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Updated: June 9, 2025
It being the custom of the Muses' feast to draw lots, and those that were matched to propose curious questions to one another, Ammonius, fearing that two of the same profession might be matched together, ordered, without drawing lots, a geometrician to propose questions to a grammarian, and a master of music to a rhetorician.
The royal road to fame was now discovered; it was the regular practice of many afterwards to deliver their discourses at the festival; Hippias the rhetorician was on his own ground there; but Prodicus came from Ceos, Anaximenes from Chios, Polus from Agrigentum; and a rapid fame it brought, to them and many others.
And what reflection would conclude, a little examination will confirm. The mistake has, doubtless, grown out of a misconception of the nature of eloquence itself. If eloquence were all figure even if it were, in any considerable degree, mere figure then the tawdriest rhetorician would be the greatest orator. But it is not so.
But he had still graver defects for a professor who wants to get on: he was not a schemer, and he could not make the most of himself. It is quite possible that he did not possess the qualities which just then pleased the pagan public in a rhetorician. The importance that the ancients attached to physical advantages in an orator is well known.
When I have any leisure, I amuse myself with my papers. He describes a certain journey of his from Rome to Brundusium with great pleasantry. Having left mighty Rome, Aricia received me in but a middling inn: Heliodorus the rhetorician, most learned in the Greek language, was my fellow-traveller: thence we proceeded to Forum-Appi, stuffed with sailors and surly landlords.
If, in the brief talks he had with the young rhetorician, he was able to gather anything of his character, he could not have formed a very favourable opinion of it.
Howson, Dean of Chester, wrote thus in his diary: "One good bit that the emptying Christianity of dogma would perish it, like Charlemagne's face when exhumed." It was a striking simile, and if well worked out by a rhetorician, say of Dr. Liddon's type, it might have powerfully clinched some great argument for the necessary place of dogma in Christian theology.
The stories of professors and teachers had meant little until he knew at first hand the lentil suppers and brilliant talking at the house of Taurus, the ethical discussions with Peregrinus in his hovel on the outskirts of the city, and, most of all, the generous and ennobling hospitality, in his city house and villas, of the millionaire rhetorician, Herodes Atticus.
Though neither a great statesman nor philosopher in himself, Isocrates constitutes an epoch as a rhetorician or artist of language.
Ovid was a trained rhetorician and an accomplished man of the world before he began to write poetry; that, in spite of his worldliness and his glittering rhetoric, he has so much of feeling and charm, is the highest proof of his real greatness as a poet. But this feeling and charm are the growth of more mature years. In his early poetry there is no passion and little sentiment.
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