His speeches were designed not to be read by literary experts, but to be delivered from the platform, and he aimed, not at pleasing the critics’ taste but at working on the passions of the ordinary citizen. Some of his most important orations were not written at all, though he probably preserved notes of them,[273] and the three which he did write out in full were preserved not for their literary beauty but for their subject-matter. The time for the rhetoric of culture was past; the course of events required the kind of oratory that would stir men to action. As to the effectiveness of his speeches, there can be no doubt. We know—on his own authority, certainly; but it has never been disputed—how his harangue moved the Amphictyons; and we know that, without any conspicuous moral qualities, with no advantages from family influence and no definite political principles, he became a power in Athens solely by virtue of his eloquence. Aeschines varies the length of his sentences very considerably; some of them are long, and consist of strings of participial and relative clauses. These, however, occur mostly in narrative passages, where such discursive style is excusable: for instance, the long sentences in the _de Legatione_, §§ 26-27, §§ 75-77, and § 115, contain reports of Aeschines’ own earlier speeches. The first of these (§§ 26-27) is monotonous owing to the series of genitives absolute which compose an inordinately long protasis, the main verb not occurring till near the end of the sentence, and then being followed by another genitive clause. A long sentence early in the _Ctesiphon_ gives a _résumé_ of the circumstances by which the orator is impelled to speak; the clauses are mostly connected by καί, though all depend on a relative at the beginning. No skill is displayed in the structure of such sentences, and their possible length is limited only by the amount of water in the _clepsydra_. Up to a certain length, they are forcible, but if the limit is exceeded, the effect is lost, for the point which the orator wishes to make is too long deferred, since the main clause, containing the statement which the preceding relative clauses illustrate or explain, is not reached until the heavy accumulation of relative clauses has wearied the perception. In general, however, Aeschines is moderate in length; his sentences, on the average, are shorter than those of Isocrates, and he tacitly adheres to the rule that a period should not be so long that it cannot be uttered in one breath. Though not pedantic, he was far from being without a taste for composition. In all the speeches we find examples of the deliberate avoidance of hiatus, and in the _de Legatione_ he bestowed some care on the matter.