To simplify the language of Dionysius by borrowing from music a metaphor which, though it does not cover his whole intention, is true so far as it goes, the three tasks of the shaper of sentences are: (1) to hear the tune, (2) to follow the tune, (3) to correct the tune. The first depends on the speaker’s awareness, his sensitiveness to words; the second depends on his technical ability to carry out what is thus suggested, to sustain and enhance; the third, more specifically technical, is to revise in detail. On its face this division is new. Not only has it nothing to do with other divisions which apply to style in general, being limited to sentence movement, but it also differs from earlier divisions of this item by being synthetic. Its point of view is not that of a critic analyzing what has been already composed, but of a speaker or writer composing. It is practical. Is it practicable? At the very outset of the exposition the analogy of the building arts is disconcerting. Even when allowances are made for the strict limitation to building, the exclusion of all that we now call architecture, the description still seems hardly exact. And, its exactness assumed, is it applicable? Is the analogy sound? Both the _Rhetoric_ and the _Poetic_ of Aristotle in speaking of sentences generally avoid analogies from the static arts. The _Poetic_ even rules them out at the start by its classification of the arts; and Aristotle’s analogies for sentences are drawn not from building, but from walking, running, and breathing.[19] Dionysius both assumes and asserts the same point of view: “The science of public speaking is, after all, a sort of musical science, differing from vocal and instrumental music in degree, not in kind.”[20] And generally his discussion, like Aristotle’s, is in terms of rhythm. Why, then, this analogy with arts that Aristotle regarded as lying in quite another field? The famous analogy in the _De Sublimitate_[21] of building with solid blocks is not, in its context, so remarkable; for it is applied less restrictively to _compositio_. Is a shaper of sentences like a builder?