The same anxiety led to their frequent use of obsolescent words. Archaism became an habitual form of decoration. They borrowed the language of Demosthenes to welcome a proconsul and win from him some otiose appointment, or played upon an audience to capture its applause for literary tone. “Atticism” was often little more than pride in a highly sanctioned diction. The aim of the sophists was not to model their composition on Demosthenes, still less on the restrained habit of Lysias, but to borrow from them words enough to give antique flavor. Presuming to be apostles of Hellenism, they were anxious to sound traditional. That they often thereby became stilted is early evidence that this conception of elegance is false.[72] (2) Decorative Imagery Metaphor, which is a reliance of all popular oratory, seldom has in sophistic the suggestiveness of fresh observation. Rather the sophist relied on far-fetching or on the abundance of his literary stock.[73] “Living tombs,” said of vultures, is ascribed to Gorgias by the treatise _On the Sublime_,[74] and passed on through the schools. If Athens was “the eye of Greece,” another city might be “the eye of Asia.” Sophistic metaphor generally lacks vitality. That it should achieve so little imaginative suggestion is a clear sign of artificiality. No less conventional and decorative are the frequent similes. They are more sophistic only in being more elaborate. In both cases it is not the imagery that is sophistic; it is the straining, or the conventional decoration, or the dilation. For all its store of tropes, for all its lavish use of them, sophistic is poor in active imagery. Quintilian’s eighth book analyzes the heightening of diction which comes from concreteness[75] (iii), amplification (iv), epigram (_sententia_, v), and tropes (vi). Of these the second and third were the reliance of the sophists. The first they neglected; the fourth they had conventionalized. (3) Balance Imagery, what the ancients called trope, covers all that is usually meant by the term _figure_ in modern use. Ancient manuals and their medieval derivatives generally use _figures_ to mean typical adaptations of sentence movement. These are minutely classified even in the older rhetoric. The treatise _Ad Herennium_,[76] which does not distinguish them from tropes, enumerates sixty-one and groups them by the traditional twofold division followed by Quintilian: _figuræ sententiarum_ (σχήματα διανοίας), and _figuræ verborum_ (σχήματα λέξεως). Quintilian (IX), distinguishing them from tropes, both reduces the number of figures and by grouping simplifies the analysis. Of _figuræ sententiarum_ he enumerates twelve.[77] _Figuræ verborum_ he groups as: (1) variations of syntax, (2) modes of iteration, (3) word-play, (4) balance and antithesis. The sophists especially cultivated these figures, most of all the last, those forms of balance which were traditionally called the figures of Gorgias (Γοργίεια σχήματα).[78]