The natural and perspicuous expression which spontaneously rises to the mind will often refuse to accommodate itself to such a form.

It is necessary either to expand it into weakness, or to compress it into almost impenetrable density.

The latter is generally the choice of an able man, and was assuredly the choice of Thucydides.
It is scarcely necessary to say that such speeches could never have been delivered.

They are perhaps among the most difficult passages in the Greek language, and would probably have been scarcely more intelligible to an Athenian auditor than to a modern reader.

Their obscurity was acknowledged by Cicero, who was as intimate with the literature and language of Greece as the most accomplished of its natives, and who seems to have held a respectable rank among the Greek authors.