted by Ari- Laws. stotle, of Philolaus, Phidon, and Lycurgus (in so far as the enactments of the latter were committed to writing), were also prose documents of the eighth and ninth centuries B. c.3 That the Rhetræ, or fundamental statutes of Ly- Rhetræ of curgus, were written in prose is established, not only Lycurgus, by the testimony of the best authors', but by the evidence of one of those statutes which has been preserved. The genuine character of this relic is undoubted. It was known to, and commented by, 1 See Vol. III. p. 453. 2 Vol. III. p. 484. sq. Aristotle; and its rude, even to that acute critic, but partially intelligible Doric, guarantees it as a monument of the remotest Spartan antiquity. It is certainly a curious fact, that this, the oldest authenticated example, not only of Greek prose composition but of the art of writing in Greece, should be the production of the Greek state which above all others was proverbial in historical times for its illiterate habits. The interest which, on these various grounds, attaches to the fragment, will be a sufficient apology for here subjoining it entire, with such a translation as the obscurity of the text will admit.1 Διος Συλλανίου και Αθηνας Συλλανιας ἱερον ίδρυσα μενον φυλας φυλάξαντα, και ωβας ωβαξαντα τριακοντα· γερουσίαν συν αρχαγέταις καταστησαντα ώρας εξ ώρας απελλάζειν μεταξυ Βαβυκας τε και Κνακίωνος. Ούτως εισφέρειντε, και αφίστασθαι γαμωδαν γοριαν η μην και κρατος. Having dedicated a sanctuary to the Syllanian Jove and the Syllanian Minerva; having divided the citizens into their tribes, and classed them into their thirty classes; having installed the kings and the senate in their functions, let them hold assemblies from season to season, between the river and the bridge. Thus let the laws by them be proposed or withdrawn. Let the power to confirm or reject belong to the people.3 This primitive ordinance contains in its dry Laconic phraseology the essence of the political constitution of Sparta. Had we the other rhetræ in a like state of integrity, we should find doubtless the social and military organisation of the people similarly provided 1 Plut. in Lyc. 6. 2 So rendered by Aristotle, ap. Plut. loc. cit. 3 The last part of the text is corrupt. We have endeavoured to convey the spirit of the most plausible restoration. See Müller, Dor. m. 5. 8. |