Mention must be made once more of the technical distinction between ‘figures of language’ and ‘figures of thought’. A ‘figure of language’ is a combination of words for the artificial expression of an idea—as by antithesis. The object of such a figure is rhetorical ornament; and, if the form of expression is changed, the figure of language is destroyed ¹ . A ‘figure of thought’ consists in the suggestion of an idea which is itself artificial, having for its object, not ornament, but êthos or pathos— moral persuasion or the excitement of emotion ² . If the speaker prefaces a statement by asking the question which he is himself about to answer: if he feigns perplexity for the sake of giving the greater effect to his own solution: if, instead of relating what other persons have said, he introduces those persons as speaking with their own mouths: if he imagines his adversaries as raising an objection which he goes on to refute—these and the like devices are ‘figures of thought’. Unlike the figures of language, these figures of thought are independent of any form of words; the form of words may be changed without affecting them. Their general tendency is to give animation. The elder school of Attic oratory was too grave and too stately to admit this animation; Antiphon, who uses the figures of language sparingly, uses the figures of thought hardly ever ³ . That Andokides uses the figures of thought so much, is a strong mark of his comparative modernism and of his detachment from the art of his day ⁴ . Lysias, the founder of a style free from the old rigour, had a reason of his own for still using the figures of thought with moderation,— namely, because they are too suggestive of thrust and parry, and, though they may serve êthos, tend to mar the special êthos at which he chiefly aimed, since they present the speaker too much as a combatant. Isaeos, while still desirous of a persuasive plainness, is also bent on exerting the essential vigour of his art. He has no longer, then, the same motive as Lysias for declining aids to vivacity or even vehemence; and accordingly—while he usually avoids the figures of language ⁵ —he uses the figures of thought ⁶ with a freedom which brings him decidedly nearer than any of his predecessors to the practice of their greatest master ⁷ , Demosthenes. When Photios says that Isaeos ‘set the example of using figures’, πρῶτος σχηματίζειν ἤρξατο—a statement strange at first sight in reference to one who came after Isokrates—this, it can hardly be doubted, is the meaning ⁸ .