If we turn to others, we shall draw some of the most flourishing coverts in vain, but find something elsewhere. Erycius of Cyzicus[98] has a spirited retort to an insulter of Homer, and a generous eulogium of Sophocles—it is noteworthy that these two most unite the Anthological, as the general, suffrage. Palladas handles Homer’s dealings with women,[99] elsewhere[100] jests ruefully about having to sell his books, even Callimachus and Pindar, and moralises[101] the story of Circe, rather stupidly, but in a fashion for which he might find only too many compurgators in antiquity. Pollianus[102] rallies (not disagreeably) the stealers of Homeric tags and phrases; and a certain Cyrus accomplishes[103] a mild couplet to complete his own witty conceit of erecting a statue of Pindar at a bath. The long and curious poem[104] of Christodorus Coptites on the statues in the Gymnasium of Zeuxippus naturally has a great many literary allusions. Agathias—a somewhat major star than most of these, and one whose pursuits earned him the special surname of Scholasticus—has, so far as I remember, only two literary epigrams[105] on statues of Æsop and Plutarch. Another “Scholasticus,” scarcely distinguished more by the name of Thomas, announces that he has three “stars in rhetoric”—Demosthenes, Aristides, and Thucydides[106]—praising especially the pains of the first, but seeming actually to prefer the two latter. Leon, the philosopher, has a little handful[107] of epigrams on books, chiefly of science and philosophy, and a Homeric cento not more respectable than such things usually are.
The great name of Theocritus is attached[108] to pieces, not inelegant but very distinctly banal, on Anacreon, Epicharmus, Archilochus, Hipponax; and that of the lesser Alcæus (not the great one of Mitylene, but the much lesser Messenian) to some praises of Homer,[109] of Hesiod,[110] and again of Hipponax. Dioscorides[111] extols Sappho, defends the much-injured Philænis against those who (to judge from confirmatory testimony to the same effect elsewhere) played upon her the same ignoble trick by which a certain Frenchman, in days nearer our own, tried to blast the fair fame of Luisa Sigea of Toledo. He is complimentarily orthodox as to Sophocles, but not much less complimentary to Sositheus, of whom we know little, and to Macho, of whom, thanks to Athenæus, we know that he exercised his wits upon putting naughty anecdotes into uncommonly pedestrian verse. An epigram of the Grammarian Crates[112] refers to the controversy on the respective merits of Chœrilus, Antimachus, and Homer, and would have been very welcome if it had given us some information on that matter; but as it is, the subject is a mere pretext to enable Crates to “talk greasily.” Antipater of Sidon,[113] starting from the childish debate about the birthplace of Homer, turns it into something better by his conclusion—
and he subsequently celebrates Sappho, “Erinna of few verses,” and Pindar, returning to the same subjects (except Erinna) in another batch, and adding a group on Anacreon (who, as fertile in commonplaces, is a favourite subject of the Anthologians), Stesichorus, and Ibycus.
At least three epigrams of a different sort rather make us regret that there are not more of the same kind, instead of the iteration of stock phrases. The first,[114] by Herodicus of Babylon, is a smart onslaught on the “fry of Aristarchus,” the “mono-syllabists” who care for nothing but ΣΦΙΝ and ΣΦΩιΝ and ΜΙΝ and ΝΙΝ. The second,[115] by Antiphanes, hails the “busybody race” of grammarians who “dig up the roots of other people’s muses,” with a great many more abusive but not quite inappropriate epithets and comparisons. The third,[116] by Philippus, is perhaps the best of the three, girding at the “whelps of Zenodotus” with a kind of combination of the other two, which is very likely actual and intentional. Philip (v. infra) was a careful student of the elders of his craft. Antipater of Thessalonica[117] has quite a group of literary epigrams. He celebrates the Nine Poetesses, takes part in the Antimachus-Homer debate, refusing the Colophonian primacy, but granting him second rank and the praise of rough vigour (“the Hammer on the anvil of the Pierides”), &c., and honours Aristophanes. Homer once more occupies Alpheus of Mitylene[118] and Antiphilus of Byzantium,[119] while Philippus of Thessalonica[120] devotes a “pretty but slim” comparison with flowers to the principal bards of the Anthology itself.
This same Philippus has also a not unhappy conceit[121] about Hipponax bidding the usual passer-by at his tomb “not wake the sleeping wasp, Whose shafts fly straight although his metres limp.” A pale addition to the garland of Sophocles comes from the doubtless alien hand of Stratyllius Flaccus,[122] and Hesiod supplies only a play on words to the better artistry of Marcus Argentarius,[123] while the accident of our order of reading—a genuine accident—finishes a volume, and the tale, with the marvellously lame and only epigram of a certain Pinytus[124] on no less a person than Sappho.
A very thankless wretch would he be who was not grateful for any legitimate excuse to wander once more through the length and breadth of the enchanted gardens of the Anthology. But the reperusal can only strengthen the opinion already formed that on the actual “evaluation of π” in criticism the Greek mind, whether wisely or unwisely, was not strongly set. Nothing can be clearer than that the forms, the range, the etiquette, so to speak, of the compositions which are here grouped, invited criticism in the graver way as thorough as that which Ben Jonson gives to Shakespeare, Camden, and a dozen others; in the lighter as sharp, and at the same time as piercing, as that of Piron on La Chaussée. But it was not the mode, and they were not in the vein. With rare exceptions they obeyed the classical principle of taking the accepted, the obvious, the orthodox, and dressing it up in their best way. It by no means follows that they were not right; but it does follow that they leave us a little unsatisfied. To tell us that Homer is great, Sappho lofty, Sophocles perfect, Aristophanes witty, is (to use the old comparison of George Gascoigne) to praise the “crystal eye” and the “cherry lip” of any gentle-woman. And so we may turn to the division of Greek literature most opposite to the Anthology itself.
Before considering in some, at least, representative detail the vast and arid province of the technical Greek Rhetoric, it may be |The Rhetoric of the Schools.| well, or rather is absolutely necessary, to resume the consideration of what Rhetoric really meant. As we have seen, it was at the beginning a strictly practical Art of Persuasion by Oratory; and if it tended to embrace and absorb all or most other arts and sciences, this was partly because the orator would certainly have to deal with many, and might have to deal with all, of these, partly because it was always more or less a political art, an art of public business. For the Greek politician, like others, was expected to be a Jack-of-all-trades.
But even while this practical object continued, the Greek passion for abstracting and refining tended to turn practice into theory, while the Greek love of sport, competition, public display, tended further to turn this theory into the code of a very elaborate game. Obviously enough, as the practical importance of oratory declined, the technical and “sporting” interest of Rhetoric got more and more the upper hand. Rhetoricians specialised their terminology, multiplied their classifications, and drew their rules ever finer and finer, just as croquet-players narrow their hoops and bulge out their balls, just as whist-players split and wire-draw the broad general principles of the play of Deschapelles and Clay into “American leads,” and an endless reverberation of “calls” and “echoes.” We possess a very large, and a more curious than interesting, collection of the technical writings of this half craft, half sport, and a collection, rather less in proportion, but a little more interesting, of examples of the finished handiwork or game. To both of these we must now turn, premising that the technical part has not very much, and the finished examples surprisingly little, to furnish to the stricter literature of our subject. Why, then, do we deal with it? Because even abused Rhetoric is always Literary Criticism in a more or less degraded and disguised condition. The degradation can be remedied, the disguise thrown off, whenever the hour and the man arrive. Rhetoric, in her worst moods, keeps the tools ready, keeps them almost too sharply ground, if she does not put them to the right use.
As Rhetoric preserved her authority not merely to the latest classical times but right through the Middle Ages, and even at |Its documents.| the close of the latter escaped, at the cost only of some minor changes and additions, the decay which fell upon the rest of Scholastic learning, it is not surprising that the Rhetores Græci received early attention from the young art of Printing. Had not Aldus, in 1508-1509, collected them in two folio volumes, it is perhaps rather unlikely that we should have had any more modern collections at all. For technical Rhetoric fell into even more disfavour than Logic with the rise of physical science and materialist philosophy in the seventeenth century; and though, in some applied senses of the word, it has never fallen into complete disuse, it has never, as Logic has, recovered position in its stricter and more formal forms. It was therefore no small feat, even of German industry, when, some seventy years ago, Christian Walz of Tübingen undertook a new edition,[125] which, though some additions and improvements have since been made by Spengel[126] and others, remains the main standard and thesaurus. Its ten stout volumes, of some seven thousand closely printed pages, have probably been read through, and line by line, by hardly a single person for each decade of the seven during which it has been before the world. For not only is the bulk enormous, but the matter is extremely technical; there is endless repetition, commentaries on commentaries on commentaries forming no small part of the whole, while the minute definition and special terminology[127] require extremely careful reading. I shall not pretend to have read every word of it myself; but I have read a very great deal of it, and everything that follows can be guaranteed as drawn at first hand.
The original treatises of the collection form its smallest part, and none of them is very early; indeed, of the earlier formal Rhetoric, as has been said, Aristotle is almost our only representative, though, luckily, he is worth all the others. If the περὶ ἑρμηνείας, or De Interpretatione, which goes by the name of Demetrius, had been rightly referred (in accordance with nearly all the MSS., as far as the name goes, and with the assent of so distinguished and acute a scholar as Petrus Victorius in regard to the person) to Demetrius of Phalerus,—the Athenian statesman and orator of the latter half of the fourth century B.C., the antagonist of his namesake the City-Taker and lover of Lamia, the scholar of Theophrastus, the schoolfellow of Menander, the probable consulting founder of the Alexandrian library—its interest of authorship would be only inferior to that of the work of the greatest writers. But the allusions and citations in the treatise itself (unless we suppose it to have been edited and interpolated to an extent such as to make it useless as a document) are such as to put this attribution out of the question. And while Dionysius and others have been put forward as possible claimants, there seems no reason to doubt that the most probable author is to be found in some Alexandrian grammarian or sophist of the name of Demetrius (perhaps the one actually named by Diogenes Laertius as having written rhetorical treatises), who may have lived under the Antonines. There is, therefore, no reason for disturbing Walz’s actual order.[128]
His first volume is composed of divers more or less original treatises, which are of the kind called προγυμνάσματα, “Preliminary Exercises,” and which in most cases actually bear that title. The first is by the famous Hermogenes (ob. c. 170 A.D.), the Phœnix of rhetoricians pure and simple, who became a master at fifteen and an idiot at five-and-twenty, whose “heart was covered with hair,” and whose works not only followed him, but were followed by libraries-full of scholiasts and commentators. The next, itself a sort of adaptation of Hermogenes, is by Aphthonius of Antioch, a teacher of the beginning of the fourth century A.D., who had the rather curious good fortune not merely to secure a long vogue in the late classical ages, but to be current in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Theon, an Alexandrian, but not the father of Hypatia, follows, with the less-known names of Nicolas, Nicephorus, Adrian, Severus, and the better known George Pachymeres, as well as another collection by an anonym. Of these, the works attributed to Adrian and Severus are not called προγυμνάσματα, but in the first case μελέται, in the second διηγήματα καὶ ἠθοποΐαι.[129] The most famous and popular of the sets, those of Hermogenes and Aphthonius, are very short, and, like that of Georgius Pachymeres, do not exceed fifty pages. The others are longer, and in the case of the work of Nicolas, some three times as long.
The opening of the Progymnasmata of Hermogenes is a curious and slightly bewildering mixture of definition, literary |The Progymnasmata of Hermogenes.| history, and the kind of “Manual for Young Writers” (lege orators), which, after long disuse, has recently begun to be prepared for the aspiring journalist. The first chapter is on Fables. They are supposed to be good things for the young. They have various authors and titles, but there is a tendency to give the name of Æsop to all of them. They are not true to fact; but should be plausible, and can be made so by suiting the action to the characters and making the peacock stand for beauty and vanity, the fox for wisdom, the ape for mimicry. Sometimes you should give them shortly, sometimes spin them out. (Example given.) You may put them in different places of your speech, and they will do instead of an actual example.
The second chapter is of Narration (διήγημα), which is distinguished from Fable as being the story of something which has either actually happened or is told as if it had. Homer and Herodotus are both “narrators.” There are five kinds of it (one thinks of Polonius)—the directly declaratory, the indirectly ditto, the elenchtic, the loose, the periodic—with examples of each kind.[130] The first is good for story, the second for debate, “the elenchtic [confuting] is rather for elenchs,” and the loose for epilogues, as being pathetic.
We might at very little expense of trouble, if at much of space, go through the whole of the little treatise and show how the hairy-hearted one of Tarsus deals in the same way with “Uses,”[131] Maxims, Refutation and Confirmation, Commonplace, Encomium, Comparison, Character-drawing,[132] Ecphrasis,[133] Thesis,[134] and Introduction. But the examples given will suffice. Each chapter consists of a definition, a division, sometimes very finely drawn, of kinds, examples, and generally a scrap of advice as to how, when, and where to introduce them.
The good and the evil of this kind of thing, as well as its special bearings on literary criticism, are not difficult to discern. |Remarks on them.| It necessitates the narrowest and most accurate investigation of the kinds and characteristics of literature, of literary means, of “composition,” in the wide and the narrow sense. It confers on apt students, besides the mere ability to play the special game of artificial oratory, a great acuteness of analysis. It entirely avoids, no doubt, the danger which is charged constantly, and sometimes not without a certain justice, on the more æsthetic kind of literary study and literary criticism—the danger of desultory chatter. It has, in short, though to a less degree, the virtues of Formal Logic. And if the subject of Education, and fresh nostrums in it, were not a weariness to all intelligent mankind, one might say that not a few things in our present curricula might with advantage be excluded to make room for a course (with some due alterations) of Rhetoric according to Hermogenes. But, at the same time, its own shortcomings and its own dangers are equally obvious. The greatest of them—indeed one which in a manner swallows up and contains within itself all the others—is the almost irresistible temptation to regard literature as something according to scheme and schedule, something that the pocket ivory rule of the architect, and his neatly latticed paper, and a short handbook like this before us, will enable you to despatch and dispose of. Acute as are the divisions and definitions, they are dead things; and nothing that imitates and follows them can be really alive.
Aphthonius adopts the same divisions of Progymnasmata, save that he makes them fourteen instead of twelve, by |Aphthonius.| separating ἀνασκευὴ [rebutting] from κατασκευὴ [confirming], and adding a section on Blame. His object was evidently to make even the business-like handling of his predecessor more precise still; and the long and revived popularity which, as has been said, he achieved, was not an undue reward for one of the most craftsmanlike crambooks that ever deserved the encomium of the epithet and the discredit of the noun. Aphthonius substitutes for the simple heading “Of Myth,” &c., “Definition of Myth,” &c.; and though he still keeps his sections very short, he manages, instead of the rather brachygraphic indication of examples in the text, to give an appendix of complete if miniature pattern at the end of each section—a fable of the ants and grasshoppers, urging youth to industry, for the first; the story of the rose and its acquiring redness from the blood of Aphrodite when she struck her foot against its thorns in trying to shield Adonis from Ares, for the second; and so on. In every respect, Aphthonius has studied clearness, and he has certainly achieved it. If it were not for the dangers of the whole method, and especially that greatest one, of encouraging the mistake of classification for fact, terms for things, orderly reference to a schedule for æsthetic appreciation, he would deserve very hearty applause. And even as it is, one could, as has been said above, see the study which he facilitates substituted for any one of at least a dozen subjects of our modern overcrowded curriculum with a great deal of equanimity. Short as the piece is, some of the examples, such as the encomia of Thucydides and of Wisdom, are compositions of considerable finish. But it is significant that in the first there is, strictly speaking, no literary criticism at all, and that even the inevitable comparison with Herodotus is poorly shuffled off with the stock reproach that Herodotus writes to please, Thucydides to speak the truth.
Theon, with greater space at his command, employs a different method. It is uncertain whether he preceded or followed |Theon.| Aphthonius; but the former theory is favoured by the fact that he, like Hermogenes, has twelve subjects only, those which Aphthonius put asunder being still united. He begins with a general disquisition on, and encomium of, the Progymnasmata, widening them somewhat, so as to bring in Figures to some extent, but also describing some of these as “contentious” or “disputed.” Then he has a rather curious chapter, nearer to our special purpose than usual, showing how, not merely the great orators, but the great writers of old, used these forms, or rather things which can be brought under these forms, citing the famous speech of Sophocles as to his emancipation from love in the Republic, the fable of the flute-player in Herodotus, others in other historians, and a very great many more things, not a few of which are lost. This enumeration is not only interesting as pointing to these desiderata, but as showing how unhappy the Greek was unless he could arrange and classify and ticket, as well as, distinguish and enjoy, the parts and characteristics of literature. The spirit is not dead yet: it has prompted a much-respected living author on Rhetoric to describe In Memoriam as “a combined Hyperbole of Affection and Sorrow.” And this may undoubtedly be said in its favour, that its exercise does really require and promote a certain intellectual alertness and activity. But the question is, Do this alertness and this activity exert themselves in actual progress, or in mere marking-time? Is the comprehension (one can hardly even ask Is the enjoyment) of In Memoriam furthered by its orderly arrangement in the case generally labelled “Hyperbole,” and in the compartment labelled “Combined Hyperboles,” and in the further pigeon-hole labelled “Of Affection and Sorrow”? Is it really important to decide whether Sophocles’s variation on “sour grapes” is a χρεία or an apophthegm, and which are the most remarkable examples of διήγημα in the orators and the historians respectively? Such things may appear to some specially and fatally to underlie the Platonic curse on the appearance of knowledge without the reality. But they have, as we see, very strong and long prescription, and there are still some who bitterly resent the exclusion of them from the teaching, not merely of technical Rhetoric, but of literature—who regard a system of “leaden rules,” of individual appreciation without classes and compartments and indorsements, as dilettante, unscientific (which it would certainly allow itself to be), and effeminate. Between the two, opinion, a little assisted by Logic and History, must be left to decide.
Theon’s handling of the Progymnasmata (which he often speaks of without the pro) is, as has been said, much fuller than those of Hermogenes and Aphthonius. He does not, like the latter of these, give a regular formal pattern of each kind; but he has a great many illustrative references to literature, and he has a good deal of discussion on what may be called the philosophy of the several kinds. Nor is it unnoteworthy that in dealing with Commonplace he drops the “common,” substitutes prosopopœia for ethopœia, and introduces the curious new heading of “Law.” On the whole, Theon is more “for thoughts” than either of his forerunners;[135] he might profit a clever boy more, and he has much more numerous and deeper glimmerings of insight into the purely critical side of the matter. But he lacks system, and this, in dealing with a subject which is systematic or nothing, is a drawback.
There was a rhetorical Nicolaus (indeed the name was very common) who was a student of Proclus; but the author of the |Nicolaus.| Progymnasmata we possess seems to have flourished later, under the Emperor Leo and after him. For some reason or none, MSS. of him seem to be specially found at Oxford. They are merely examples, several of each kind, and sometimes minutely subdivided, there being, for instance, separate patterns of mixed, unmixed, logical, and practical “Use.” They form, in fact, a curious bundle, and by no means a very small one, of partial declamations in common form, the examples of Ethopœia being especially remarkable: “What sort of things Niobe would say,” “What Menœceus the patriotic suicide,” “What Cassandra at the sight of the horse,” &c. No less than fourteen in all are given.
This is also the principle of the Progymnasmata of Nicephorus Basilicus, a notary (not the son-in-law chronicled by |Nicephorus.| Scott) of Alexius Comnenus, who gives no less than three-and-twenty Ethopœiæ on subjects Pagan and Christian. In fact, these two collections, which together fill some two hundred and fifty well-packed pages, may be regarded rather as rhetorical reading-books, designedly intended to possess a certain interest, than as anything else. Familiarity with them would be likely to produce much the same sort of literary facility, and in a sense “correctness,” as that which we find in the minor French writers of the eighteenth century. It could, after mere childhood (when it might insensibly inculcate some good principles and some sound models), have little other good effect.
The few μελέται of Adrianus, the successor and funeral eulogist of Herodes Atticus, are whole declamations, not |Minors.| brought under any of the heads. The Diegemata and Ethopœiæ of Severus, after what has been said of these kinds, will need no special characterisation; and the Progymnasmata of George Pachymeres (who was nearly contemporary with Dante) and of the Anonymus are, like so many of the others, pure examples, indeed (as the former are well called in one MS.) Meletæ on the Progymnasmata themselves.
No great resumption or amplification of the scattered comments already made on these works can be necessary. They form a by no means contemptible group of "Composition |General remarks on the Progymnasmata.| books," creditably distinguished from some more modern examples of the same kind by being busy with something better than mere grammar, but not as a rule showing any of that conception of style which is visible as early as Dionysius, distinct in Quintilian, and present in a form at once vigorous and exquisite in Longinus. They are by no means ill calculated to excite an interest in literature, and even to facilitate the production, in not contemptible form, of certain kinds of it. But there is upon all of them the curse of beginning at the wrong end—of constructing an elaborate skeleton system of forms, and kinds, and sub-kinds, and then classifying literature under these, instead of beginning with the literature, separating the good from the bad, and examining, as far as may be possible, the sources of goodness and badness. A man trained in them would have many advantages over our heaven-born, but hardly even earth-instructed, reviewers and students of literature. But he would be very apt to miss the finer touches, to lose the nobler gusts, of literature; and he would be especially disposed towards that worst disease of criticism, so often manifested in its history, which leads men to ignore, or even blaspheme, great work, because it refuses to be classified, or to obey the arbitrary rules which have been foisted into, or encrusted upon, the classification.
Not from such a point of view did the still later teachers, who set themselves to comment on the comment of Hermogenes |The Commentaries on them.| and Aphthonius, regard their authorities. The second volume of Walz—a stout one of nearly seven hundred pages—is entirely occupied with scholia on Aphthonius alone, at the rate, that is to say, of about fourteen pages of margent to one of text. This flood of words about words has been too much for the patience even of the editor, who gives specimens only of some, and in just wrath labels one as “a futile opuscule botched together with utter stupidity.” Much, indeed, is of the usual kind which we associate with scholia—verbal interpretation, sometimes not useless, but as a rule singularly pedestrian and uninspired, introduced with a monotonous rattle of clichés and catchwords. But there are also better things, and the so-called “Homilies” of Doxopater, besides being of very considerable bulk (they fill some four hundred pages, not of mere scrappy annotation but of substantive commentary), attest the intelligence as well as the industry of their author, a Byzantine of the eleventh century. But they are (necessarily, no doubt) cribbed and cabined by the circumscriptions of their text.
In the third volume we return to comparatively original work, with Hermogenes once more at the head of the authors. |The "Art" of Hermogenes.| We have left the vestibule—the Progymnasmata—and are now in the main courts of pure Rhetoric herself. Much more than half the volume is occupied by the four divisions of the master’s Technic: the first of “Staseis,” the second, in four parts, of “Inventions,” the third of “Ideas,” and the fourth of “Cleverness[136] of Method.” One synopsis of about a hundred pages, an anonymous epitome of fifty, with eleven shorter epitomes, and other tractates, scarcely averaging a dozen pages each, complete the volume.
There is no doubt that the manual of Hermogenes is the text-book of later Greek Rhetoric. Five mortal volumes of Walz, one of nearly nine hundred pages, are occupied by scholia upon it, two of these being devoted to the Staseis alone; and it seems to have been the model subject even of those who did not ostensibly range themselves as its commentators. The book of the Staseis, which produced fifteen hundred pages of extant and printed commentary, has itself but fifty or sixty, the great bulk of the treatise being contained under the heads of “Inventions” and “Ideas.” There is a table of contents, but it may be feared that this will be of but partial service to any one not acquainted with the technicalities of the subject. Others may indeed be relieved by the names of well-known Greek orators and historians, who appear to be discussed under “Ideas,” and even by those of some commonly known Figures in the last division. But on the whole Terminology revels in all her wildest Greek luxuriance. Hypodiæresis and Prodiegesis guard the labyrinth with Antenclema and Procatastasis[137] ready at hand; more familiar words have obviously assumed new senses; and it is not even the very easiest thing to acquire a distinct and satisfactory idea of the connotation of the great section-headings themselves, while, when that idea is at last attained, we may find that it is for our special purpose irrelevant, or nearly so.
The best instance stands, at the very threshold of the investigation, in the very name of those Staseis which, as we have seen, attracted the commentators as a candle does flies. Στάσις is a term which appears impossible to translate into any single English word, even in that legal vocabulary to which (far more than to anything having to do with literature) it really belongs. Its Latin equivalent is status or constitutio:[138] M. Egger renders it in French as état de cause; Liddell and Scott do not attempt to render it at all; but it and its Latin equivalents have been variously translated as “state of the case,” “issue,” “point.” Sometimes it seems as if it might be not impossibly translated “plea.” Hermogenes (who plunges at once, after his fashion, into a wilderness of the most wiredrawn distinctions) gives no general definition, but says that στάσις ὁρικὴ is “the search for a name for a thing,” and instances the case of a man who has stolen the private property of a priest. Is this Sacrilege or Theft? The opening for hair-splitting which such an inquiry gives is, of course, a very wide one, and Hermogenes simply revels in the indulgence thereof. But for us there is hardly a blade of pasture in the field on which centuries of commentators browsed so greedily.
Εὑρέσις again may be “for thoughts.” Again we can find no single word for them, how much less for such niceties as procatastasis and prodiegesis? The term covers the additions to the case introduced by the speaker’s own invention, and ranges over a vast variety of subtleties, ending with a treatment of some Figures. The examination of “Ideas”[139] shifts to the qualities of the speech or speaker—clearness, purity, dignity, energy, brilliancy, and very many others, ending with that survey of great speakers and writers which has been noted. And finally the treatise on “Cleverness of method” contains, not only more figures, but a profusion of mostly brief and rather desultory cautions. Throughout the book the author seems in a sort of paroxysm of distinction and nomenclature: he is always striving to make out some one thing to be at least two things, and to fit each of the two with some technological form.
We turn, naturally enough, to the dealings with great writers mentioned above to see what this method, of analysis pushed to the verge of mania, will give us. They are very short—not in all filling twenty pages—and, as we might have expected, they contain little more than simple reference to the technicalities on which so much time has been spent. Literary criticism, in short, becomes a form of chemical analysis. We all know how this runs, as posted up, say, outside the walls of a pump-room. The water contains iron so many grains, sulphur so much, chlorine so much, nitrates a trace, and so forth. So here. Lysias has moderate ἐπιμέλια, only a trace of γοργότης, a certain amount of περιβολή κατ’ ἔννοιαν, but hardly any of it κατὰ μέθοδον, very little that is axiomatic, but a great deal of cleverness of method. On the other hand, Isæus has a great deal of γοργότης,[140] more abundant ἐπιμέλεια, and so with other things. He is not so good as Demosthenes (who, be it observed, is Hermogenes' ideal), but much better than Lysias, though he has not so much clearness of method, yet still a good deal. Of the historians, Xenophon is very particularly ἀφελὴς and also “sweet,” &c., &c.
Perhaps the following sentence may serve as well as any other as an example of the method of Hermogenes. It is from the fourth chapter of the third book, περὶ εὑρέσεων:—
“Since many have set out many things about epicheiremes[141] and have spent much speech on this, and nobody has been able to bring it home to the mind clearly, I shall endeavour, as clearly as I can, to decide what is the invention of the epicheireme which constructs the kephalaion or the lusis, and what the invention of the ergasia which constructs the epicheireme, and what the invention of the enthymeme which constructs the ergasia.” I quote this with none of that ignorant scorn of terminology, as such, which authorities so different as Hamilton and Mill have justly denounced in reference to the common eighteenth-century judgments of the schoolmen. But it will be obvious to anybody that this kind of writing tends to the construction of a sort of spider’s web of words, the symmetry and exactness of construction whereof are in inverse ratio to substance and practical use. It may catch flies; it undoubtedly gives a sense of ingenuity and mastery to the spider. But it has extremely little sweetness: it rather obstructs the light: and it is not capable of being put (for it will not even staunch wounds) to any of those practical purposes which objects possessing very little sweetness, and no light at all, not unfrequently subserve.
We shall still have something to say of Hermogenes when we come to the conclusion of this Rhetorical matter; but for the |Other “Arts,” &c.| present it is necessary to pass on to the writers associated with him in this third volume of Walz. The Art of Rhetoric of Rufus, whose age and identity are quite unknown, is a very brief and rather slight skeleton, with classifications, definitions of terms, and a few examples. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is the addition of a fourth kind—historic—to the usual three—forensic, and symbouleutic, and epideictic. The very common habit, to which reference has been already made, of taking examples almost indiscriminately from orators and historians, has evidently a logical connection (whether of cause or effect) with this. An anonymous “Synopsis” is busied with Hermogenes only. Joseph the Rhacendyte, who seems to have been a thirteenth-century man and a native of the “little isle” of Ithaca, is much fuller, has written an argument of his book in about 150 iambic trimeters, of a kind which would bring severe tribulation on the British schoolboy, and is noteworthy (though he would be more so if it were not for his late day) because he has evidently reached the stage where Rhetoric is recognised as the Art of Literature. His chapter-headings have the curious confusion and jumble which characterises much, if not most, Rhetoric since the strict oratorical side was lost sight of,—he has one on epistolary writing, one even on verse: and from several points of view his interest is not infinitesimal. It is very far from superfluous to note, though it may be impossible to discuss in detail, the significance of the fact that while another Anonym gives us four parts of a perfect speech—proem, diegesis, agon, and epilogue, a third notes eight parts of rhetorical speech—conception, style, figure, method, clause, composition, punctuation, and rhythm.
For, arbitrary and “cross,” in the technical sense, as these divisions are (and as, it may be noted in passing, are all subsequent attempts to produce things of the same kind), they testify to a salutary sense of dissatisfaction. They make tacit or more than tacit acknowledgment that something must be put in the place of the old, defunct, purely oratorical Rhetoric—nay, that that Rhetoric itself was incomplete, and would have needed extension even if it had not been defunct of its old office. Of still further Anonyms one (only partly given in Walz) is interesting because it attempts a kind of historical introduction; another is couched in “political” (accent-scanned) verses, with curious refrains in the different sections, and with odd prose insertions, as are the acknowledged epitomes of Tzetzes and Psellus. The remainder of the volume consists of a brief dictionary of figures, a treatise of some interest on “Rhetorical Metres” by a certain Castor, and a brief ecthesis or exposition of rhetoric generally.
The enormous collection of the scholia on Hermogenes fortunately requires no detailed notice.[142] At most could we pick out a few isolated passages bearing more or less directly on our subject, and even these would be of scarcely any value, seeing that the authorship and date of most of them are quite unknown, and that hardly any can be said to possess that intrinsic literary interest which might make questions of date and authorship unimportant.
The eighth and ninth volumes (really the ninth and tenth) present matter of more individual interest—the eighth because of the principal subject, which with comparatively little alteration is treated by a great number of authors, the ninth for other reasons. This subject—a subject which was to exercise a disastrous attraction on the Rhetoric of the Renaissance and even of later times—consists of the famous, or infamous, Figures.[143]
We know from a contemptuous phrase of Quintilian (see post) that long before his time the facility of compounds in |Treatises on Figures.| Greek had induced the Greeks to multiply Figures beyond all sense and endurance. Yet as we have partly seen, in the so numerously attended school of Hermogenes, these famous playthings, though not exactly neglected, did not receive the first attention. Others, however, made up for any apparent neglect of them. We have, specially devoted to the subject, under the head of σχήματα or of τρόποι, some fifteen or sixteen treatises—some by named authors, others anonymous. The first, by a certain Alexander, divides Figures as usual into those of the meaning and those of the style, and enumerates twenty of the former and twenty-seven of the latter; Phœbammon deals more shortly with a somewhat smaller number of figures, brought under more general heads; and Tiberius the rhetorician confines himself to the figures in Demosthenes. Herodian has a very large number of poetical examples—a device which, as we shall see, served to keep Rhetoric nearer and nearer to literature as time went on. The little treatise of Polybius of Sardis deals less with figures individually than with figurativeness; while an Anonymus, neglecting to some extent the usual phraseology, but reducing the usual procedure unawares to the absurd, manages to give a vast number by taking individual expressions from Homer and making a figure out of each. Zonæus follows more succinctly on the lines of Alexander; another Anonymus busies himself with Synecdoche only, and yet another adopts the dictionary arrangement, as do divers others with Tropes. One of the best pieces of the whole is the treatise of Georgius Choeroboscus, a writer of the fourth or fifth century. It is short, and deals with only a few figures; but these are the important ones, the definitions are mostly clear and sensible, and the examples, though not numerous, are well chosen.
The ninth volume opens with the not unimportant work to which reference has been made above, the De Interpretatione |The Demetrian De Interpretatione.| of Demetrius the Uncertain. But it also contains six other works on various divisions of Rhetoric, one of which is at least interesting for the great name of Longinus attached to it (as some would have it with greater certainty than in the case of the work that we would rather wish his), and others for other matter.
Demetrius takes a somewhat independent view of his subject, which he puts on a level with Poetics, but does not call Rhetoric. As Poetry, he states, deals with—or at least is distinguished and divided by—metres (this netteté is refreshing, and we shall go farther to fare very often worse), so what are called clauses[144] divide and distinguish the interpretation of prose speech. Then, directing attention directly to clauses, he illustrates their kinds from the respective beginnings of the histories of Hecatæus and the Anabasis of Xenophon, and prefers (though not to the exclusion of what he does not prefer) short clauses to long. From clauses he goes to periods, discussing and analysing their composition rather narrowly, and then returns to parallel clauses, whence striking off to homœoteleuta he continues his treatise under a great number of similar heads, betraying the slightly heterogeneous and higgledy-piggledy arrangement which, as we have said already, is so apt to beset these writers on Rhetoric. But he maintains throughout a creditable desire to identify his subject with the Art of Prose Composition, and not merely with Persuasion, or with the composition of an extremely artificial kind of prize essay on lines more artificial still.
The rhetor Menander, who has left us a treatise on the third division of rhetorical speeches, Epideictic (generally subdivided |Menander on Epideictic.| into encomia and invectives), is thought to have lived at the end of the third century. From the first his treatment is of considerable literary interest, because he handles the sources of the material of these curiously artificial compositions. First, he takes the hymns about the gods, and here, according to the way of his class, he rushes at once into a classification. There are, it seems, nine kinds of hymns—Cletic, apopemptic,[145] physic, mythic, genealogical, artificial, prayerful, deprecating, and mixed—the appearance of which last heading, here and elsewhere, always makes one wonder how a person of any logical gifts could write it down without seeing that he made his whole classification ridiculous if not fraudulent thereby. Then he quotes a great number of authors, ranging them under the heads. A separate chapter is next given to each kind, still referring to many authors, but unluckily seldom or never citing the actual passages. Next he passes to the Praising of Cities, that very important part of the bread-study of the travelling rhetor, who had to make himself welcome by accommodating his lectures to local patriotism, as we see, for instance, in Dion Chrysostom (v. infra). Hardly in the whole of this dully fantastic division of literature shall we find anything quainter than the sections devoted to this subject. If the city is a landward one, you will point out how safe it is from piratical attacks; if it is on the coast, you will dwell on the splendours and advantages of the sea. “How to praise Harbours,” “How to praise Gulfs,” “What is the best fashion of encomium for an Acropolis?”—these actual headings meet us. At even fuller length the orator is told how to praise not merely the site but the population and its origin, the neighbours (perhaps dispraising them might come in best here), the customs, and so forth. In short, the little treatise reminds one most of those modern cookery-books which—assuming the housewives who will read them to be of Paraguayan kin, and to continue idiots—give not only prescriptions for dishes but lists of dinners and rules of etiquette. One hardly wonders that a man like Lucian, of mother-wit compact to the finger-tips, should have soon left a profession in which the average practitioner seems to have been taken for granted as next door to a fool, without either common-sense or imagination enough to meet the most obvious requirements of his business.
One MS. of Menander stops here, but another gives us much more of the same kind, dealing with the βασιλικὸς |Others.| λόγος—flattery of kings—with epithalamia, with consolations, et cetera. The general scheme is much the same, and at least does not disincline us to believe it from the same hand. The short treatise of Alexander on Rhetorical Starting-points is very technical and not very profitable; but it falls in with the Menandrine books in showing how this business of flattery—the reducing to system of the “dodges” of the auctioneer or the advertising agent—was, latterly at least, the mainstay of the rhetorician. The two books of Aristides' Art of Rhetoric, on the other hand, busy themselves not with the epideictic but with the political speech, and deal chiefly with its technical qualities, our old friends. Apsines deals with the exordium only, and Minucianus with the epicheireme or imperfect rhetorical argument. Between them comes the treatise attributed to Longinus by some, and for that reason, if for no other, worth a little fuller examination.
“That[146], so to speak, there is nothing better in man’s possession than memory, who in his senses will deny? Some indeed praise Oblivion, as Euripides—