Sir Richard C. Jebb, The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeos

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Simplicity.

Next, in contrast with the Sicilian school of rhetoric, Lysias is characterised by a general avoidance of ornamental figures. Such figures as occur are mostly of the kind which men use in daily life without rhetorical consciousness,—hyperbole, metaphor, prosopopoiïa and the like¹. As a rule, he expresses his meaning by ordinary words employed in their normal sense². His panegyrical speeches and his letters are said to have presented a few exceptions to this rule; but all his business-works, as Dionysios calls them—his speeches for the ekklesia and for the law-courts—are stamped with this simplicity. He seems, as his critic says, to speak like the ordinary man, while he is in fact the most consummate of artists³,—a prose poet who knows how to give an unobtrusive distinction to common language, and to bring out of it a quiet and peculiar music⁴. Isokrates had the same command of familiar words, but he was not content to seek effect by artistic harmonies of these. His ambition was to be ornate; and hence one of the differences remarked by Dionysios: Isokrates is sometimes vulgar⁵; Lysias never is. There is one kind of ornament, however, which Lysias uses largely, and in respect to which he deserts the character of the plain style. He delights in the artistic parallelism (or opposition) of clauses. This may be effected: (1) by simple correspondence of clauses in length (isokôlon); (2) by correspondence of word with word in meaning (antitheton proper); (3) by correspondence of word with word in sound (paromoion)⁶. Examples are very numerous both in the public and in the private speeches. This love of antithesis—shown on a larger scale in the terse periodic composition—is the one thing which sometimes blemishes the êthos in Lysias.