Kitap 9
2.14
In fact, if we break up and disarrange any sentence that may have struck us as vigorous, charming or elegant, we shall find that all its force, attraction and grace have disappeared. Cicero in his Orator breaks up some of his own utterances in this way: Neque me divitiae movent, quibus omnes Africanos et Laelios multi venalicii mercatoresque superarunt. Change the order but a little so that it will run multi superarunt mercatores venaliciique, Or. 70, 232. Nor do riches move me, in which many a merchant and slave-dealer has surpassed all such great men as Africanus and Laelius. and so on. Disarrange these periods in such a manner, and you will find that the shafts you have hurled are broken or wide of the mark.
2.15
Cicero also corrects passages in the speeches of Gracchus where the structure appears to him to be harsh. For Cicero this is becoming enough, but we may content ourselves with testing our own power of welding together in artistic form the disconnected words and phrases which present themselves to us. For why should we seek elsewhere for examples of faults which we may all of us find in our own work? One point, however, it is enough simply to notice—that the more beautiful in thought and language the sentence which you deprive of such structural cohesion, the more hideous will be the effect upon the style, for the very brilliance of the words at once exposes the carelessness of their arrangement.
