Place the words thus:—­

“Potuisse superari ab aliquo Syro aut Deliaco.”

Do you not see that by making this slight change in the order of the words, the very same words (though the sense remains as it was before) lose all their effect the moment they are disjoined from those which were best suited to them?

Or if you take any carelessly-constructed sentence of any unpolished orator, and reduce it into proper shape, by making a slight alteration in the order of his words, then that will be made harmonious which was before loose and unmethodical Come now, take a sentence from the speech of Gracchus before the censors:—­

“Obesse non potest, quin ejusdem hominis sit, probos improbare, qui improbos probet.”

How much better would it have been if he had said,

“Quin ejusdem hominis sit, qui improbos probet, probos improbare!”

No one ever had any objection to speaking in this manner; and no one was ever able to do so who did not do it.  But those who have spoken in a different manner have not been able to arrive at this excellence.  And so on a sudden they have set up for orators of the Attic school.  As if Demosthenes was a man of Tralles; but even his thunderbolts would not have shone so if they had not been pointed by rhythm.

LXXI.  But if there be any one who prefers a loose style of oratory, let him cultivate it; keeping in view this principle,—­if any one were to take to pieces the shield of Phidias, he would destroy the beauty of the collective arrangement, not the exquisite workmanship of each fragment:  and as in Thucydides I only miss the roundness of his periods; all the graces of style are there.  But these men, when they compose a loose oration, in which there is no matter, and no expression which is not a low one, appear to me to be taking to pieces, not a shield, but, as the proverb says, (which, though but a low one, is still very apt,) only a broom.  And in order that there may be no mistake as to their contempt of this style which I am praising, let them write something either in the style of Isocrates, or in that which Aeschines or Demosthenes employs, and then I will believe that they have not shrunk from this style out of despair of being able to arrive at it, but that they have avoided it deliberately on account of their bad opinion of it:  or else I will find a man myself who may be willing to be bound by this condition,—­either to say or write, in whichever language you please, in the style which those men prefer.  For it is easier to disunite what is connected than to connect what is disjointedly strung together.