their shields together they pushed, they fought, they slew, they
fell.”[1] And the words of Eurylochus in the _Odyssey_--

“We passed at thy command the woodland’s shade;
We found a stately hall built in a mountain glade.”[2]

Words thus severed from one another without the intervention of stops
give a lively impression of one who through distress of mind at once
halts and hurries in his speech. And this is what Homer has expressed by
using the figure _Asyndeton_.

[Footnote 1: Xen. _Hel._ iv. 3. 19.]

[Footnote 2: _Od._ x. 251.]


XX

But nothing is so conducive to energy as a combination of different
figures, when two or three uniting their resources mutually contribute
to the vigour, the cogency, and the beauty of a speech. So Demosthenes
in his speech against Meidias repeats the same words and breaks up his
sentences in one lively descriptive passage: “He who receives a blow is
hurt in many ways which he could not even describe to another, by
gesture, by look, by tone.”

2
Then, to vary the movement of his speech, and prevent it from standing
still (for stillness produces rest, but passion requires a certain
disorder of language, imitating the agitation and commotion of the