5
Lysias once composed a speech for a litigant and gave it to him. The man read it through a number of times and came to Lysias in despair and said that the first time he read it the speech seemed to him wonderfully good, but on taking it up a second and third time it appeared completely dull and ineffectual. Well, said Lysias laughing, isn’t it only once that you are going to speak it before the jurors? And consider the persuasiveness and charm of Lysias! For he is one who, for my part, I say has a fair portion in the violet-tressed Muses.An anonymous fragment, attribtued to Sappho by Bergk ( Poet. Lyr. Gr., iii. p. 703), to Bacchylides by Diehl (Anthologia Lyrica, ii. p. 162); Cf. Edmonds, Lyra Graeca, iii. p. 429. And of the things said about the Poet this is the truest - that Homer alone has survived the fastidiousness of men,Cf. Pope’s Those oft are stratagems which error seem, Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream, with the judgement of Horace, Ars Poetica, 359. since he is ever new and his charm is ever at its best; yet none the less, he spoke and proclaimed that famous remark about himself, I scorn to tell A tale again that’s once been clearly toldOd., xii. 452-453; Cf.Moralia, 764 a.; and he avoids and fears the satiety which lies in ambush for every tale, leading his hearers from one narrative to another and soothing away the ear’s surfeit by constant novelty. But babblers actually wear out our ears by their repetitions, just as though they were smudging palimpsests.Plutarch probably means that talkers wear out our ears by the repetitions of stale news, just as palimpsests are worn out by constant erasure. But not all points of the comparison are clear; Cf.Moralia, 779 c; Cicero, ad Fam., vii. 18. 2.
