keenness, Persuasion sate upon his lips. So he charmed all ears and,
alone of all our orators, left his thrill behind him in his hearer's
minds." But even Pericles would not have possessed the persuasion and
charm of which Eupolis speaks merely owing to his conciseness or to his
keenness, or to both (for they are different attributes), unless he had
also possessed consummate oratorical power. In order to delight and
carry conviction an orator must have ample time and room allowed him,
for he alone can leave a thrill in his hearers' minds who plants his
weapon besides merely puncturing the skin. Again, see what another
comic poet writes of the same Pericles: "He lightened, he thundered, he
turned Hellas upside down." Such metaphors as thunder, lightning, and
chaos and confusion could not be used of abbreviated and compressed
oratory, but only of oratory on a sweeping scale, pitched in a lofty and
exalted key.

But, you say, the mean is the best. Quite so, but the mean is as much
neglected by those who fail to do justice to their subject as by those
who overdo it, by those who wear a bearing rein as by those who give
themselves their heads. And so you often hear the criticism that a
speech was "frigid and weak," just as you hear that another was
"overloaded and a mass of repetition." The one speaker is said to have
over-elaborated his subject, the other not to have risen to the
occasion. Both are at fault; one through weakness, the other through
too much strength, and the latter, though he may not show the more
refined intellect, certainly shows the more robust mind. When I say
this it must not be supposed that I am approving Homer's Thersites--the
man who was a torrent of words--but rather his Ulysses, whose "words
were like snow-flakes in winter," though at the same time I admire his
Menelaus, who spoke "Few words, but well to the point." Yet, if I had
to choose, I should prefer the speech that is like the winter snow-