his sentences can be imagined to have been delivered with a smile; and something
like ferocity is generally not far below the surface. Pathos is seldom in him
unmixed with sterner qualities, and is usually lost in indignation. But of
almost every other variety of tone he has a complete command. The essential
parts of his reasoning (even when it is logically or morally defective) are
couched, as a rule, in a forcible and cogent form;[12] and he has a striking
power of close, sustained, and at the same time lucid argumentation. His matter
is commonly disposed with such skill that each topic occurs where it will tell
most powerfully; and while one portion of a speech affords relief to another
(where relief is needed, and particularly in the longer orations) all alike bear
on the main issue or strengthen the orator's position with his audience.
Historical allusions are not (as they often are by Aeschines and Isocrates)
enlarged out of proportion to their importance, but are limited to what is
necessary, in order to illustrate the orator's point or drive his lesson home.
Add to these qualities his combination of political idealism with absolute
mastery of minute detail; the intensity of his appeal to the moral sense and
patriotism of his hearers; the impressiveness of his denunciation of political
wrong; the vividness of his narrative, the rapid succession of his impassioned
phrases, and some part of the secret of his power will be explained. For the
rest, while there is in his writing every degree of fullness or brevity, there
is no waste of words, no 'fine language' out of place. His language, indeed, is
ordinarily simple--sometimes even colloquial; though in the arrangement of his
words in their most telling order he shows consummate art, and his metaphors are
often bold and sometimes even violent. In the use of the 'figures of speech' he
excels; above all, in the use of antitheses (whether for the purpose of vivid
contrast or of precise logical expression), and of the rhetorical question, used
now in indignation, now in irony, now in triumphant conclusion of an argument:
and at times there are master-strokes of genius, which defy all analysis, such
as the great appeal to the men of Marathon in the Speech on the Crown.[13] He
does not as a rule (and this is particularly true of the Speech on the Crown)