Hyperbata are to be reckoned of the same kind. They are an arrangement of words or thoughts shifted from the natural sequence — the truest stamp, as it were, of vehement passion. For just as those who are really angry or afraid or indignant, or possessed by jealousy or any other emotion (passions are countless, no one could say how many), continually meet other thoughts, set out from one and leap to another, throwing in something irrelevant in between, then circling back to the first; everywhere, as if by a shifting wind, dragged this way and that by their distress, they alter the order of their words and thoughts in countless turns from the natural sequence: just so, in the best writers, mimesis through hyperbaton is borne to the very work of nature. For art is then perfect when it seems to be nature, and nature again is right when it surrounds an unobserved art. So speaks the Phocaean Dionysius in Herodotus: ‘Our affairs, men of Ionia, are now upon the razor's edge, whether to be free or slaves, and runaways at that. Now, then, if you are willing to put up with hardship, there will be present toil for you, but you will be able to overcome the enemy.’ §1
The natural order would have been: ‘Men of Ionia, now is the time for you to embrace toils; for our affairs are now upon the razor's edge.’ But he transposed the address ‘men of Ionia,’ and broke in at once with the matter of fear, as if not having even time to address his hearers in the face of the impending dread; and he reversed the order of the thoughts. Before saying that they must work — for that is what he is urging — he gives the reason why they must work, ‘our affairs are upon the razor's edge,’ so that what he says may seem not premeditated but forced from him. §2
Thucydides goes still further, being most expert at sundering by transpositions even what is by nature wholly knit and indivisible. Demosthenes is not so high-handed as he, but most lavish of any in this kind, and showing much of forensic energy by transposing, and even by appearing to speak on the spur of the moment, and besides drawing his hearers along into the danger of his long hyperbata. §3
Often, leaving the thought he set out to utter hanging, and bringing in among other things, as into a foreign and disjointed order, one item after another from outside, plunging the hearer into fear lest the whole utterance should fail, and forcing him through anxiety to share the speaker's risk; then unexpectedly, after a long interval, paying off the long-sought thought neatly at the close, he astounds the hearer all the more by the very hazard and verge of the hyperbata. Examples we shall withhold for their multitude. §4