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 (Περὶ Σοφιστῶν), directed against Isocrates and setting forth the superiority of extempore over written speeches (a more recently discovered fragment of another speech against Isocrates is probably of later date);
Odysseus (perhaps spurious) 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
ex tempore on every conceivable subject.
Aristotle (
Rhet. iii. 3) 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 (a word invoking the
Muses) 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 (
Rheinisches Museum 25 (1870) & 28 (1873)), appears to have been confirmed by three papyrus findsone 3rd century BC (
Flinders Petrie Papyri, ed.
Mahaffy, 1891, pl. xxv.), one 2nd century BC (Basil Mandilaras, 'A new papyrus fragment of the
Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi'
Platon 42 (1990) 45–51) and one 2nd or 3rd century AD (University of Michigan pap. 2754: Winter, J. G., 'A New Fragment on the Life of Homer'
TAPA 56 (1925) 120–129 ). ==Notes==