Book 9
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He was the first to exact a fee of a hundred minae and the first to distinguish the tenses of verbs, to emphasize the importance of seizing the right moment, to institute contests in debating, and to teach rival pleaders the tricks of their trade. Furthermore, in his dialectic he neglected the meaning in favour of verbal quibbling, and he was the father of the whole tribe of eristical disputants now so much in evidence; insomuch that TimonFr. 47 D. too speaks of him asCf. Il. xv. 679. Protagoras, all mankind’s epitome, Cunning, I trow, to war with words.
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He too first introduced the method of discussion which is called Socratic. Again, as we learn from Plato in the Euthydemus,286 c. he was the first to use in discussion the argument of Antisthenes which strives to prove that contradiction is impossible, and the first to point out how to attack and refute any proposition laid down: so Artemidorus the dialectician in his treatise In Reply to Chrysippus. He too invented the shoulder-pad on which porters carry their burdens, so we are told by Aristotle in his treatise On Education; for he himself had been a porter, says Epicurus somewhere.Sc. in an epistle, Περὶ ἐπιτηδευμάτων, cf. Athen. viii. 354 c. This was how he was taken up by Democritus, who saw how skilfully his bundles of wood were tied. He was the first to mark off the parts of discourse into four, namely, wish, question, answer, commandThis answers roughly to the optative, the indicative, and the imperative.;
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others divide into seven parts, narration, question, answer, command, rehearsal, wish, summoning; these he called the basic forms of speech. Alcidamas made discourse fourfold, affirmation, negation, question, address.
