Aesion
historical figure · 2 works · 2 mentions · 2 anchored passages
in the texts
Rhetoric
Orator cited for a vivid metaphor describing the drain of Athenian resources into the Sicilian campaign.
Aesion used to say that they had drained the State into Sicily, which is a metaphor and sets the thing before the eyes.
Demosthenes
Critic whose judgment, reported by Hermippus, favored the arrangement and power of Demosthenes' written speeches over live older oratory.
And Hermippus tells us that Aesion, when asked his opinion of the ancient orators as compared with those of his own time, said that one would have listened with admiration when the older orators discoursed to the people decorously and in the grand manner, but that the speeches of Demosthenes, when read aloud, were far superior in point of arrangement and power.