This was a kind of speaking in which the ancients used to take delight, even before the time of Isocrates; and especially Gorgias; in whose orations his very neatness generally produces an harmonious rhythm.  We too frequently employ this style; as in the fourth book of our impeachment of Verres:—­“Compare this peace with that war; the arrival of this praetor with the victory of that general; the debauched retinue of this man, with the unconquerable army of the other; the lust of this man with the continence of that one; and you will say that Syracuse was founded by the man who in reality took it; and was stormed by this one, who in reality received it in an admirable and settled condition.”

This sort of rhythm then must be well understood.

L. We must now explain that third kind of an harmonious and well-arranged speech, and say of what character it is; and what sort of ears those people have who do not understand its character, or indeed what there is in them that is like men at all, I do not know.  My ears delight in a well-turned and properly finished period of words, and they like conciseness, and disapprove of redundancy.  Why do I say my ears?  I have often seen a whole assembly raise a shout of approval at hearing a musical sentence.  For men’s ears expect that sentences shall be strung together of well-arranged words.  This was not the case in the time of the ancients.  And indeed it was nearly the only thing in which they were deficient:  for they selected their words carefully, and they gave utterance to dignified and sweet sounding ideas; but they paid little attention to arranging them or filling them up.  “This is what delights me,” one of them would say.  What are we to say if an old primitive picture of few colours delights some men more than this highly finished one?  Why, I suppose, the style which succeeds must be studied again; and this latter style repudiated.

People boast of the names of the ancients.  But antiquity carries authority with it in precedents, as old age does in the lives of individuals; and it has indeed very great weight with me myself.  Nor am I more inclined to demand from antiquity that which it has not, than to praise that which it has; especially as I consider what it has as of more importance than what it has not.  For there is more good in well chosen words and ideas in which they excel, than in the rounding off of phrases in which they fail.  It is after their time that the working up of the termination of a sentence has been introduced; which I think that those ancients would have employed, if it had been known and employed in their day; as since it has been introduced we see that all great orators have employed it.