all, and whether it is not by that that rhythm is produced,
and those things which I have called the forms and light of a speech,
and which, as I have said, the Greeks call [Greek: schaemata]. But
that which is pleasant when uttered by the voice, and that which is
made perfect by careful regulation, and brilliant by the nature of the
words employed, are not one and the same thing, although they are both
akin to rhythm, because each is perfect of itself; but an arrangement
differs from both, and is wholly dependent on the dignity or sweetness
of the language employed.

These are the main questions which arise out of an inquiry into the
nature of oratory.

LV. It is, then, not hard to know that there is a certain rhythm in a
speech: for the senses decide that. And it is absurd not to admit an
evident fact, merely because we cannot find out why it happens. And
verse itself was not invented by _a priori_ reasoning, but by nature
and the senses, and these last were taught by carefully digested
reason what was the fact; and accordingly it was the careful noticing
and observation of nature which produced art.

But in verses the matter is more evident. For although there are some
kinds of verse which, if they be not chanted, appear but little to
differ from prose; and this is especially the case in all the very
best of those poets who are called [Greek: lyriloi] by the Greeks;
for when you have stripped them of the singing, the language remains
almost naked. And some of our countrymen are like them. Like that line
in Thyestes:--

"Quemnam te esse dicam, qui tarda in senectute" ...

And so on; for except when the flute-player is at hand to accompany
them, those verses are very like prose. But the iambics of the common
poets are, on account of their likeness to ordinary conversation, very
often in such a very low style, that sometimes it is hardly possible
to discover any metre, or even rhythm in them. And it may easily be
understood that there is more difficulty in discovering the rhythm in
an oration than in verses.

Altogether there are two things which season oratory--the sweetness of
the language, and the sweetness of the rhythm. In the language is the
material, and in the rhythm the polish. But, as in other things,
the older inventions are the children of necessity rather than of
pleasure; so also has it happened in this, that oratory was for many
ages naked and unpolished, aiming only at expressing the meaning
con