ἱστορίαι Historiai
Plut. Mor., Platonic Questions 10.4 Plutarch's Platonic questions, Plutarch; served verbatim
Now neither an animal nor an instrument nor arms nor any thing else is more fine, efficacious, or graceful, for the loss of a part. Yet speech, by taking away conjunctions, often becomes more persuasive, as here: One rear’d a dagger at a captive’s breast; One held a living foe, that freshly bled With new-made wounds; another dragg’d a dead. And this of Demosthenes: A bully in an assault may do much which his victim cannot even describe to another person,—by his mien, his look, his voice,—when he stings by insult, when he attacks as an avowed enemy, when he smites with his fist, when he gives a blow on the face. These rouse a man; these make a man beside himself who is unused to such foul abuse. And again: Not so with Midias; but from the very day, he talks, he abuses, he shouts. Is there an election of magistrates? Midias the Anagyrrasian is nominated. He is the advocate of Plutarchus; he knows state secrets; the city cannot contain him. Therefore the figure asyndeton, whereby conjunctions are omitted, is highly commended by writers of rhetoric. But such as keep overstrict to the law, and (according to custom) omit not a conjunction, rhetoricians blame for using a dull, flat, tedious style, without any variety in it. And inasmuch as logicians mightily want conjunctions for the joining together their axioms, as much as charioteers want yokes, and Ulysses wanted withs to tie Cyclop’s sheep; this shows they are not parts of speech, but a conjunctive instrument thereof, as the word conjunction imports. Nor do conjunctions join all, but only such as are not spoken simply; unless you will make a cord part of the burthen, glue a part of a book, or distribution of money part of the government. For Demades says, that money which is given to the people out of the exchequer for public shows is the glue of a democracy. Now what conjunction does so of several propositions make one, by knitting and joining them together, as marble joins iron that is melted with it in the fire Yet the marble neither is nor is said to be part of the iron; although in this case the substances enter into the mixture and are melted together, so as to form a common substance from many and to be mutually affected. But there be some who think that conjunctions do not make any thing one, but that this kind of discourse is merely an enumeration, as when magistrates or days are reckoned in order.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

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Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass
Demades — a life Demosthenes — a life Midias — a candidate entry Ulysses — a candidate entry

Plutarch's Platonic questions, Plutarch — translated by R. Brown (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)