In section III, 12, of the Rhetoric, Aristotle discusses the style of practical oratory, λέξις ἀγωνιστική, as opposed to the literary style, λέξις γραφική. While in the latter a compact construction is necessary, the former uses an asyndetic composition which gives it the character of natural speech and a dramatic potential conformable to ὑπόκρισις, the artistic delivery. As far as Aristotle deals with stylistic composition in a larger sense (up to the beginning of ch. 4), his comments seem clear. In chapter 4 he passes to a more definite plane of syntactical notions: .

The interpretation of this passage offers more than one difficulty, contained both in its first section which ends with the example and in its last sentence.

1. The standard translation of the first section is as follows: ‘The asyndeton has a further peculiarity: in an equal space of time many things appear to be said. Just as the connective particle turns a number of statements into one, so its omission does the opposite: turns a single statement into many. Thus an asyndeton produces amplification, e.g. I came, I talked (with him), I entreated (him).’

Ex Propertio semper aliquid novi. It is with novelties, to speak relatively, that I am concerned; but first a glance around and backwards.

If one wishes to separate Propertius' editors into conservative sheep and radical goats, it is tempting to take as a criterion their attitude towards the problem of (alleged) disorder of verses in his MSS.—the Properzproblem as some call it κατ'ἐξοχήν——which arises chiefly, though not exclusively, in his second book. An ‘unvereinbare Divergenz’ is held by Ulrich Knoche to divide the troop of critics who have in general adhered to the verse order of the MSS. from those others, Housman, Postgate, and Richmond among them, who have tended to deal with the vulgate as Omar would have dealt with the universe—first shattering to bits and then remoulding nearer each to his own heart's desire; a practice inaugurated by Scaliger during the six or seven weeks of convalescence which produced (along with editions of Catullus and Tibullus) the portentously transposed Propertius of 1577.

During the course of some work on the Parmenides, I found I was coming to a conclusion about the First Part of the dialogue which was at variance with what I supposed to be the traditional and commonly accepted view. It therefore seemed advisable to ascertain precisely what this traditional view was, and what were the arguments in favour of it; and the contents of this paper represent some part of an attempt to do this. As it happens, they also tend to make the writer appear as one playing the part of a Zeno to his own Parmenides, showing that even stranger results follow from the hypotheses of those from whom he differs than from his own.

It is now nearly two and a half years since Mr Lobel published the fragment which he has called ‘as surprising as any recovered from the soil of Egypt’. Since then a considerable literature has grown up around the fragment. Mr Lobel with caution and Professor Page with more conviction have attributed the fragment to early Attic tragedy. But the other scholars who have written on the subject have with striking unanimity assigned it to the tragedy of the Hellenistic age, some of them with what seems to me a surprising self-assurance.

Arguments from the nature of the subject-matter seem to give little help in reaching a decision. If one party can adduce the Persae of Aeschylus and the Phoenissae and the Capture of Miletus of Phrynichus, the other can retort with the Themistocles of Mausolus and the Cassandreis of Lycophron. Leaving subject-matter aside, three main types of evidence have been brought forward, that of the style, that of the language and that of the metre. Any inference about the date based solely on the style must rest on foundations that are at least partially subjective.

In their speech dissuading the Athenians from the Corcyraean alliance the Corinthians are represented by Thucydides (1, 40,5) as saying:

The significance of this passage for Corinthian policy has often been noted, but its bearing on that of Sparta seems to have been ignored. The occasion to which allusion is made is evidently a formal congress of the Peloponnesian League; the language is explicit—the Peloponnesian cities are divided in their vote, Corinth does not record her vote against Athens, but speaks on her behalf. From the detailed account of the preliminaries of the Peloponnesian war we know the procedure of the League. A complainant first applied to Sparta (1, 67), the Spartan assembly voted (1, 87), and if its vote were favourable, the Spartan government summoned a congress of the allies (1, 119), whose vote was taken (1, 125). If this vote were also favourable, the League took action. The machinery was evidently so designed that Sparta could not be committed to a war without her prior consent, nor could she commit the League to a war without the agreement of the majority of its members.

The Cretan song of ‘Teacher John’ narrates in an epic manner the tragic history of the revolt against the Turks in Sphakia led by Dhaskaloyannis. The poem was composed by an illiterate cheese-maker, named Barba Pantzelios, and written down in 1786, only sixteen years after the outbreak of the rebellion. In dialect the poem is an interesting link between medieval poems such as the epic of Erotokritos and modern Cretan ballads, but regarded as an epic it is something far more interesting. It is not so much a link with Homer as a reminiscence of the epic lays behind Homer, the lays sung not by Demodocus and other royal protégés, but by village bards celebrating the exploits of local heroes.

The metre is the ‘political’ metre regularly employed in medieval and modern ballads. The language is good Cretan dialect with only a smattering of Turkish words, and only rarely a word to indicate that the author was a West Cretan. Pantzelios is no Homer but can hold his own with the best of the balladists, and it is astonishing how Homeric traits of which he could never have read reappear in his poem.