the aims of the two being so very different. Plato and his followers looked down with more or less contempt on the half-philosophising of Isocrates. And at last the youthful Aristotle came forward as a champion, challenging and attacking the highly-reputed veteran. Aristotle is said to have parodied on this occasion a line of Euripides—
In silence leave barbarians to speak?
Never!”
and to have taken for his motto the words—
In silence leave Isocrates to speak?”
The acrimony of the allusion suggests to us the spirit in which he opened the controversy. He seems to have assailed the matter of the discourses of Isocrates, as being of a superficial and merely oratorical character, and also his theory of the art of rhetoric, and his mode of teaching it. The strictures of Aristotle were answered by Cephisodorus, one of the pupils of Isocrates, who wrote a defence of his master in four books. Both attack and reply have completely perished. Aristotle appears to have followed up his theoretical denunciation of Isocrates by the practical step of opening a school of Rhetoric in rivalry to his. What the success of this enterprise may have been is not recorded. There is no reason for supposing that the young Stagirite at all succeeded in impressing the Athenians at that time with his superior insight into the laws of Rhetoric. The real value and scientific
