was delighted at a clever turn of speech, a surprising rhythm, or a
startling comparison. Literary study of style in occasional oratory must
have been extensive and extravagant at a very early date, to judge by the
rebukes of such practical speakers as Alcidamas. Moreover, such stylistic
artifice as was practiced and taught by Gorgias, Isocrates, and other
sophists crept into tragedy, says Norden, beginning with Agathon.[96] The
result was that with the poets style became as it had become with the
sophists, an end in itself. The epideictic orators became less orators and
more poets, and the poets cultivated less the characteristic vividness and
movement of poetic than those turns of style which began in oratory.

Thus it was very natural that the discussions of artistic prose in the
treatises of the later rhetoricians should be copiously illustrated by
quotations from the poets, and that the poets should, in turn, be
influenced in the direction of further sophistical niceties by the
rhetorical treatises on style, such as those of Demetrius and Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, who devoted whole treatises to style alone. The obsession
of style is well exemplified by a comparison of Dionysius and Longinus in
their discussion of Sappho's literary art. Longinus praises her passion,
and her masterful selection of images which realize it for the reader,
while Dionysius, no less enthusiastic, points out that in the ode which he
quotes there is not a single case of hiatus. Dionysius is here much the
more characteristic of his age, as he is in his belief that there is very
little difference indeed between prose and verse. Longinus, while showing
the relations of rhetoric and poetic, keeps the two apart; Dionysius draws
them together. To Dionysius the best prose is that which resembles verse
although not entirely in meter, and the best poetry that which resembles
beautiful prose. By this he means that the poet should use enjambment
freely and should vary the length and form of his clauses, so that the
sense should not uniformly conclude with the metrical line.[97] In this