Greek Sentence Structure: Loose and Periodic Style

Last revision: 1/29/07

Contents

• Introductory Note
• Technical Terms: What Are They For?
• The Architecture of Greek Sentences: Loose and Periodic Style
• Loose Style and Periodic Style: Examples in English
• Loose or Running Style: Hekataios
• Herodotos
• Lysias
• Plato's "Naive" Style
• Periodic Style: Demosthenes and Isokrates
• Short and Long Kola: Xenophon and Thucydides
• A Lysianic Period
• A Longer Isokratean Period
• More Lysianic Periods
• A Herodotean Period
• Rhetorical, Historical, and Philosophical Periods
• A Short Historical Period of Xenophon
• A Philosophical Period of Plato
• A Period of Gorgias
• A final Demosthenic Example
• More Periods of Gorgias, Isokrates, and Demosthenes
• Isokrates, Demosthenes, and Cicero

Introductory Note

Graphic images of the Greek texts discussed are provided. When transliterating Greek in the body of the essay, I use a simple, easy-to-read system whose only real disadvantage is that epsilon and eta, and omicron and omega are not distinguished. With the Greek text at hand, this should cause no problem.

---Hardy Hansen

Technical Terms: What Are They For?

This analysis is a joke, of course. It pokes fun at pedantry. But it is also perfectly valid and makes a serious point. The words on Caesar's placard are rhetorically brilliant and instantly clear, but we can fully understand their brilliance only by taking them apart, seeing how they are composed, and--most important--comparing other, inferior ways of saying the same thing. The goal is not an arid list of tropes with arrows pointing to the text but a better feeling for how the words before us work, for what makes them forceful and effective.

How big an armory of rhetorical terms does a student of Greek prose need? Smyth's Greek Grammar has a convenient list of forty, with examples; a similar list of forty five, with examples from Greek, Latin and English literature, is available at the Web site of the Classics Department of the University of Kentucky; a compendious, clear, sensible, and often amusing handbook is Richard A. Lanham's A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Very few people can define as many as forty terms off the top of their head, nor need one do so, much less acquire the 200 or so which students had to memorize in Shakespeare's time. Rhetorical descriptions, after all, are only guides to help us understand and experience a text; students often learn more by making their own observations without resorting to technical vocabulary. Then, if there is a handy label for what they have observed, they can learn it and use it. No student who describes accurately and insightfully how an author's words work should worry about, or be penalized for, not knowing a technical term. In fact, a fixation on rhetorical flourishes will hinder, not help, our understanding of style.

Consider again Caesar's placard. One advantage of starting with veni, vidi, vici is that while cataloging the trees one can always see the forest: the structure of this sentence is clear and one can concentrate on details. When analyzing complex sentences, however, it is easy to forget that the goal of arranging words "rhetorically" is to shape a sentence which develops clearly as it is heard or read, not to distract the audience with pointless ornamentation. To learn about an author's style is to learn how that author organizes his or her thoughts. Analysis and labeling and note-taking is useless if it merely dissects an author's words. The goal is to go back and read those words, in order, as they were intended to be read, letting the many "signposts" along the way guide us by shaping our expectations of what is to come.

This point cannot be emphasized enough. Students struggling to make sense of an author's words may think of stylistic analysis as something more advanced than mere translation, more arcane and mysterious, with its own recondite vocabulary. Ironically, they get this impression from the emphasis which most of us place on the most obvious marks of style--rhetorical figures such as chiasmus, alliteration, homoioteleuton--as the key to everything: these strike our ears and eyes as we read, so naturally we begin our analysis by scanning the text, collecting as many tropes as we can, and labeling them like specimens found on a nature hike. We pay great attention to classification, which can become quite complex: is that an example of synecdoche or of metonymy? Are we dealing with paronomasia or only parechesis?

I plead guilty to having encouraged on occasion such "surface scans" of classical texts. The problem with them is that they don't necessarily lead students to understand how Gorgias or Demosthenes or Isokrates has structured and expressed his thoughts, the "character" or "cast of thought" each presents to us. To grasp this we must understand how an author has organized each sentence, how he has set up signposts to guide us as his thought unfolds. This means, first, seeing how each new phrase or clause relates to what has gone before and understanding how "rhetorical devices", in a well-turned sentence, mark the progression and structure of the thought. The real rhetoric is in the unfolding of the ideas in the order in which the author wants us to hear or read them; rhetorical tropes are markers along the way. To learn about an author's style is to learn to read that author's words, in order, as they were written--not to disarrange the words but to hear what the ancient audience heard.

In his admirable essay on the style of Cicero W. Ralph Johnson puts it succinctly: " . . . Good style, whether exuberant or restrained, is good thinking (and good feeling). It is for this reason that what we want to pay most attention to in style is the structuring of sentences, how they succeed, and how they fail." [Luxuriance and Economy: Cicero and the Alien Style, p. 7] He quotes Virginia Woolf's description of "the rhythm of a book that, by running in the head, winds one into a ball", and he rescues from obscurity a book by Edith Rickert, New Methods for the Study of Literature, which asserts the importance for style of the length of whole sentences and of their parts. [Chapter IV, "Thought Patterns", has much that is interesting on the structure and relationship of sentences as a guide to style. As Rickert remarks (p. 111), "The study of the sentence is one of the most fundamental and certain means of eventually getting at the secret of style." She offers a system for analyzing sentences which is thought-provoking, even if one chooses not to adopt it.]

[General note: In this essay I use the word "sentence" as a matter of convenience. There is no exactly corresponding Greek term or concept. Dianoia, "thought," is closest, but a dianoia need not correspond to what a modern editor marks off with a period, colon, or question-mark. Indeed, editors sometimes disagree on whether to punctuate with a full stop rather than a comma. See now Dover, The Evolution of Greek Prose Style, chapter 2.]

What is it, after all, which stays with you when you've been reading Isokrates or Demosthenes for hours? Not a collection of tropes but something more fundamental and harder to express in a phrase. Why did reading Isokrates for hours on end once make me physically ill? Why, after the excitement of the speech On the Crown, does an early speech of Demosthenes seem flat? Because a real stylist "gets in among" you. The "rhythm" of the writer's thought is what does this.

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The Architecture of Greek Sentences: Loose and Periodic Style

1. Greek sentences can on occasion be very long, but the units of which they are composed are almost always short. "The edifice, lofty though it may be, is built of bricks, not of huge blocks of Cyclopean masonry." [J. D. Denniston, Greek Prose Style, p. 61]

2. Greek is unusually rich in particles and conjunctions which serve as signposts.

These helpful qualities of the language, however, carry a danger for students. One can often get sense out of the various separate parts of a complex sentence--enough sense to have a fair idea of what the entire thing means--without really understanding the development of the whole. And the reason for this is often the very profusion of "marker-words" or "signposts" in Greek: because they are omnipresent, students tend to ignore them or at least to forget earlier signposts when later ones, in corresponsion with them, appear. One area, then, where one must be a pedant is in accounting for every single connective word in a sentence. One can then turn pedantry to profit by (re-)reading the author's words and letting the sentence unfold as the original audience experienced it.

Before we turn to the analysis of sample passages from Greek authors, let us consider the two main types of sentence structure which ancient critics recognized: the loose style (lexis eiromene) and the periodic style (lexis katestrammene). The first phrase means literally "speech strung together" (from eiro, "to string or thread together", like beads in a necklace); the second, "speech turned or guided toward an end"; the word "period" (periodos, "way around") refers metaphorically to a racecourse, where the starting and finish lines were the same: contestants went out and around the turning-post, then retraced their path. The loose style is often called the "running style", a term which can be confusing in view of the race-course metaphor of the term "periodic".

[Dover points out the difficulty of interpreting the terms lexis katestrammene and periodos (The Evolution of Greek Prose Style, chapter 2, Appendix: Period and Kolon). He thinks that the word periodos, rather than referring to a race-course, describes "a unit of utterance which begins from major pause and 'returns' to a state of rest by leading to a second pause" (p. 39).]

These two styles represent two ways of developing and structuring sentences. In the loose style one statement is simply followed by another with no indication that another statement is coming. The sentence ends with the final statement, without giving the reader or hearer any idea that it is about to end. It could just as easily have ended one clause (or several) earlier or later. Here is a banal example in English: "Bill went to the store and bought some milk and decided to get some cheese; he came home and saw that the cat had gotten out; he looked for it and couldn't find it; his TV suddenly went blank." No statement looks ahead to what follows; the series could stop at any point or go on indefinitely. There is no "race-course" with a beginning, a turning point, and an end. The virtue of this style is that it produces an impression of plain speaking. In a court case, for example, if one is trying to set out the facts and convince the jury of one's honesty and straightforwardness (no matter how one has actually slanted the "facts"), this is the style to use. Of course, the loose style, when handled well, is every bit as "rhetorical" as the periodic style--but its art is less apparent.

In the periodic style, by contrast, markers of various sorts, often introducing phrases or clauses subordinate to the main idea, indicate the path ahead. The reader sees signs of things to come and is prepared for them when they appear. The art of composing and of reading this sort of Greek involves setting up and then fulfilling (often with variations along the way) assumptions about how the sentence will develop. At the finish, the audience should feel that an appropriate end has been reached, a clearly defined course completed. All periodic composition involves, in one way or another, suspension of sense: the arrangement of one or more elements of the sentence so that the thought is not felt to be complete until something else has been added.

Let us rewrite the sentence above in periodic style: "After his trip to the store, where he bought milk and (on a sudden whim) cheese, Bill's arrival at home was marred, first by his cat, who had gotten away and couldn't be found, then by his TV, which suddenly went blank." Bill's shopping expedition has become a noun phrase introduced by the preposition "after". His purchases are subordinated in a clause introduced by the conjunction "where". A parenthesis characterizes his acquisition of cheese. The center of the sentence makes the main point: coming home was no fun. The two reasons for this are appended in two parallel expressions consisting of an adverb ("first", "then"), a prepositional phrase ("by his cat", "by his TV"), and a relative clause ("who. . .", "which. . .").

As silly as these sentences are, they illustrate an important point: unlike a simple narration in the running style, a periodic sentence will highlight the main point(s) the writer is trying to put across and will require the writer to decide how various events or ideas are related. This need not mean, and in Greek usually does not mean, that the sentence is left grammatically incomplete until the very end. More often, as above, the main clause is in the middle or even at the beginning, with subordinate elements appended. Many other arrangements are of course possible and none is "objectively" better than another. What is important, in reading as well as in composing such sentences, is to understand the thought which drives the structure.

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Loose Style and Periodic Style: Examples in English

Here are examples in English of both styles. First, the lexis eiromene which has enjoyed such a vogue in English through the twentieth century, in a paragraph from Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises:

The bus climbed steadily up the road. The country was barren and rocks stuck up through the clay. There was no grass beside the road. Looking back we could see the country spread out below. Far back the fields were squares of green and brown on the hillsides. Making the horizon were the brown mountains. They were strangely shaped. As we climbed higher the horizon kept changing. As the bus ground slowly up the road we could see other mountains coming up in the south. Then the road came over the crest, flattened out, and went into a forest. It was a forest of cork oaks, and the sun came through the trees in patches, and there were cattle grazing back in the trees. We went through the forest and the road came out and turned along a rise of land, and out ahead of us was a rolling green plain, with dark mountains beyond it. These were not like the brown, heat-baked mountains we had left behind. These were wooded and there were clouds coming down from them. The green plain stretched off. It was cut by fences and the white of the road showed through the trunks of a double line of trees that crossed the plain toward the north. As we came to the edge of the rise we saw the red roofs and white houses of Burguete ahead strung out on the plain, and away off on the shoulder of the first dark mountain was the gray metal-sheathed roof of the monastery of Roncesvalles.

(Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, New York 1926, repr. 1954, chapter 3, p. 108)

That praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours due only to excellence are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely to be always continued by those who, being able to add nothing to truth, hope for eminence from the heresies of paradox, or those who, being forced by disappointment upon consolatory expedients, are willing to hope from posterity what the present age refuses, and flatter themselves that the regard which is yet denied by envy will be at last bestowed by time. . . .

To works, however, of which the excellence is not absolute and definite, but gradual and comparative; to works not raised upon principles demonstrative and scientific, but appealing wholly to observation and experience, no other test can be applied than length of duration and continuance of esteem. What mankind have long possessed they have often examined and compared, and if they persist to value the possession it is because frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favour. As among the works of nature no man can properly call a river deep or a mountain high without the knowledge of many mountains and many rivers, so, in the productions of genius, nothing can be styled excellent till it has been compared with other works of the same kind. . . .

The reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arises, therefore, not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages, or gloomy persuasion of the degeneracy of mankind, but is the consequence of acknowledged and indubitable positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood.

(Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings, ed. R. T. Davies, Evanston 1965, pp. 262-263)

[Lanham (s.v. "period", p. 113) quotes Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators (Oxford 1971), pp. 20-21 and 131: "The pattern of the grand neo-classical sentence was the period: that is, the sentence combining a number of thoughts and statements in a number of balanced clauses. . . . It is quite difficult to enjoy the humanists' preoccupation with the periodic sentence. . . . But one cannot come to historical terms with the humanists' verbal performance without recognizing how supremely important it was for them, and in how many different ways. The periodic sentence is the basic art form of the early humanists. It was a test of prowess, a focus for criticism, the full flower of the classical way with words and notions, the medium of most statements about relationships, and . . . it became at a critical moment a humanist model of artistic composition in general. . . . Compositio was a technical concept every schoolboy in a humanist school had been taught to apply to language. It did not mean what we mean by literary composition, but rather the putting together of the single evolved sentence or period, this being done within the framework of a four-level hierarchy of elements: words go to make up phrases, phrases to make clauses, clauses to make sentences."]

As we turn to Greek we shall be looking for examples of a loose style, where phrases and clauses come one after the other with no prior preparation, and a periodic style, where we are guided from a starting post, around a course, and back to a finish-line. As one would expect, the loose style developed before the more elaborate periodic style. But only scraps of the earliest prose remain, and the greatest writer associated with this style, Herodotos, is far more sophisticated than some caricatures of him suggest and writes just as elegantly and effortlessly in the periodic as in the loose style.

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Loose or Running Style: Hekataios

For a graphic image of the Greek text click here.

Orestheus, son of Deukalion, came to Aitolia for a kingdom and his dog gave birth to a log, and he ordered it to be buried, and from it grew a vine with many grapes. Thus he also named his own son Phytios. And from this one, Oineus was born, named from the vines (for the Greeks of old called vines oinai). And from Oineus was born Aitolos.

Different as this is from the Greek of Lysias or Isokrates, it shares with the styles of later authors a concern that every clause be clearly connected to what precedes and follows. Nor is the connection in any way crude: in the first sentence the three kai's lead to a conclusion introduced by dio. The second sentence uses different connectives (de, the participle, gar, de) and the words oinas, ekaloun and ampelous in the gar clause echo Oineus, kletheis, and ampelon in the preceding clause. Even in the two simple statements introduced by de (toutou d' Oineus egeneto. . .Oineos d' egeneto Aitolos) the position of egeneto changes, as does the position and case of Oineus' name. This is not to claim any great sophistication for Hekataios' Greek, but only to remind us that naivete is a relative notion.

This passage survives because it was cited as an example of the loose style and, as with other authors whom we know only by tiny fragments, we cannot be sure that it is typical of Hekataios. He may have assumed a more naive style when he was recounting a myth. Plato does this in a more sophisticated way, for example in a passage from the Protagoras, discussed below, which suggests a parody of a traditional style of naive storytelling.

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Herodotos

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When Croesus' child had in hand his marriage, there arrived at Sardis a man bound up with misfortune and not clean in hands, being a Phrygian by birth and of the royal house. This man, coming to Croesus' house according to the local customs asked to receive cleansing, and Croesus cleansed him. Cleansing is similar for the Lydians and the Greeks. When Croesus had performed the accustomed rites, he inquired where the man was from and who he was, saying as follows: "Man, who are you and from where in Phrygia have you come to be at my hearth? Whom of men or women did you kill?" And he answered: "King, of Gordias son of Midas I am the child, and I am called Adrastos, and having killed my brother unwilling I am here, driven out by my father and deprived of everything." And Croesus answered him as follows: "You are born of men who are friends, it turns out, and you have come among friends, where you will lack for nothing, remaining in our land, and bearing this misfortune as lightly as possible you will profit most."

Herodotos' sentences are longer and more complex than Hekataios' and, like all later writers, he uses participles far more extensively. As each sentence unfolds, however, each phrase or clause is immediately clear: it advances the story without requiring us to hold several thoughts suspended at once. Thus the first sentence consists of a genitive absolute, followed by the main verb apikneetai, followed by its subject (aner, still unnamed), followed by more about the man: his misfortune, his uncleanliness, his birth. At the end the phrases with men and de, both dependent on eon, lead up to the climactic word basileiou; the chiastic placement of the similar words geneei and geneos accentuates the final phrase.

Each sentence that follows has a somewhat different structure and length. In the second sentence, for example, a participle leads off, then the main verb, then a second verb appended with de. Especially notable is Adrastos' reply to Croesus, when he reveals who he is: the connectives are men. . .de. . .de. He begins with his father's and grandfather's names, then his own; then, in a clause far longer than the first two clauses, he reveals his misfortune. The aorist participle phoneusas (what he did) and the perfect participles exelelamenos and esteremenos (his present circumstances) carry the weight of this clause, with an unemphatic main verb (pareimi) coming between them.

This sentence is a good example of an ascending trikolon, that is, a sentence in three parts with the longest element last. Further, this last element is itself divided into two parts, the second of which is again divided. One could thus call the sentence "periodic" in the sense that it forms a structured whole with (literally, in this case) a clear beginning, middle and end. Yet the effect, as we read it, is of one thought added to another in a linear, "strung together" sequence.

Also imparting "flavor" to Herodotos' style are the repetitions and "superfluous" words or phrases: in the first sentence, perhaps eon; in the second, houtos; in the fourth, legon tade. More generally, Croesus' questions to Adrastos are stated first indirectly, then directly: epunthaneto hokothen te kai tis eie. . . .tis te eon kai kothen. (Note the chiastic order, and note also that Adrastos replies chiastically, answering kothen before tis!) The effect is of an unhurried narrative--but not a flaccid one. Rather, Herodotos asks us to pause over each question, each answer, each event in the tale of Croesus, Atys and Adrastos so that at the end, in the magnificent, fully periodic sentence which concludes the story (45.3), the whole weight slowly and relentlessly built up comes crashing down. [Cf. Denniston, Greek Prose Style, p. 8.]

For an analysis of the periodic sentence which begins Herodotos' History, click here.

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Lysias

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Dividing up the houses, they went on their way. Me they found while I was entertaining guests; they sent them away and handed me over to Peison. The others went to the workshop and made a list of the slaves. I asked Peison if he wanted to take money and rescue me. He said he would, if it were a lot. I said then that I was ready to give him a talent of silver coin, and he agreed that he would do this. Now I knew that he had no regard for either gods or human beings, but nevertheless in the present circumstances it seemed to me to be imperative to get some pledge from him. After he swore an oath, calling down ruin on himself and his children, that he would accept the talent and save me, I went into the room and opened the chest. Peison noticed and came in, and when he saw the contents he called two of his servants and ordered them to take the things in the chest.

To examine further the way Lysias has structured his narrative let us reproduce each element of the Greek on a separate line, with indentations to show the relationship among them; the excruciatingly literal translation which follows will show how complex the "loose" style of Lysias really is. To emphasize the careful connection and subordination of the Greek (even where ideas seem to follow straightforwardly one after the other), words which serve as signposts are in boldface and circumstantial participles, which express so many subordinated ideas so concisely, are underlined in the Greek graphic.

For a graphic image of the Greek text, click here.

And dividing up the houses they went on their way.
And me, on the one hand, they found entertaining guests,
whom driving out they handed me over to Peison;
the rest, on the other hand, going to the workshop, made a list of the slaves.
And I asked Peison, on the one hand, (5)
if he wanted to rescue me, taking money.
he, on the other hand, said he did,
if it were a lot.
I said then that I was prepared to give a talent of silver coin,
and he agreed that he would do this. (10)
Now I knew that he had no regard for either gods or men,
but nonetheless in the present circumstances it seemed to me to be most necessary
to take a pledge from him.
And when he swore,
calling down ruin on himself and his children, (15)
that accepting the talent he would save me,
going into the room I opened the box;
But Peison, noticing, came in
and, seeing the contents, called two of his servants
and ordered them to take the things in the box.

[As a tool for analyzing Greek style such an ultra-literal translation is far more useful than a smooth, fully Englished version, since the goal is to understand the Greek, not to replace it. Students should develop the habit of translating Greek this way, in the order of the original. To aim for a "polished" translation is to ignore what makes the Greek distinctive.]

Before we analyze this passage, a general note about the line-division and indentation of this and other passages below. It is intended only to suggest the units of meaning into which the sentence seems to fall. Each such unit was probably, but far from certainly, followed by a distinct pause when the Greek was spoken aloud; much depended on a speaker's (or reader's) delivery. No "scientific" accuracy is claimed or, indeed, is possible. Lines often, but not always, correspond to kola. (To be entirely consistent one would have to place eipon oun [9], for example, on a separate line, but this would create a false impression of composition in very short units [kommata].)

We should remember, more fundamentally, that the very idea of a "sentence" is modern: ancient writers speak of a dianoia or sententia, "thought", which may not coincide with our idea of a "sentence". [For a modern definition of a sentence see, e.g., Rickert, New Methods for the Study of Literature, p. 111.] Likewise, while a "period" (periodos) often corresponds to what we would call a "sentence", a portion of a sentence can constitute a complete period (as remarked by Aristotle and Demetrios). Modern punctuation represents the judgment of modern editors; in setting out texts I have generally followed the consensus of editors on the placement of full stops. [See, e.g., Johnson, Luxuriance and Economy, pp. 15-17 with references.]

Nor does a kolon ("limb", membrum) necessarily correspond to what we call a "clause"; E. Fraenkel has shown that even a short phrase can have the force of a kolon. [See also H. Dik, Word Order in Ancient Greek, chapter 3.] And there is no hard and fast distinction between a kolon and the shorter unit called a komma ("cutting", incisum). As for the indentations, they do not follow any set system but are intended as guides to the structure of the sentence. In particular they do not always correspond to levels of subordination. (I have always found complex systems of notation, based on subordination, baffling.) Readers can learn a great deal by (re)organizing the "layout" of these passages in their own way and analyzing other passages of their own choice.

Now for Lysias. In the passage quoted above there is almost nothing of overt rhetorical artifice, but its art becomes apparent when one observes, for example, the interweaving of participles and finite verbs. They tend to be paired, but not mechanically so. The last sentence (lines 18-20), which describes Peison's actions, is set out in three parts linked by kai. Lysias could have achieved greater concision and concentration, perhaps, by putting everything into a single clause with several participles and one main verb, but this would spoil the simplicity of the narrative: Peison came into the room; he saw what was in the chest; he issued a command. (Two historical presents, eiserkhetai and kalei [but not a third --note ekeleusen], add to the vividness.) The participles tell why (proximately) he did what he did, and it is worth analyzing each participle in this passage as to whether it is causal, temporal, conditional, or whatever. Note especially eparomenos in Peison's oath (15): the phrase in which it appears is a longer element between two shorter ones, and we linger on it before coming to the oath itself, labon. . .sosein.

Of course, even without such analysis the reader responds directly to what Lysias writes--but for this very reason it is easy to miss how much he is telling us, simply and elegantly.

Notice also the variety. Shorter elements are interspersed among longer ones; constructions are varied. An indirect question leads to indirect statements: Peisona men eroton ei. . . , ho d' ephasken ei. . . ., eipon oun hoti . . . ., ho d' homologese. . . ., epistamen men oun hoti. . ., homos d'. . .edokei. . . ., epeide de omosen. . . . Note, too, the placement of sosai. . .labon (6), labein (13), labon. . .sosein (16), labein (20). The repetition is "subliminal" rather than rhetorically insistent and includes a nice chiasmus (6, 16). In short, this is rhetorical art which succeeds by concealing itself. As with Herodotos, lexis eiromene is anything but naive. If one wants to appreciate Lysias fully, one need only attempt to translate a similar narrative from English to Greek!

For an analysis of periodic sentences by Lysias, click here.

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Plato's "Naive" Style

For a graphic image of the Greek text, click here.

Once there was a time
when gods existed
but mortal kinds did not.
And when for these too there came the appointed time of birth,
gods molded them within the earth (5)
from earth and fire mixing them
and from the things which blend with fire and earth.
And when they were ready to lead them to the light,
they bade Prometheus and Epimetheus
adorn them and assign powers to each as was fitting. (10)
And Epimetheus asked Prometheus if he could assign them himself.
"And when I've assigned them," he said, "you inspect them."
And so persuading, he assigned.
And in his assigning, to some he attached strength without speed;
the weaker with speed he adorned; (15)
some he weaponed;
to some awarding a weaponless nature,
another power he devised for their safety:
to the ones he wrapped in smallness
winged flight or underground home he assigned; (20)
the ones he increased in greatness,
by this very thing he made them safe.
And so he assigned the rest, maintaining a balance.

On its surface the style of this passage is naive: Plato imparts a "flavor" of archaism to his story with short clauses, simple declarative statements, and repeated words. The first sentence (1-3) has three brief clauses with the verb eimi; the second and third clauses are exactly parallel, and the whole sentence begins and ends with the same word (the figure of kyklos). The variation theoi/thneta gene avoids a too-exact symmetry.

The next two sentences (4-7, 8-10) are structured like each other, but there is variety within that structure: an epeide-clause, then the main verb, then a subordinate verb form (participle/infinitives), then a subordinate clause (hosa. . .hos. . .). [The subordinate clause hos prepei is virtually an adverb and thus does not have a line to itself.] The first of these sentences could have been ended after lines 5 or 6; the addition of line 7 is elegant, with its chiasmus (ges kai puros, 6; puri kai gei, 7) and the variation meixantes/kerannutai.

Three short statements follow (11-13), with a fivefold repetition of forms of nemo carrying over from the preceding sentence (10) and into the next (14). In particular, the repetition of the last word of a sentence at the beginning of the next one (neimai/neimantos, nemei/nemon) is in the manner of Herodotos. Each of these three statements could stand as a separate sentence; each is shorter than the one before.

One can see the art of this by glancing at the next sentence, which runs through line 18 (in thought, all the way to 23): exactly the sort of variety that Plato always seeks, and a sure sign that he is creating the illusion of a naive style, not the real thing. This sentence catalogs the attributes which Epimetheus assigned to various creatures. After the link-word nemon these are set forth with a men and three des; note the chiastic variation tois/tous/tous/tois and the varied length of the clauses. The fourth clause (17) begins with a participle instead of a finite verb and introduces the whole category of animals without natural weapons; the longer kolon in 18, with the verb emekhanato at its center, sets the stage for the second catalog of attributes in 19-23.

Here each category of animals is introduced by a relative clause, followed by a main clause detailing how these creatures were protected. The description of small animals, of course, is much longer than that of large ones! Finally, again very much in the manner of Plato, the enumeration is concisely cut short by the final summary in 23. Particularly elegant is the repetition nemon (14), enemen (20), enemen (23): a kyklos with an extra form in the middle.

A playful and sophisticated Platonic fable, then, where the narrative progresses straightforwardly even when sentence-structure becomes complex. Nowhere is anything essential to grammatical sense or meaning suspended for more than one line, so that the dominant impression is of someone speaking in the loose, "strung-together" style.

But when one looks back at the elegant repetitions and subordinations, at the effortless variety of Plato's expression, and especially at the elaborate edifice of 14-23 (nemon . . . enemen), one has, in retrospect, a sense of rounding, a sense that one has been led on a planned path with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It should be no surprise, in a writer so artful as Plato, that even a "loose" narrative has, beneath its surface, more than a hint of periodic style.

[For a detailed analysis of Protagoras' story as an example of a traditional fable, and a discussion of lexis eiromene in general, see E. Norden, Agnostos Theos, Anhang VII, pp. 366-379. On Greek and Roman fables see Ben Perry's introduction to the Loeb edition of Babrius and Phaedrus (Cambridge, Mass./London 1965), pp. xi-xxxiv.]

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