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Show HANDBOOK FOR TEACHERS OF INTERPRETATION 2 come to us in dialogue-the spoken word. Noone could receive be crowned in the games; and sports, or in any contest of physical prowess, unless he should also be tested through speech, honors or demonstrate the mental status of the candidate. During the thousand years of intellectual evolution which prepared for the golden age of Greece and which gave birth to Socrates and Plato, to '.Aristotle and Demosthenes, Aeschylus and Euripides, Pericles and Solon, education consisted largely of reciting Homer and the classics. But even before Greece rose prophets spoke before priests to intellectual heights, poets and and kings of their welfare and woe. We know not if Lamech gave the first recorded speech to more than Adam and Zillah/ but we have evidence that the spoken words of Isaiah preceded Pericles by six generations. Spoken language had developed to such a degree five hundred years before Christ, that Corax founded a system of ora tory in ancient Syracuse. He taught his five divisions of speech, proem, narration, argument, subsidiary remarks, and peroration. Greece. The school of oratory which Isocrates founded lasted nine hundred years. He took more years to refine his panegyric on the Persian In an age when than Alexander took to conquer all Asia. money was worth many times its present value? Isocrates received war two hundred and fifty dollars for each student, and had as many as one hundred pupils in a class. The King of Cyprus paid him twenty a single oration. Demosthenes, Cicero, and others of the ancient teachers of speech grew wealthy from their teaching. Teaching speech was. a more lucrative profession 2500 thousand dollars for years ago than it is now. Then came the deliberate oratory of Demosthenes, who combined, perfected, and built upon the work of the earlier teachers of oratory, so that "without great natural gifts, good voice, or commanding presence, ornament or philosophic generalization, pathos or wit," he exemplified the greatest results ever attained in his art. He "recited with pebbles in his mouth in order to overcome stammering, de claimed while running or walking up a hill to get breath control, and 2 He borrowed something from practiced ,gesture before a mirror." 1 2 Gen. IV, 23-24. Sears, History of Oratory-Scott, Foresman and' C0. |
