The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (41 page)

He descends to Hades, where all the great tragedians had gone, to find Euripides and bring him back to earth. As Charon ferries him across the Styx, the frogs, from whom the play takes its name, chant their famous chorus—

Dionysus arrives in Hades just in time to witness a competition between Aeschylus and Euripides for the Throne of Tragedy, and the right to sit beside Pluto. Finally, when Pluto asks Dionysus to choose between them he prefers Aeschylus simply because he likes him more, and brings him back up to Earth, as the Chorus sings,

“I
N
most of our abilities, we differ not at all from the animals”; Isocrates observed about 374
B.C.
, “we are in fact behind many in swiftness and strength and other resources. But because there is born in us the power to persuade each other and to show ourselves whatever we wish, we not only have escaped from living as brutes, but also by coming together have founded cities and set up laws and invented arts, and speech has helped us attain practically all of the things we have devised.” It was writing, of course, that made it possible for the powers of persuasion to reach across the years.

Poetry, which usually meant metrical language or “verse,” bore conspicuous signs of the intention to be remembered. But prose, the language of everyday trivia, bore no such signs. It required an effort of imagination to see how the flow of daily words could become the substance of lasting art.

The first literary work in prose was history. And we call Herodotus (c.480–c.425
B.C.
) the Father of History because his is the earliest surviving work in Greek prose that aimed to give literary form to an extended narrative of the past. The Greek
historie
means “inquiry” or the search for truth. Herodotus might also perhaps be called the Father of Prose, for until his time verse was still the normal vehicle for narratives of great events and heroes of the past. The chroniclers and philosophers like Heraclitus (c. 540–c. 470
B.C.
) had already tried to give literary form to their prose and to sharpen the precision and accuracy of their language. But the surviving fragments of Heraclitus’ work lack the clarity and elegance of later prose. In fact, ancients called him “the obscure one,” and not until the dialogues of Plato (428–347
B.C.
) did philosophic prose take polished literary form.

Although he writes in prose, Herodotus is still in the Homeric tradition celebrating great men and wondrous deeds. His accounts of the local customs of Egyptians and others broadened the Greeks’ views of themselves. His successor Thucydides was in the same tradition, but professed to be
more scrupulous in separating rumor and romance from fact. Herodotus, lacking documents, reported speeches as he thought they ought to have been said under the circumstances. And Thucydides also explained, “My habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.” Apologizing for the lack of “romance” in his history, his purpose was “not an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.” Herodotus and Thucydides proved that prose could be an appealing, effective, and durable literary medium. And they set a standard of literary art that survived. But history, unlike music and gymnastics, did not become a new field of study for the Athenian educational program of paideia.

Still, Herodotus did signal the appearance of a new literary art of prose to which the future belonged. Politics in the West was not to be a chronicle of lonely Solomons keeping their own counsel. Rather it was to be a history of councils, of senates, parlements and parliaments—of men trying to persuade one another, their fellow governors, and the people whom they governed. In politics there was neither time nor opportunity for epics elaborating messages into verse. Prose, the language of everyday life, would be the vehicle of persuasion. And the new art of rhetoric would provide the techniques, define the standards, and shape the style of the message. What was required was not merely rules for judging a polished literary work but skill in using the common discourse. Even as public expectations grew, despots needed the arts of persuasion to mollify and satisfy their subjects. Rhetoric, which Aristotle himself defined as the arts of persuasion, became a necessary if often unacknowledged skill of the government classes. The arts of prose became essential to the arts of governing.

We know much more about the creation of this new art of prose and its handmaiden rhetoric than we do of the origins of the art of poetry. Prose was associated with the earliest hesitant moves toward democracy. And we see it allied, too, with opposition to Plato’s pursuit of absolutes. The rise of prose as an art and of rhetoric as a discipline is plainly connected both with wider public participation in government and with appeal to expediency rather than to truth as the guide of political life. The classic antithesis between rhetoric (the concern for the appropriate) and philosophy (the pursuit of truth) was dramatized by Plato in two of his Dialogues, the
Phaedrus
and the
Gorgias
. Ever since Plato’s time the arts of persuasion have been associated with popular institutions, with the pursuit of compromise and the acceptance of relative and temporary solutions instead of the pursuit of Truth, of the Utopian and the ideal.

Gorgias (483–376
B.C.
), born in Leontini, near Syracuse, the oldest Greek settlement in Sicily, is reputed to be the first ancient Greek to create an art
of prose style. His arrival as an ambassador from his hometown seeking Athenian aid in 427
B.C.
marks the beginning of rhetoric in Athens. He was one of the most prominent and influential of the Sophists. These practical philosophers were a thriving symbol of the Greek quest for links between thought and action, between the pursuit of truth and the arts of persuasion. For us, “sophist” describes a person given to clever but specious reasoning. But originally a Sophist (from the Greek
sophia
, wisdom; or from
sophizesthai
, making a profession of being clever) was simply a wise man skilled in some special way. In the fifth century
B.C.
, the Great Age of classic Greece, a Sophist was a teacher who traveled about giving instructions in successful living. The Sophists were paid for their services, and some, like Gorgias, did very well for themselves. Plato (in his
Protagoras, Phaedrus
, and
Gorgias
) and others who were unsympathetic to their pragmatic approach to life treat them as an errant school of philosophy or, rather, of antiphilosophy. But they were a varied lot who simply shared a suspicion of absolutes and ultimates, of the pursuit of Truth and Virtue, of which Plato was the brilliant exponent. They were more interested in what they called successful living, in the accommodations of community, than in the Platonic Ideas.

By ancient repute, Protagoras (c.485–c.410
B.C.
) was the first Sophist. A friend of Pericles, he prospered and attained wealth and eminence by his fees from teaching. When Athens founded a colony at Thurii in 444, he was given the task of drawing up its laws. He professed to teach
arete
(honor or nobility), which some said was simply the technique of successful living. He is best remembered for his motto “Man is the measure of all things.” He and his fellow Sophists were impressed that different nations had different rules even about sacred matters like marriage and burial. They concluded that most morals were conventional. Therefore, they preached, since morals were relative and successful living was the important thing, all men should defer to the morals of their community. This also implied that all knowledge was relative and no science could be universal. So Protagoras ridiculed the philosophic speculations of Socrates and Plato about what was the “real” world. Nevertheless Protagoras himself did write a book,
On the Gods
, which questioned the gods’ existence. His books were publicly burned, and he was expelled from Athens.

But paradox plagued the Sophists and others who claimed that they could improve society by improving its techniques of persuasion. It seems that Protagoras had instructed a young man in rhetoric, with the understanding that he should be paid his tuition fees only if the young man won his first lawsuit. Unfortunately the ungrateful young man’s first lawsuit was the one that Protagoras had to bring to recover his fees.

Gorgias, pioneer Sophist of another breed, focused less on philosophy than on oratory, and made the art of rhetoric his key to successful living.
In cities newly experimenting with democratic institutions, it seemed that success depended on the ability to influence people. When the spoken word was the only medium that reached the whole community, rhetoric aimed to train pupils to defend any cause or its opposite. Platonic philosophers naturally ridiculed this as only the technique of “making the worse seem the better cause.” Like Dale Carnegie, Gorgias and his fellow Sophist teachers of rhetoric promised to teach their pupils how to influence people. They taught the arts of persuasion but not the techniques of discovering virtue. To show the superior importance of the powers of persuasion, Gorgias once told how his brother, a physician, saw that his patient needed a particular operation. But the patient would not agree to the operation until Gorgias used his rhetorical powers.

Distrusting the philosophers’ pompous distinctions between the phenomenal world of everyday life and their own “real” world of Ideas, Gorgias countered with his satirical treatise “On That Which Is Not, or on Nature.” His three mock-philosophic propositions disposed of the private world of the philosophers. He said he had proven that nothing exists, that even if something existed no one could have knowledge of it, and finally, in the unlikely event that somebody did know, there was no way he could communicate it to others. But Gorgias was famous also for having his very own prose style. According to Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian in the first century
B.C.
, he was “the first to make use of figures of speech which were far-fetched and distinguished by artificiality: antithesis, isocolon, parison, homoeoteleuton, and others which then, because of the novelty of the devices, were thought worthy of praise, but now seem labored and ridiculous when used to excess.” His extravagant figures of speech came to be called the “Gorgianic figures,” symptoms of the strenuous effort to create an art of literary prose.

As a Sophist, Gorgias built his style and his system of rhetoric on the concept of “the opportune” (
to kairon
). The master of the art of rhetoric, Gorgias said, had the ability to defend any cause, and the worse the cause the better the test of the orator’s skill. In his
Encomium of Helen
he showed the flamboyant style that would influence his successor Isocrates as well as Thucydides. He had chosen this subject, he explained, because it was the orator’s duty not only to praise the praiseworthy but to defend the maligned. And who was more in need of such defense than Helen of Troy? She should not be blamed for abandoning her husband Menelaus and yielding to the handsome Paris, for she must have been the innocent victim of fate, the will of the gods. Or if not, she must have been overcome by force or by words or by the irresistible power of love. These exhausted the possibilities, and Gorgias, like a defense lawyer in a courtroom, showed that in every conceivable circumstance Helen was blameless.

In another rhetorical exercise Gorgias came to the rescue of a Greek hero whose honor, like Helen’s, needed rehabilitating. The melodramatic career of the much maligned Palamedes, who joined the expedition against Troy, had already been put on the stage by Aeschylus and Sophocles, and according to Gorgias, too, he was really a victim. His enemy the wily Ulysses had forged a letter from Priam offering Palamedes gold to betray the Greeks and then planted the gold in Palamedes’ tent. As a result the innocent Palamedes was stoned to death. So went Gorgias’s story. Gorgias, with tight lawyerly logic, argued that Palamedes could not have betrayed the Greeks, and even if he could have he would not have wanted to. Students learned these speeches to become familiar with the Gorgianic style and method of argument. If Gorgias could make Helen and Palamedes look good, what might not the arts of rhetoric accomplish for the lesser villains whom his pupils would defend in the Athenian courts? Unfortunately for Gorgias’s reputation, his style survives in Plato’s elegant parody in Agathon’s speech in the
Symposium
.

The rise of prose as a literary art was destined to have a deep influence on Western literature and education. The ancient prophet of humanism Isocrates (436–338
B.C.
), in the shadow of Plato, his eloquent opponent, has received less than his due. His style “survives” in his speeches for Helen and Palamedes. But Plato’s dazzling portrayal of Ideas and Absolutes has left us impatient with the prosaic arts of persuasion, the techniques of community that Isocrates practiced, taught, and defended. Yet the arts of rhetoric, the improvement of the arts of persuasion, would become the basis of humanistic education in the West for the next millennia.

While Plato and his Academy aimed to produce philosophers, Isocrates and his schools looked for the statesmen needed in his turbulent age. The ninety-seven years of Isocrates’ life stretched from the decline of the Periclean empire to the rise of the empire of Philip of Macedon. In 430
B.C.
when, for the first time in many years, Pericles was not reelected to the board of ten generals, he lost the power base from which he had led Athens. His death in 429
B.C.
and the collapse of the old empire left Athens in political limbo. Isocrates then grew up in the trying years of the Peloponnesian War (431–404
B.C.
), a time of plague in which two of Pericles’ sons died and the population was decimated, a time of broken peace treaties and bitter naval defeats. Athens’s domestic disorders ended in the seizure of power by the Thirty Tyrants, and their removal by a fragile democracy.