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that the students who have taken form under his instruction and are able to pattern after him will, from the outset, show in their speaking a degree of grace and charm which is not found in others. When all of these requisites are found together, then the devotees of philosophy will achieve complete success; but according as any one of the things which I have mentioned is lacking, to this extent must their disciples of necessity fall below the mark.
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Now as for the sophists who have lately sprung up and have very recently embraced these pretensions,The sophist before mentioned. The teaching of the older sophists is discussed in Antidosis. even though they flourish at the moment, they will all, I am sure, come round to this position. But there remain to be considered those who lived before our time and did not scruple to write the so-called arts of oratory.Especially the first to write such treatises, Corax and Tisias of Syracuse. τέχνη, like ars in Latin, was the accepted term for a treatise on rhetoric. These must not be dismissed without rebuke, since they professed to teach how to conduct law-suits, picking out the most discredited of terms,Again and again Isocrates expresses his repugnance to this kind of oratory, and in general it was in bad odor. The precepts of Corax (Crow), for example, were called “the bad eggs of the bad Corax.” which the enemies, not the champions, of this discipline might have been expected to employ—
