And since laws were not written before the time of Draco, it was doubly necessary that they should be cast in that fashion by which words are most durably impressed on the memory of the multitude.

Even on Solon's first appearance in public life, when he inspires the Athenians to prosecute the war with Megara, he addresses the passions of the crowd, not by an oration, but a poem; and in a subsequent period, when prose composition had become familiar, it was still in verse that Hipparchus communicated his moral apothegms.

The origin of prose in Greece is, therefore, doubly interesting as an epoch, not only in the intellectual, but also in the social state.

It is clear that it would not commence until a reading public was created; and until, amid the poetical many, had sprung up the grave and studious few.

Accordingly, philosophy, orally delivered, preceded prose composition--and Thales taught before Pherecydes wrote [185].