Those who are brought up on such a diet can no more attain to wisdom than
a kitchen scullion can attain to a keen sense of smell or avoid stinking
of the grease. With your indulgence, I will speak out: you--teachers
--are chiefly responsible for the decay of oratory. With your well
modulated and empty tones you have so labored for rhetorical effect that
the body of your speech has lost its vigor and died. Young men did not
learn set speeches in the days when Sophocles and Euripides were
searching for words in which to express themselves. In the days when
Pindar and the nine lyric poets feared to attempt Homeric verse there was
no private tutor to stifle budding genius. I need not cite the poets for
evidence, for I do not find that either Plato or Demosthenes was given
to this kind of exercise. A dignified and, if I may say it, a chaste,
style, is neither elaborate nor loaded with ornament; it rises supreme by
its own natural purity. This windy and high-sounding bombast, a recent
immigrant to Athens, from Asia, touched with its breath the aspiring
minds of youth, with the effect of some pestilential planet, and as soon
as the tradition of the past was broken, eloquence halted and was
stricken dumb. Since that, who has attained to the sublimity of
Thucydides, who rivalled the fame of Hyperides? Not a single poem
has glowed with a healthy color, but all of them, as though nourished
on the same diet, lacked the strength to live to old age. Painting
also suffered the same fate when the presumption of the Egyptians
"commercialized" that incomparable art. (I was holding forth along these
lines one day, when Agamemnon came up to us and scanned with a curious
eye a person to whom the audience was listening so closely.)