Having in his Panegyrical Oration set himself to prove that the Athenian
state has surpassed that of Sparta in her services to Hellas, he starts
off at the very outset with these words: “Such is the power of language
that it can extenuate what is great, and lend greatness to what is
little, give freshness to what is antiquated, and describe what is
recent so that it seems to be of the past.”[2] Come, Isocrates (it might
be asked), is it thus that you are going to tamper with the facts about
Sparta and Athens? This flourish about the power of language is like a
signal hung out to warn his audience not to believe him.

[Footnote 2: Paneg. 8.]

3
We may repeat here what we said about figures, and say that the
hyperbole is then most effective when it appears in disguise.[3] And
this effect is produced when a writer, impelled by strong feeling,
speaks in the accents of some tremendous crisis; as Thucydides does in
describing the massacre in Sicily. “The Syracusans,” he says, “went down
after them, and slew those especially who were in the river, and the
water was at once defiled, yet still they went on drinking it, though
mingled with mud and gore, most of them even fighting for it.”[4] The
drinking of mud and gore, and even the fighting for it, is made credible
by the awful horror of the scene described.

[Footnote 3: xvii. 1.]

[Footnote 4: Thuc. vii. 84.]

4
Similarly Herodotus on those who fell at Thermopylae: “Here as they