Chapter 34: Demosthenes and Hyperides

But if correctness were decided by number, not by true greatness, Hyperides would be better than Demosthenes in every point. He is, you see, able to create more voices than Demosthenes and he has more excellences, and he is just below the top in everything, like a competitor in the pentathlon, so that he is left behind all the others struggling in the competition for first prizes, but is first among the private amateurs.

2. Hyperides, in addition to imitating all the Demosthenian correctnesses (except, of course, for the way he puts things together), is too much taken with both the excellences and graces of Lysias. You see, he talks with simplicity when it is necessary and does not say everything consistently and in one tone, as Demosthenes does; his characterization has a pleasing and sweet quality, made pleasing by its simplicity; his urbanities are ineffable: a most politic sneer, good breeding, well trained irony, jokes neither unrefined nor ill-bred as in the Attic orators but placed fittingly, a dexterity at ridicule, much comic skill, and a spur well aimed with playfulness—and in all of these an inimitable charm; his nature is most able to evoke a sense of the lamentable, and he is utterly flexible at pouring out myth-making and with his fluid spirit at finding his way through digressions, as in his rather too poetic passage on Leto, and (and I don’t know whether any other writer did so) he did make his Funeral Oration an epideictic speech. 3. Demosthenes, on the other hand, is not given to characterization; he does not pour himself forth; he is least fluid and epideictic, and of the qualities just listed he more of ten than not has no share. And surely when he forces himself to generate laughter and urbanities, he does not so much excite laughter as make himself laughable; and when he wishes to approach being graceful, he is all the farther from it. And, of course, had he tried his hand at writing on Phryne or the little speech on Athenogenes, he would surely have established still more the reputation of Hyperides as the superior of the two. 4. But indeed I take it that the fine things of Hyper- ides, even if they are numerous, are all the same lacking in greatness and achieve no effect because they come from “the heart of one sober” and allow the audience to remain still-no one is frightened when reading Hyperides—but Demosthenes takes up the tale, drawing on

excellences which start from what is great in nature and end up on the height: a tone of sublime address, emotions with a soul, resources, quickness of conception, swiftness, and, where important, a power and capacity unreachable by all others. And since, I say, he has concentrated all these into himself, like heaven-sent gifts (one cannot rightly say they are human), by means of his fine qualities he is victorious over all others and, as compensation for those he does not have, he outthunders, as it were, and outshines public speakers of all ages: one might actually be more capable of opening his eyes towards a thunderbolt bearing in on him than to set his eyes on the emotions of this man as they come one on top of another.