rites of burial is to be publicly "sped on your way" by the State. And these turns of language lend dignity in no common measure to the thought. He takes the words in their naked simplicity and handles them as a musician, investing them with melody,–harmonising them, as it were,–by the use of periphrasis.3 So Xenophon: "Labour you regard as the guide to a pleasant life, and you have laid up in your souls the fairest and most soldier-like of all gifts: in praise is your delight, more than in anything else."[1] By saying, instead of "you are ready to labour," "you regard labour as the guide to a pleasant life," and by similarly expanding the rest of that passage, he gives to his eulogy a much wider and loftier range of sentiment. Let us add that inimitable phrase in Herodotus: "Those Scythians who pillaged the temple were smitten from heaven by a female malady."
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