its fuel now here, now there.

5
Such points, however, I resign to your more competent judgment.

To resume, then, the high-strung sublimity of Demosthenes is appropriate
to all cases where it is desired to exaggerate, or to rouse some
vehement emotion, and generally when we want to carry away our audience
with us. We must employ the diffusive style, on the other hand, when we
wish to overpower them with a flood of language. It is suitable, for
example, to familiar topics, and to perorations in most cases, and to
digressions, and to all descriptive and declamatory passages, and in
dealing with history or natural science, and in numerous other cases.


XIII

To return, however, to Plato: how grand he can be with all that gentle
and noiseless flow of eloquence you will be reminded by this
characteristic passage, which you have read in his _Republic_: “They,
therefore, who have no knowledge of wisdom and virtue, whose lives are
passed in feasting and similar joys, are borne downwards, as is but
natural, and in this region they wander all their lives; but they never
lifted up their eyes nor were borne upwards to the true world above, nor
ever tasted of pleasure abiding and unalloyed; but like beasts they ever
look downwards, and their heads are bent to the ground, or rather to the
table; they feed full their bellies and their lusts, and longing ever
more and more for such things they kick and gore one another with horns
and hoofs of iron, and slay one another in their insatiable desires.”[1]