The vocabulary of Aeschines consists mostly of words in ordinary use which require no comment. Though he was a great admirer of poetry, his ordinary writing does not display more poetical or unusual words than that of any other orator. The difference between his style and that of a writer such as Lysias is, essentially, a difference not of vocabulary but of tone; the tones of Aeschines are raised. He tends to use words which are stronger than they need be, to be ‘angry’ when only surprise is called for; to be ‘excessively indignant’ when a moderate resentment would meet the case, to ‘detest’ when to dislike would be enough.[269] He makes unnecessary appeals to the gods more frequently than any other orator except Demosthenes. Exaggeration is part of the secret of his _splendor verborum_, as the Roman critic described it; but by far the greatest part is his instinct for using quite ordinary words in the most effective combinations. His best passages, if analysed, contain hardly any words which are at all out of the common, and yet their vigour and dignity are unquestionable.[270] The ancients, however, denied purity of diction to Aeschines, perhaps on account of the characteristics just described. He is, as Blass observes, occasionally obscure; that is, it is possible to find sentences which are not quite easy to understand; but on the whole these are very rare. No writer, even a Lysias, can be at all times perfectly lucid.[271] As a rule Aeschines is as simple in the construction of his sentences as he is in the arrangement of his speeches, and he is much easier to understand than, for instance, Demosthenes. He has not the consummate grace and terseness which critics admire as the chief beauties of Lysias; sometimes unnecessary repetitions of a word are to be found, sometimes two synonyms are used where one word would suffice; but such repetitions often give us lucidity, though at the expense of strict form, and the accumulation of synonyms increases the emphasis.[272] Only the great artist, who is perfectly confident that he has found the right word to express adequately his whole meaning in exactly the right way, can afford to do without all superfluous strokes. Aeschines is not a perfect artist in language; he aims not at artistic beauty but effect, to which style is nothing but a subordinate aid. The composition of artistic prose is, for him, far from being an end in itself.