The long reign of sophistic reduced rhetoric to style.[65] That this was the preoccupation even of the earlier sophistic we may guess from the derision of the _Phædrus_ and from other references.[66] And there is also Polus, who has schools of diplasiology and gnomology and eikonology, and who teaches in them the words of which Licymnius made him a present; they were to give a polish. _Phædrus_, 267, Jowett’s translation. The wider scope demanded by Aristotle’s different conception is recognized in the traditional fivefold division[67] found in Cicero and Quintilian. This division, which has such validity as to be essential for securing the educational values proposed by the ancients, seems to have been inactive from Quintilian on to the fall of Rome.[68] That the limitation to style impoverishes rhetoric and impairs even the study of style itself is evident in the sophistic period and is confirmed in the medieval. Incidentally, the focus on style contributed to the confusion of rhetoric with poetic.[69] Neither being conceived often in its larger aspects of movement, both being studied habitually for words and sentences, the distinction between the two was the more easily blurred. Here poetry had the more to lose. The use of poetic diction to decorate oratory must have confirmed the tendency to conceive poetic itself as an art of decoration. But the main results of giving to style a monopoly are the cultivation of literary flavor, with conformity to past usage, and the forcing of figure and rhythm. The style inevitably acquired by those who seek style is decorative and elaborate. In order to sound literary, the orator is impelled both to depart from common speech and to force his note. Devices valuable in revision, to clarify and impress a message, become artificial in practise and unduly elaborated in theory by being pursued for themselves. (1) Literary Allusion and Archaism The preoccupation that seized any opportunity for “Medics”[70] led to frequent literary allusions. Allusion is a legitimate, sometimes an important, means of heightening eloquence. Reviving old associations by familiar words and rhythms, it helps to suggest a mood or intensify an appeal. Who is this that cometh from Domrémy? Who is she in bloody coronation robes from Rheims? Who is she that cometh with blackened flesh from walking the furnaces of Rouen? De Quincey, _Joan of Arc_, last paragraph. But the sophists used this form of suggestion so incontinently, and often so conventionally,[71] as to betray an anxiety to sound literary.