A History of Classical Greek Literature Author:Archibald Henry Sayce, John Pentland Mahaffy Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHY AND THE RISE OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION IN THE FIFTH CENTURY—THE SOPHISTS AND SOCRATES. § 329. We now proceed to cons... more »ider the speculations and the teaching of Greek philosophy—a large and special study— so far as they had a direct influence upon letters. There was a time when Greek philosophy assumed the garb of epic poetry, and though very novel in subject, did not modify the form which it adopted, or create a new kind or species in literature. I have mentioned Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles as the most remarkable representatives of this epoch in Greek thought. There came also a time when prose had long been the received organ for earnest thinking, when philosophy, with equal indifference about the form, used that received organ without adding any other feature to literature than seriousness of tone and the introduction of some technical terms. Such, for example, was the prose of Chrysip- pus and of Aristotle. But at the crisis in the Greek mind which we have reached with the middle of the fifth century—a period of seething restlessness in politics and in speculation, of scepticism in religion, of vagueness in the yet untormed theory of morals—philosophy must necessarily become an important thread in the variegated tissue which the historian seeks to unravel. The rise of a new character in Greek literature produced by these causes must of course have been gradual, and marked off by no gap of time from what preceded, and we might expect to find even contemporaries variously affected by it— some adhering to the old, and some to the new ideas. But bya peculiar good fortune we still have two remarkable pairs of writers, contemporaneous in most of their life, who illustrate the wide gap in style and in sentiment which maybe produced ...« less