Woe to the modern mess! Because though isocolon can still be used in the calm Greek manner, it usually isn’t. When Cassius Clay said ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’, he had no calm and peaceful thoughts in his mind. And when Rick tells Ilsa, ‘Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of’, he doesn’t sound like Socrates contemplating virtue, he sounds like a man in a crisis with a gun and a girl at an airport.
