The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

were fairer than Aphrodite the Golden,
Defter of hand than Athene…
    (The Attic orators are particularly fond of this method of
speech.) Consequently it does not suit an elderly speaker.
12
    It should be observed that each kind of rhetoric has its own
appropriate style. The style of written prose is not that of spoken
oratory, nor are those of political and forensic speaking the same.
Both written and spoken have to be known. To know the latter is to
know how to speak good Greek. To know the former means that you are
not obliged, as otherwise you are, to hold your tongue when you
wish to communicate something to the general public.
    The written style is the more finished: the spoken better admits
of dramatic delivery-like the kind of oratory that reflects
character and the kind that reflects emotion. Hence actors look out
for plays written in the latter style, and poets for actors
competent to act in such plays. Yet poets whose plays are meant to
be read are read and circulated: Chaeremon, for instance, who is as
finished as a professional speech-writer; and Licymnius among the
dithyrambic poets. Compared with those of others, the speeches of
professional writers sound thin in actual contests. Those of the
orators, on the other hand, are good to hear spoken, but look
amateurish enough when they pass into the hands of a reader. This
is just because they are so well suited for an actual tussle, and
therefore contain many dramatic touches, which, being robbed of all
dramatic rendering, fail to do their own proper work, and
consequently look silly. Thus strings of unconnected words, and
constant repetitions of words and phrases, are very properly
condemned in written speeches: but not in spoken speeches-speakers
use them freely, for they have a dramatic effect. In this
repetition there must be variety of tone, paving the way, as it
were, to dramatic effect; e.g. ‘This is the villain among you who
deceived you, who cheated you, who meant to betray you completely’.
This is the sort of thing that Philemon the actor used to do in the
Old Men’s Madness of Anaxandrides whenever he spoke the words
‘Rhadamanthus and Palamedes’, and also in the prologue to the
Saints whenever he pronounced the pronoun ‘I’. If one does not
deliver such things cleverly, it becomes a case of ‘the man who
swallowed a poker’. So too with strings of unconnected words,
e.g.’I came to him; I met him; I besought him’. Such passages must
be acted, not delivered with the same quality and pitch of voice,
as though they had only one idea in them. They have the further
peculiarity of suggesting that a number of separate statements have
been made in the time usually occupied by one. Just as the use of
conjunctions makes many statements into a single one, so the
omission of conjunctions acts in the reverse way and makes a single
one into many. It thus makes everything more important: e.g. ‘I
came to him; I talked to him; I entreated him’-what a lot of facts!
the hearer thinks-’he paid no attention to anything I said’. This
is the effect which Homer seeks when he writes,
Nireus likewise from Syme (three well-fashioned ships did
bring),
Nireus, the son of Aglaia (and Charopus, bright-faced king),
Nireus, the comeliest man (of all that to Ilium’s strand).
    If many things are said about a man, his name must be mentioned
many times; and therefore people think that, if his name is
mentioned many times, many things have been said about him. So that
Homer, by means of this illusion, has made a great deal of though
he has mentioned him only in this one passage, and has preserved
his memory, though he nowhere says a word about him afterwards.
    Now the style of oratory addressed to public assemblies is
really just like scene-painting. The bigger the throng, the more
distant is the point of view: so that, in the one and the other,
high finish in detail is superfluous and seems better away. The
forensic style is more highly finished; still more so is the style
of language addressed to a single judge, with whom there is very
little room for rhetorical artifices, since he can take the whole
thing in better, and judge of what is to the point and what is not;
the struggle is less intense and so the judgement is undisturbed.
This is why the same speakers do not distinguish themselves in all
these branches at once; high finish is wanted least where dramatic
delivery is wanted most, and here the speaker must have a good
voice, and above all, a