Alcidamas


Alcidamas, of Elaea, in Aeolis, was a Greek sophist and rhetorician, who flourished in the 4th century BC.

Life

He was the pupil and successor of Gorgias and taught at Athens at the same time as Isocrates, to whom he was a rival and opponent. We possess two declamations under his name: On Sophists, directed against Isocrates and setting forth the superiority of extempore over written speeches ; Odysseus in which Odysseus accuses Palamedes of treachery during the siege of Troy.
According to Alcidamas, the highest aim of the orator was the power of speaking extempore on every conceivable subject. Aristotle criticizes his writings as characterized by pomposity of style and an extravagant use of poetical epithets and compounds and far-fetched metaphors.
Of other works only fragments and the titles have survived: Messeniakos, advocating the freedom of the Messenians and containing the sentiment that "God has left all men free; nature has made no man a slave"; a Eulogy of Death, in consideration of the wide extent of human sufferings; a Techne or instruction-book in the art
of rhetoric; and a Phusikos logos. Lastly, his Mouseion seems to have contained the narrative of the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, of which the version that has survived is the work of a grammarian in the time of Hadrian, based on Alcidamas. This hypothesis of the contents of the Mouseion, originally suggested by Nietzsche & 28 ), appears to have been confirmed by three papyrus findsone 3rd century BC, one 2nd century BC and one 2nd or 3rd century AD.