Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/497

475 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 475 are, indeed, plenty of long sentences in these authors, in which they show a power of bringing thoughts and observations into the right con- nexion with each other. But these long sentences appear as a heaping together of thoughts without any necessary rule or limit, such that if the author had known any further circumstances likely to support his argument, he might have added or incorporated those circumstances,* and not as a whole of which all the subordinate particulars were neces- sary integral parts. The only structure of sentences which was cultivated to any great extent at this period was that in which the different mem- bers are not related to one another as principal or subordinate but merely as consecutive sentences, i. e. the copulative, adversative, and disjunctive sentences ; t ail( l these were consistently and artfully carried out in all their parts. It is indeed very worthy of remark, how skilfully an orator like Antiphon arranged his thoughts so that they always produced those binary combinations of corresponding or opposed members ; and how laboriously he strove to exhibit on every side this symmetrical relation, and, like an architect, carried the symmetry through all the details of his work. To take an example, the orator has scarcely opened his mouth to speak on the murder of Herodes when he falls into a system of paral- lelisms such as we have just described : " Would that my oratorical skill and knowledge of affairs, judges, were equal to my unhappy condition and the misfortunes which I have suffered. As it is, however, I have more of the latter than I ought to have ; whereas the former fails me more than is expedient for me. For where I was in bodily peril on account of an unjust accusation, there my knowledge of affairs was of no avail ; and now that I have to save my life by a true statement of the case, I am injured by my inability to speak ;" and so forth. It is clear that this symmetrical structure of sentences must have had its origin in a very peculiar bias of mind ; namely, in the habitual pronencss to com- pare and discriminate, to place the different points of a subject in such connexion that their likeness or dissimilitude might appear in the most marked manner ; in a word, this mode of writing presumes that peculiar combination of ingenuity and shrewdness for which the old Athenians were so pre-eminently distinguished. At the same time it cannot be denied that the habit of speaking in this way had something misleading in it, and that this parallelism of the members of a sentence was often carried much farther than the natural conditions of thought would have prescribed ; especially as a mere formal play with sounds united itself discussed more at length when we come to Thucydides. f The sentences with tnei ( (vori^ov) — n. In general, this constitutes the avnx&uAvr, :■ + This is the Ua^ino; <ri^iff,^ of CiBcilius of CalftCte (Photiiu, Cod. '-'"'0), the concinnitas of Cicero.
 * This structure of sentences, which occurs principally in narrative, will lie