Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/516

494 494 HISTORY OF THE the symmetrical structure which prevails in his speeches, in separating and contrasting the different ideas, in comparing and discriminating, in looking backwards and forwards at the same time, and so producing a sort of equilibrium both in the diction and in the thoughts. As we have already said, in speaking of Antiphon, this antithetical style is not mere mannerism ; it is a natural product of the acuteness of the people of Attica ; but at the same time it is not to be denied, that under the influence of the sophistical rhetoric it degenerated into a sort of mannerism ; and Thucydides himself is full of artifices of such a nature that we are sometimes at a loss whether we are to admire his refined dis- crimination, or wonder at his antique and affected ornaments, — especially when the outward graces of Isocola, Homceoteleuta, Parecheses, &c, are superadded to the real contrasts of thoughts and ideas.* On the other hand, Thucydides, even more than Antiphon, is free from all those irregularities of diction which proceed from passion or dissimulation ; he is conspicuous for a sort of equable tranquillity, which cannot be better described than by comparing it to that sublime serenity of soul which marks the features of all the gods and heroes sculptured by Phidias and his school. It is not an imperfection of language, it is rather a mark of dignity, which predominates in every expression, and which, even in the most perilous straits which necessarily called into play every passion and emotion — fear and anguish, indignation and hatred — even in these cases, bids the speaker maintain a tone of moderation and re- flexion, and, above all, constrains him to content himself with a plain and impressive statement of the affair which he has in hand. What passionate declamation a later rhetorician would have put into the mouths of the Theban and Platsean orators, when the latter are pleading for life and death against the former before the Spartans, and yet Thucydides intro- duces only one burst of emotion : " Have you not done a dreadful deed?"t " It will readily be imagined, on the slightest comparison between these speeches and those of Lysias, how strange this style and this eloquence — with its fulness of thoughts, its terse and nervous diction, and its con- nexions of sentences not to be understood without the closest attention — must have appeared to the Athenians, even at the time when the work Ix^vrts, tuXiyui uvguxrot iiriccnv i. £., "and thus those who with specious pretexts came here on an unjust imitation, will he sent away on good grounds without having effected their object." We have other examples in I. 77. 144 ; III. 38. 57. 82; IV. 108. The old rhetoricians often speak of these (r^/Aara rris Klhuis in Thucydides ; Dionysius thinks them ijaipukicuI-/!, puerilia. Compare Aulus Gellius, N. A., XVIII. 8. I" lias ol hiva il^yourh ; III. 66. There is a good deal more liveliness and cheer- fulness (probably intended to characterize the speaker) in the oration of Athenav goras, the leader of the democratic party at Syracuse. (Thucyd. VI. 38, 39.)
 * As when Thucydides says (IV. Gl) : «" t i-prix^yiroi ihs &$ir.oi