First of these is his great care in composition. Isocrates is known to have spent years in polishing the essays which he intended as permanent contributions to the science of politics; Plato wrote and erased and wrote again before he was satisfied with the form in which his philosophy was to be given to the world; Demosthenes, without years of toil, could produce for definite occasions speeches whose finished brilliancy made them worthy to be ranked as great literature quite apart from their merits as contributions to practical policy. It is a well-known jest against him that his speeches smelt of midnight oil, but he must have had a remarkable natural fluency to be able to compose so many speeches so well. It is quite possible, on the other hand, that the speeches which survive are not altogether in the form in which they were delivered. It seems to have been a habit among orators of this time to edit for publication their speeches delivered in important cases, in order that a larger audience might have an opportunity of reading a permanent record of the speakers’ views on political or legal questions which had more than a transitory interest. We have indirect evidence that Demosthenes was in the habit of introducing corrections into his text. Aeschines quotes and derides certain expressions, mostly exaggerated metaphors, which do not occur in the speeches as extant to us, though some of them evidently should, if the text had not been submitted to a recension.[331] We may note the remark of Eratosthenes[332] that while speaking he sometimes lost control of himself, and talked like a man possessed, and that of Demetrius of Phaleron, that on one occasion he offended against good taste by quoting a metrical oath which bears the stamp of comedy: ‘By earth and fountains, rivulets and streams.’[333] This quotation is not to be found in any extant speech, but it is noticeable that formulae of the kind, typically represented by the familiar ὦ γῆ καὶ θεοί—‘Ye Earth and Gods’—are commonly affected by Demosthenes, as indeed they are to be found in his contemporary Aeschines. Evidently the Attic taste was undergoing a modification; such expressions are foreign to the dignified harmonies of Isocrates and of rare occurrence in the restrained style of Lysias; but they begin to appear more frequently in Isaeus, whose style was the model for the early speeches of Demosthenes. Certain other expressions belonging to the popular speech, and probably avoided by Isocrates as being too colloquial, are found in Demosthenes’ public speeches—_e.g._ ὁ δεῖνα and ὦ τᾶν.