the Phaedrus, chiefly in the latter part, he aims his shafts at the
rhetoricians. The profession of rhetoric was the greatest and most
popular in Athens, necessary 'to a man's salvation,' or at any rate to
his attainment of wealth or power; but Plato finds nothing wholesome
or genuine in the purpose of it. It is a veritable 'sham,' having no
relation to fact, or to truth of any kind. It is antipathetic to him not
only as a philosopher, but also as a great writer. He cannot abide the
tricks of the rhetoricians, or the pedantries and mannerisms which they
introduce into speech and writing. He sees clearly how far removed they
are from the ways of simplicity and truth, and how ignorant of the very
elements of the art which they are professing to teach. The thing which
is most necessary of all, the knowledge of human nature, is hardly if
at all considered by them. The true rules of composition, which are
very few, are not to be found in their voluminous systems. Their
pretentiousness, their omniscience, their large fortunes, their
impatience of argument, their indifference to first principles, their
stupidity, their progresses through Hellas accompanied by a troop
of their disciples--these things were very distasteful to Plato, who
esteemed genius far above art, and was quite sensible of the interval
which separated them (Phaedrus). It is the interval which separates
Sophists and rhetoricians from ancient famous men and women such as
Homer and Hesiod, Anacreon and Sappho, Aeschylus and Sophocles; and the
Platonic Socrates is afraid that, if he approves the former, he will be
disowned by the latter. The spirit of rhetoric was soon to overspread
all Hellas; and Plato with prophetic insight may have seen, from afar,
the great literary waste or dead level, or interminable marsh, in which
Greek literature was soon to disappear. A similar vision of the decline
of the Greek drama and of the contrast of the old literature and the
new was present to the mind of Aristophanes after the death of the three
great tragedians (Frogs). After about a hundred, or at most two hundred
years if we exclude Homer, the genius of Hellas had ceased to flower or
blossom. The dreary waste which follows, beginning with the Alexandrian
writers and even before them in the platitudes of Isocrates and his
school, spreads over much more than a thousand years. And from this
decline the Greek language and literature, unlike the Latin, which has
come to life in