BOOK V

ITALY AND THE RISE OF THE ROMAN

STATE.

FROM THE EARLIEST ACCOUNTS TO THE SUBJUGATION OF ITALY BY ROME, IN B.C. 264.

VOL. II.

K

regarded as, in a sense, the parents both of philosophy and rhetoric; but the demand for the latter, as an art, threatened to draw off attention from the former, when Socrates arose to teach philosophy in a new spirit. The fruit of the rhetorical teaching of the Sophists, but still more of the free institutions of Athens, was seen in the long line of orators, from Pericles, the pupil of Anaxagoras, to Demosthenes and his contemporaries. TEN of these ATTIC ORATORS were selected as the worthiest by the Alexandrian critics, who have handed down to us some of their orations. They are Antiphon and Andocides, whom we have met with in the latter part of the Peloponnesian War; Lysias, the greatest master of the pure Attic style; Isæus and Isocrates, who were especially distinguished as professors of rhetoric; Demosthenes and Æschines, and their contemporaries, Lycurgus, Hyperides, and Dinarchus. The discussion of their literary merits and their extant works must be left to the special histories of literature.

Still less does the vast field of the history of philosophy fall within our province. It must suffice to indicate the celebrated schools, which arose out of the teaching of Socrates, the great master who first separated philosophy from the rhetorical and dialectic lectures of the Sophists. The four great schools were the Academic, founded by Plato; the Peripatetic, by Aristotle; the Stoic, by Zeno; the Epicurean, by Epicurus. While the teaching of all four embraced questions both of ethics and philosophy,—the latter term comprising every branch of human knowledge, the two former sects were chiefly distinguished by their intellectual, the two latter by their moral teaching. And, in both cases, the leading points of difference may be traced more or less in all later systems: every school of philosophy leans either to the idealism of Plato or the analytic method of Aristotle: every system of ethics partakes largely of the Stoic self-sacrifice or the Epicurean quest of the highest pleasure as the chiefest good. Among the minor sects, which sprang from the school of Socrates, the two most celebrated were those which may be regarded as the extreme developments of the principles of Epicureanism and Stoicism, though anterior to them in their foundation, the Cyrenaic school of Aristippus, who placed the source of happiness in the gratification of the senses; and the Cynic school of Antisthenes, who taught his disciples to despise not only the indulgences but the decencies of life. We have already had to speak of the most famous member of this school, Diogenes of Sinopé.