are better now.’ What possible proof is there of this? The parapets we whitewash?
The roads which we repair? The fountains and the other nonsense? Look at the
statesmen who are responsible for these: some have risen from beggary to
opulence, or from obscurity to honour; some have made their private houses more
splendid than public buildings, and their wealth has increased at the same pace
as the fortunes of the state have declined.
(Olynthiac, 3, 23 ff.)Dionysius admires Demosthenes’ greater variation in clauses, sentence structure and
figurative arrangement. He is not tied to one manner or style. But above all it is the
end result of all these technical effects, the greater energy and vehemence of feeling,
that he admires. He goes on to say that while Isocrates puts him into a tranquil and
serious frame of mind, Demosthenes transports him through a whole series of
emotions.
Feeling and elevation are what Longinus illustrates in a short passage from
Demosthenes in which the orator seeks to assure the Athenians that they were right
to oppose Philip of Macedon at Chaeronea even though they were defeated.
Demosthenes is putting forward an argument in support of his policy. What was
the natural procedure for doing this? ‘You were not wrong, you who undertook
the struggle for the freedom of the Greeks, and you have a precedent for this here
at home. For those who fought at Marathon were not wrong, nor those at Salamis,
nor those at Plataea.’ But when, as though carried away by the inspiration of
Phoebus himself, he uttered his oath by the champions of Greece, ‘By those who
stood the shock at Marathon, it cannot be that you were wrong’, it would seem
that, by his use of this single figure of adjuration, which I here give the name of
apostrophe, he has deified his ancestors by suggesting that we ought to swear by
men who have died such deaths as we swear by gods; he has instilled into his
judges the spirit of the men who stood there in the forefront of the danger, and
has transformed the natural flow of his argument into a passage of transcendent
sublimity, endowing it with the passion and the power of conviction that arise from
unheard-of and extraordinary oaths. At the same time he has infused into the
minds of his audience words which act in some sort as an antidote and a remedy,
so that, uplifted by these eulogies, they come to feel just as proud of the war
against Philip as of the triumph at Marathon and Salamis.
(16)Longinus and Dionysius, both late products of the rhetorical tradition which they seek
to illuminate, help us to see that just as the great sculptures could not have come to
be without scientific study and technical mastery systematically acquired over a long
174 THE GREEKS