Selections from the Attic Orators Author:Richard Claverhouse Jebb This edition [the 1888 revision of its 1880 original] was designed by Jebb as a companion to his two volume monograph Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeus [1876]. The selection was meticulously made, as he emphasised in his Preface, not merely as 'samples from a number of writers' but as illustration of the 'successive steps in the process by w... more »hich a language of most elastic resource was gradually adapted to a certain set of purposes'. For the authors represented, with their varied styles, serve to bridge the obvious gap that lies between the prose of Gorgias and Thucydides and that of Demosthenes. At the same time the passages are specifically selected for their intrinsic social and historical interest. 'Few authors are more helpful than the orators, if we desire to see the old Greeks as they lived and moved, to enter into the spirit of their daily actions and thoughts; few, again, present more vivid or instructive pictures of Greek society in its larger political aspects.' That the edition was still in regular use up to almost a hundred years later, says much of its quality. This reissue carries an extensive new introduction in which Pat Easterling assesses Jebb's scholarship in general and Michael Edwards writes more specifically about his work on the Attic Orators.« less