Some authors go so far as to change the natural order of words for the purpose of escaping hiatus of open vowels, which are necessarily awkward to pronounce in rapid speech. This is familiar from the pages of Demosthenes, and what the later writers did systematically, Antiphon, and even Thucydides, seem to have done at times instinctively. As regards the balance of clauses, a good example may be found in the opening of the _Herodes_ speech: τοῦ μὲν πεπείραμαι πέρα τοῦ προσήκοντος, του δ’ ἐνδεής εἰμι μᾶλλον τοῦ συμφέροντος, where the correspondence of the two clauses in equal numbers of syllables is noticeable. The next sentence shows the same sort of correspondence, though not quite so precise; but here the structure is more elaborate, since we have two clauses, each of two parts, contrasted both in whole and part: A. οὗ μὲν γάρ μ’ ἔδει κακοπαθεῖν τῷ σώματι μετὰ τῆς αἰτίας τῆς οὐ προσηκούσης, α. ἐνταυθοῖ οὐδέν μ’ ὠφέλησεν ἡ ἐμπειρία, B. οὗ δέ με δεῖ σωθῆναι μετὰ τῆς ἀληθείας εἰπόντα τὰ γενόμενα, β. ἐν τούτῳ με βλάπτει ἡ τοῦ λέγειν ἀδυναμία. Though there is no rhythmical correspondence here, and the syllabic lengths only correspond roughly, the ‘antistrophic’ structure is obvious. Gorgias, if we may condemn him on the evidence of a single short fragment, seems to have affected rhyme—at any rate his collocation of γνώμην and ῥώμην cannot have been accidental—and the similar sound of the endings of the two clauses in the first passage quoted above proves that Antiphon at any rate took no pains to avoid such natural assonance. In an inflexional language, where there is always a strong probability that a rhyme will occur wherever we have to use an adjective agreeing with a noun, or two verbs in the same tense and person, some ingenuity has to be employed at times to avoid a rhyme, and Antiphon here, at any rate, did not choose to avoid it. The use of rhyme in verse seems to have been offensive to the Greek ear;[58] perhaps for that very reason it may have been at times desirable in prose, its harshness producing the same kind of effect which Antiphon elsewhere attains by the use of uncommon words. Hiatus is of fairly common occurrence in Antiphon, and I cannot point to any certain instance of an attempt to avoid it by a change from the natural order of words. Antiphon draws little from common speech; perhaps his dignity prevented him from enforcing a point by the use of those γνῶμαι—proverbial maxims—which Aristotle recommends; and he seldom has recourse to colloquialisms. We are inclined, however, to put in this class such a phrase as περιέπεσεν οἷς οὐκ ἤθελεν—‘he got what he didn’t want’—used of an unfortunate who has been accidentally killed through his own negligence.