‘When I read a speech of Isocrates, I become sober and serious, as if I were listening to solemn music; but when I take up a speech of Demosthenes, I am beside myself, I am led this way and that, I am moved by one passion after another: suspicion, distress, fear, contempt, hate, pity, kindliness, anger, envy—passing successively through all the passions which can obtain a mastery over the human mind; ... and I have sometimes thought to myself, what must have been the impression which he made on those who were fortunate enough to hear him? For where we, who are so far removed in time, and in no way interested in the actual events, are led away and overpowered, and made to follow wherever the speech leads us, how must the Athenians and other Greeks have been led by the speaker himself when the cases in which he spoke had a living interest and concerned them nearly?...’[350] Dionysius, as we know from many of his criticisms, had a remarkably acute sense of style; he had also a strong imagination. In this same treatise he recounts how the forms of the sentences themselves suggest to him the tone in which the words were uttered, the very gestures with which they were accompanied.[351] Though we modern students cannot expect to rival him in these peculiar gifts, it is still possible for us to sympathize with his feelings. We cannot fail, in reading a speech like the _Third Philippic_, for instance, to appreciate how fully Demosthenes realizes the Platonic ideal, expressed in the _Gorgias_, that rhetoric is the art of persuasion. We need not pause to analyse the means by which he attains his end; he may resemble Lysias at one moment in a simple piece of narrative, at another he may be as involved and antithetical as Thucydides, or even florid like Gorgias; he can be a very Proteus, as Dionysius says, in his changes of form; but in whatever shape he appears, naïve, subtle, pathetic, indignant, sarcastic, he is convincing. The reason is simple: he has a single purpose always present to his mind, namely, to make his audience feel as he feels. Readers of Isocrates were expected, while they followed the exposition of the subject-matter, to regard the beauties of the form in which it was expressed; in Demosthenes there is no idea of such display. A good speech was to him a successful speech, not one which might be admired by critics as a piece of literature. It is only incidental that his speeches have a literary quality which ranks him among the foremost writers of Attic prose; as an orator he was independent of this quality.