there is not a single production now extant which discovers any taste for
ornament, or seems to have been the effort of a real orator, before the
time of Pericles (whose name is prefixed to some orations which still
remain) and his cotemporary Thucydides; who flourished,--not in the
infancy of the State, but when it was arrived at its full maturity of
power.

"It is, however, supposed, that Pisistratus (who lived many years before)
together with Solon, who was something older, and Clisthenes, who survived
them both, were very able speakers for the age they lived in. But some
years after these, as may be collected from the Attic Annals, came the
above-mentioned Themistocles, who is said to have been as much
distinguished by his eloquence as by his political abilities;--and after
him the celebrated Pericles, who, though adorned with every kind of
excellence, was most admired for his talent of speaking. Cleon also (their
cotemporary) though a turbulent citizen, was allowed to be a tolerable
orator.

"These were immediately succeeded by Alcibiades, Critias, and Theramenes,
whose manner of speaking may be easily inferred from the writings of
Thucydides, who lived at the same time: their discourses were nervous and
stately, full of sententious remarks, and so excessively concise as to be
sometimes obscure. But as soon as the force of a regular and a well-
adjusted speech was understood, a sudden crowd of rhetoricians appeared,--
such as Gorgias the Leontine, Thrasymachus the Chalcedonian, Protagoras
the Abderite, and Hippias the Elean, who were all held in great esteem,--
with many others of the same age, who professed (it must be owned, rather
too arrogantly) to teach their scholars,--_how the worse might be made, by
the force of eloquence, to appear the better cause_. But these were openly
opposed by the famous Socrates, who, by an adroit method of arguing which