effected while he is preparing for it.2 Accordingly the proper use of this figure is in dealing with some urgent crisis which will not allow the writer to linger, but compels him to make a rapid change from one person to another. So in Hecataeus: "Now Ceyx took this in dudgeon, and straightway bade the children of Heracles to depart. 'Behold, I can give you no help; lest, therefore, ye perish yourselves and bring hurt upon me also, get ye forth into some other land.'"3 There is a different use of the change of persons in the speech of Demosthenes against Aristogeiton, which places before us the quick turns of violent emotion. "Is there none to be found among you," he asks, "who even feels indignation at the outrageous conduct of a loathsome and shameless wretch who,—vilest of men, when you were debarred from freedom of speech, not by barriers or by doors, which might indeed be opened,"[1] etc. Thus in the midst of a half-expressed thought he makes a quick change of front, and having almost in his anger torn one word into two persons, "who, vilest of men," etc., he then breaks off his address to Aristogeiton, and seems to leave him, nevertheless, by the passion of his utterance, rousing all the more the attention of the court.4 The same feature may be observed in a speech of Penelope's—
- ↑ c. Aristog. i. 27.
