[Footnote 1: _Il._ xv. 346.]

2
Accordingly the proper use of this figure is in dealing with some urgent
crisis which will not allow the writer to linger, but compels him to
make a rapid change from one person to another. So in Hecataeus: “Now
Ceyx took this in dudgeon, and straightway bade the children of Heracles
to depart. ‘Behold, I can give you no help; lest, therefore, ye perish
yourselves and bring hurt upon me also, get ye forth into some other
land.’”

3
There is a different use of the change of persons in the speech of
Demosthenes against Aristogeiton, which places before us the quick turns
of violent emotion. “Is there none to be found among you,” he asks, “who
even feels indignation at the outrageous conduct of a loathsome and
shameless wretch who,--vilest of men, when you were debarred from
freedom of speech, not by barriers or by doors, which might indeed be
opened,”[2] etc. Thus in the midst of a half-expressed thought he makes
a quick change of front, and having almost in his anger torn one word
into two persons, “who, vilest of men,” etc., he then breaks off his
address to Aristogeiton, and seems to leave him, nevertheless, by the
passion of his utterance, rousing all the more the attention of the
court.

[Footnote 2: _c. Aristog._ i. 27.]

4
The same feature may be observed in a speech of Penelope’s--