Hermogenes blames him for carelessness and lack of restraint in the use of words, instancing such expressions as μονώτατος, γαλέαγρα, ἐπήβολος, etc., which seem to him unsuited for literary prose. As we have had occasion to notice already, rare and unusual words may be found occasionally in every orator, almost in every writer. Hyperides was no purist; he enlivened his style with words taken from the vocabulary of Comedy and of the streets. He did not wait for authority to use any expression which would give a point to his utterance.
Critics who expected dignified restraint in oratorical prose may have been shocked by the adjective θριπήδεστος, ‘worm-eaten,’ which he applied to Greece; to us it seems an apt metaphor. Of his other colloquialisms some recall the language of Comedy—as κρόνος (‘an old Fossil’), the diminutive θεραποντίον, and ὀβολοστάτης[441] (‘a weigher of small change’ = ‘usurer’), προσπερικόπτειν (‘to get additional pickings’—the metaphor is apparently from pruning a tree), παιδαγωγεῖν in the sense of ‘lead by the nose.’ Others seem to be merely colloquial, part of that large and unconventional vocabulary which was soon to form the basis of Hellenistic Greek; for we must remember that we are already on the verge of Hellenism, and that the Attic dialect must soon give way before the spread of a freer language. In this class we may put ἐποφθαλμιᾶν (‘to eye covetously’), ὑποπίπτειν (‘to put oneself under control of somebody’), ἐνσείω (‘to entrap’), κατατέμνειν (‘to abuse’), ἐπεμβαίνω (poetical or colloquial, ‘to trample on’).
In some of his speeches relating to hetairai he seems to have used coarse language which offended his critics; nothing offensive is found in his extant speeches.[442]
Other metaphors and similes abound; he is fond of comparing the life of the State to the life of a man, as Lycurgus does also—ἓν μὲν σῶμα ἀθάνατον ὑπείληφας ἔσεσθαι, πόλεως δὲ τηλικαύτης θάνατον κατέγνως, ‘You imagine that one person (i.e. Philip) can live for ever, and you passed sentence of death on a city as old as ours.’ The Homeric phrase ἐπὶ γήρως ὀδῷ (= ἐπὶ γήραος οὐδῷ, ‘on the threshold of old age’) is curiously introduced into a serious passage in the Demosthenes without any preparation or apology. We can only suppose that it was so familiar to his hearers that it would not strike them as being out of place in ordinary speech. It is similarly used by Lycurgus.[443] In the same speech (Against Demosthenes) Hyperides speaks of the nation being robbed of its crown, but the metaphor is suggested by the fact that actual crowns had been bestowed on Demosthenes. Such metaphors as ‘others are building their conduct on the foundations laid by Leosthenes,’ though less common in Greek than in English, are perfectly intelligible. A happy instance of his ‘sureness of aim’ which Dionysius commended is preserved in a fragment about his contemporaries:
‘Orators are like snakes; all snakes are equally loathed, but some of them, the vipers, injure men, while the big snakes eat the vipers.’[444]
He uses simile, however, with varying success; the following, though the conception is good, is not properly worked out, as the parallelism breaks down:
‘As the sun traverses the whole world, marking out the seasons, and ordering everything in due proportion, and for the prudent and temperate of mankind takes charge of the growth of their food, the fruits of the earth and all else that is beneficial for life; so our city ever continues to punish the wicked and help the righteous, preserving equal opportunities for all, and restraining covetousness, and by her own risk and loss providing common security for all Greece.’[445]
The Epitaphios from which the last quotation is taken is a speech of a formal kind composed in the epideictic style, and naturally recalls similar speeches of Isocrates and others. Its composition shows much greater care than was taken with the other speeches; thus there are few examples of harsh hiatus, a matter to which the author as a rule paid no attention. All the other extant speeches have far more instances of clashing vowels.[446] The antithetical sentences are appropriate to the style, and the periodic structure is like that of Isocrates, except that the sentences are, on the whole, shorter and simpler.
In other speeches he mingles the periodic and the free styles with discretion. The objection to a long period is that it takes time to understand it; we cannot fully appreciate the importance of any one part until we have reached the end and are in a position to look back at the whole. For practical oratory it is far better to make a short statement which may be in periodic form, and amplify it by subsequent additions loosely connected by καί, δέ, γάρ, and such particles. This is what Hyperides does with success, for instance in the opening of the Euxenippus, an argumentative passage.[447] In narrative passages a free style is expected.[448]