Sometimes too the writer, while narrating about a person, suddenly turns aside and changes into that person: such a thing is a kind of outburst of passion. ‘And Hector cried out to the Trojans with a great shout, to charge against the ships and let the bloody spoils be. Whomever I shall see willingly far from the ships, I will contrive his death there on the spot.’ The narration, then, the poet attached to himself as proper to himself, but the abrupt threat he set upon the captain's wrath suddenly, with no foreshadowing — for it would have lost heat had he interposed: ‘And Hector said this and that.’ As it stands, the change of speaker outruns the changing speaker. §1
Hence the use of the figure when the occasion is so sharp that it does not allow the writer time to delay, but forces him at once to pass from person to person; as in Hecataeus: ‘Ceyx, taking these things ill, at once bade the Heraclids and their followers withdraw: “for I cannot succour you. So that you may not perish yourselves and wound me, depart to some other people.”’ §2
Demosthenes, in another way, in the speech against Aristogeiton, set passionate change of person before us with great rapidity. ‘And shall not one of you,’ he says, ‘be found with bile, with anger, at what this loathsome and shameless creature does by violence? — who, you most polluted of all men, when free speech was barred to you, not by lattices nor by doors, which one might even pry open’ — leaving the thought incomplete, he turns it sharply, almost tearing one expression by passion into two persons, ‘who, you most polluted of all men’ — then turning the speech back to Aristogeiton and seeming to leave him, yet through the very passion he has all the more brought him round. §3
Just so Penelope: ‘Herald, why have the lordly suitors sent you forth? To bid the maids of godlike Odysseus stop their work and prepare a feast for them? Would they had never wooed nor met elsewhere — let them now sup their last and final supper here, who, gathering ever and again, devour the great living, the substance of wise Telemachus; and you have not heard, from your fathers in former times, when you were children, what manner of man Odysseus was.’ §4