PROLEGOMENA.

as he had sensed each thing, to distinguish it with the lights of oratory, and to equip it with every kind of ornament, effective tropes, gravest epithets, etc. The mode of these same emotions is naturally followed by either brevity of speech or abundance, mixed together.

Sentences are also frequent in Velleius, as is the sententious style of speaking, which is entirely oratorical. For not only does he propose in infinite speech things that were to be pronounced finitely concerning certain persons, things, and times, and comprehends individuals under a universal genus (see, for example, I. 12, II. 3, 128, etc.), but he also more often intermingles universal propositions, that is, statements about a certain universal genus of things, drawn either from the narrated event itself and the experience of similar things, or recalled to the mind of the writer in a singular case. Velleius uses these sentences, which indeed sharpen and instruct the reader’s mind, so very frequently that—since they simultaneously reveal the sharpness of the writer’s wit and the wisdom of his mind—he sometimes seems to have grasped them greedily for the sake of showing off the sharpness of his wit; though this was a trait of the age rather than of any one writer. These sentences occur to readers either at the end of a narrated event, so that judgments about the explained matter might be sharpened, guided, and the mind instructed by some wise precept (see, for example, I. 2, 11, II. 10), or in the transition to a new and great and wonderful matter, or to a new event of such a matter, both to prepare the mind, as it were (see, for example, II. 53, 75, etc.), and to instruct concerning their common causes, whether situated in the common nature of things and men, or in the judgment of fortune (see, for example, I. 12, II. 30, 57, 118). Velleius sought the sharpness by which this kind of sentence is most commended, especially in antitheses, in which he reveals himself by detecting, perceiving, and arranging things contrary to one another, and indeed not obvious to everyone’s eyes. These same antitheses also reign in the whole of the writer's narrative style. See, for example, II. 1, 5, 49, etc., 84, 117. But what is wont to happen to writers who too greedily grasp at sharpness—that they sometimes quibble, and thus fall into a stale and childish coldness—that also happens to Velleius. See I. 16, 18, II. 4, 22. Contrary to this, the smoothness-