private society. Every possessor of a copy was a centre from which the ideas would reach the members of his own circle. And there is good evidence that, in the fourth century B.C., the circulation of popular writings throughout the Hellenic world was both wide and rapid. The copying-industry, in the Greece of that age, doubtless fell far short of the dimensions to which the labour of cultivated slaves (the literati) afterwards raised it at Rome—where we hear of Augustus, for instance, confiscating no fewer than two thousand copies of a single work—the pseudo-Sibylline books. But it was still amply sufficient to warrant a general comparison, in the sense just defined, between the influence of such a writer as Isocrates, and that of a modern journalist.
We have hitherto spoken only of the written rhetoric, in which the form of a speech was merely a literary fiction, like that adopted—in imitation of Isocrates—by Milton, when he chose to couch his Areopagitica in the form of a speech addressed to the Lords and Commons of England. But in passing, we should note that the actually spoken rhetoric of antiquity—especially of Greece—bore a certain analogy to the more elaborate efforts of journalism. This depends on the fact that ancient usage fully recognised, and generally expected, careful premeditation; while the speaker, conscious of the demand for excellence of form, usually aimed at investing his speech with permanent literary value. Demosthenes and Cicero are both witnesses to this: Cicero, doubtless, piqued himself on a faculty of
