His first work is said to have been a sceptical treatise on Nature, or the Non-existent.[39] This was followed by a certain number of speeches, the most famous of which was the _Olympiac_, in which, like Isocrates at a later date, he urged on the Greeks the necessity of union. The _Funeral Oration_, to which we shall recur, is supposed to have been delivered at Athens, but this can hardly have been the case, as such speeches were regularly delivered by prominent Athenian statesmen, and there would be no occasion for calling in a foreigner. A _Pythian_ speech and various _Encomia_ are recorded; some on mythical characters, which may be regarded as mere exercises, some on real people, as the Eleans.[40] He seems not to have written speeches for the law-courts; his tendency, as in his personal habits, so in his speech, was towards display, and so he originated the style of oratory known as epideictic, which Isocrates in a subsequent age was destined to bring to perfection. Though an Ionian by birth, he instinctively recognized the great possibilities of the Attic dialect, and chose it as his medium of expression; it was not, however, the Attic of everyday life, but a language enriched by the exuberance of a poetical imagination. We possess of his actual work only one noteworthy extract from the _Funeral Speech_; but from this, joined to a few isolated criticisms and phrases preserved by commentators, as well as from the language ascribed by Plato to his imitator Agathon,[41] we can form some idea of his pompous exaggerations. He was much addicted to the substitution of rare expressions—γλῶτται, as the Greek critics called them—for the ordinary forms of speech. His language abounded in archaic and poetical words, striking metaphors and unusual compounds. He frequently employed neuter adjectives and participles in preference to the corresponding abstract nouns; he liked to use a verbal noun accompanied by an auxiliary in places where a simple verb would be naturally employed. Finally, though he could not aspire to composition in elaborate periods like Isocrates or Demosthenes, he developed the use of antithesis, word answering to word and clause to clause, pointing his antithetical style not only by the frequent use of μὲν and δέ, but by the use of assonance at the ends of clauses, corresponding forms of verbs in similar positions, and by some attention to rhythm and equality of syllabic value in contrasted clauses.