2
The regular sequence here would have been: “Ionians, now is the time for
you to endure a little hardship; for a hair’s breadth will now decide
our destiny.” But the Phocaean transposes the title “Ionians,” rushing
at once to the subject of alarm, as though in the terror of the moment
he had forgotten the usual address to his audience. Moreover, he inverts
the logical order of his thoughts, and instead of beginning with the
necessity for exertion, which is the point he wishes to urge upon them,
he first gives them the reason for that necessity in the words, “a
hair’s breadth now decides our destiny,” so that his words seem
unpremeditated, and forced upon him by the crisis.

3
Thucydides surpasses all other writers in the bold use of this figure,
even breaking up sentences which are by their nature absolutely one and
indivisible. But nowhere do we find it so unsparingly employed as in
Demosthenes, who though not so daring in his manner of using it as the
elder writer is very happy in giving to his speeches by frequent
transpositions the lively air of unstudied debate. Moreover, he drags,
as it were, his audience with him into the perils of a long inverted
clause.

4
He often begins to say something, then leaves the thought in suspense,
meanwhile thrusting in between, in a position apparently foreign and
unnatural, some extraneous matters, one upon another, and having thus
made his hearers fear lest the whole discourse should break down, and
forced them into eager sympathy with the danger of the speaker, when he
is nearly at the end of a period he adds just at the right moment,
_i.e._ when it is least expected, the point which they have been waiting