Deliberative Oratory as an art—moulded on the Forensic and Epideictic

While a literary prose was being shaped, and while, on the other hand, a series of forensic writers were perfecting a series of types in their own branch, no artistic development that can be traced with the like clearness had been going forward in deliberative oratory. When, with Demosthenes and his contemporaries, deliberative oratory first comes clearly into view, its masters are found to owe their several excellences as artists to models taken from the other two departments, to a Thucydides or an Isokrates, to a Lysias or an Isaeos. Not only have we no evidence of their obligation, in point of art, to previous speakers in the same kind, but we are able to see for ourselves that the limits of such obligation would necessarily have been narrow. Now this is the reverse of what might have been anticipated. The ekklesia, considering its place in the democracy, might have been expected to be the great school, no less than the great field, of oratory. Further, the popular Dialectic, which, more than anything else, prepared the Athenian taste for artistic speaking, was far more favourable to the deliberative than to the forensic branch.