A distinction between the two in diction, the idea that the language of poetic is more freely imaginative, is both commonplace and superficial. The ancients, of course, were aware of it, and frequently thus contrasted poetry with oratory[1] or with history. But the distinction between the diction of public address and the diction of drama or epic, between prose style and poetic style, was not in ancient thought fundamental. Rather the ancients saw here common ground. Their discussions of prose style freely draw examples from poetry; for their rhetoric, more explicitly than most modern rhetoric, realized that the appeal of public address, in so far as it is an appeal of style, is largely imaginative and rhythmical.[2] Polybius, indeed, reproaches Phylarchus for his eagerness to be pathetic and his habit of visualizing the terrible, “as do the writers of tragedies”[3]; but as a restriction on style in history this is quite exceptional and would involve disparaging Thucydides. The common view of history is summed up playfully by Lucian: “Let the [historian’s] thought, in so far as it too is high-sounding and uplifted, appropriate and seize something of poetic, especially when it is involved in arrays and battles by land or sea; for then there will be need of a poetic wind to fill the sails and bear the tall ship over the waves.”[4] In oratory the ancients specifically inculcated imaginative visualization, and taught it from the poets. Their general distinction of style between prose and verse was in the habit of rhythms. No, the ancient distinction between rhetoric and poetic is far more than a differentiation of style. The difference that Aristotle saw between history and poetry is far deeper; and perhaps this was in the mind of Polybius when he went on to say,[5] “the end of history is not the same as that of tragedy, but the opposite,” and complained that Phylarchus was too fond of working up crises (περιπέτειαι). Even the flippant Lucian may have meant to imply, though he does not carry out, a deeper difference when he said:[6] “the undertakings of the poetic art [in general] and of poems [in particular], and the appropriate rules, are one thing; those of history, quite another.” At any rate, the Aristotelian distinction of history from poetry, repeated by Polybius in the second century B.C. and by Lucian in the second century A.D., is not merely in diction, not in prose or verse, but in composition.