er,
is a great fault, but we do not notice it, nor do we hear what we say
ourselves;) and as for iambics, whether regular or Hipponactean, those
we can scarcely avoid, for our common conversation often consists of
iambics. But still the hearer easily recognises those verses, for they
are the most usual ones. But at times we unintentionally let fall
others which are less usual, but which still are verses; and that is a
faulty style of oratory, and one which requires to be guarded against
with great care.

Hieronymus, a Peripatetic of the highest character, out of all the
numerous compositions of Isocrates, picked out about thirty verses,
chiefly iambics, but some also anapaests. And what can be worse?
Though in picking them out he acted in an unfair manner, for he took
away sometimes the first syllable in the first word of a sentence; and
again, he sometimes added to the last word the first syllable of the
following sentence. And in this way he made that sort of anapaest which
is called the Aristophanic anapaest. And such accidents as these
cannot be guarded against, nor do they signify. But still this critic,
in the very passage in which he finds this fault with him, (as I
noticed when I was examining his work very closely,) himself makes
an iambic without knowing it. This, then, may be considered as an
established point, that there is rhythm also in prose, and that
oratorical is the same as the poetical rhythm.

LVII. It remains, therefore, for us to consider what rhythm occurs
most naturally in a well-arranged oration. For some people think that
it is the iambic rhythm, because that is the most like a speech,
on which account it happens that it is most frequently employed in
fables, because of its resemblance to reality--because the dactylic
hexameter rhythm is better suited to a lofty and magniloquent subject
But Ephorus himself, an inconsiderable orator, though coming from an
excellent school, inclines to the paeon, or dactyl, but avoids the
spondee and trochee. For because the paeon has three short syllables
and the dactyl two, he thinks that the words come more trippingly
off on account of the shortness and rapidity of utterance of the
syllables; and that a contrary effect is produced by the spondee and
trochee, because the one consists of long syllables and the other of
short ones; so that a speech made up of the one is too much hurried,
it made up of the other is too slow; and neither is well, regulated.
But