κοῦραι ἐλαφρὰ ποδῶν ἴχνι’ ἀειράμεναι.
names the most suitable rhythms, shows where each of them is clearly serviceable, and adduces some passages by which he endeavours to establish his statement. But apart from the testimony of Aristotle, experience itself will show that some rhythms must be included in prose-writing if there is to be upon it the bloom of poetical beauty.
For example, the speech against Aristocrates which I mentioned a moment ago begins with a comic tetrameter line (set there with its anapaestic rhythms), but it is a foot short of completion and in consequence escapes detection: μηδεὶς ὑμῶν, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, νομίσῃ με. If this line had an additional foot either at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end, it would be a perfect anapaestic tetrameter, to which some give the name “Aristophanic.”
Let none of you, O ye Athenians, think that I am standing before you,
corresponds to the line
Now then shall be told what in days of old was the fashion of boys’ education.[185]
It will perhaps be said in reply that this has happened not from design, but accidentally, since a natural tendency in us often improvises metrical fragments. Let the truth of this be granted. Yet the next clause as well, if you resolve the second elision, which has obscured its true character by linking it on to the third clause, will be a complete elegiac pentameter as follows:—
Come with intent to indulge personal hate of my own,
similar to these words:—