On the Sublime
On the Sublime Imperial Longinus GreekThe little treatise of Caecilius on the sublime, which you and I, my dear Postumius Florentianus, examined together, seemed to us, as you know, to fall short of its great subject and to touch hardly at all upon the essential points; nor did it furnish its readers with much of that profit which a writer should above all aim at. For in every systematic study two things are required: first, to show what the subject is; second in order but of greater importance in effect, to show by what methods and means we may ourselves attain it. Yet Caecilius, while he tries through countless instances to show us, as though we were ignorant, what kind of thing the sublime is, somehow passed over as unnecessary the question of how we might be able to raise our own natures to a certain measure of grandeur.
Still, perhaps we ought not so much to blame the man for what he left out as to praise him for the very conception and earnestness of his undertaking. But since you have urged me too by all means to set down some notes on the sublime for your own gratification, let us consider whether there is anything in my observations of use to public men. You yourself, my friend, will help me judge the particular points with perfect honesty, as your nature fits you and your duty requires; for he spoke well who, when asked what we have in us that is like the gods, answered, "Doing good, and speaking truth."
Since I am writing to you, dear friend, who are versed in letters, I am nearly relieved of the need to establish at length, by way of preface, that sublimity is a certain consummate excellence and distinction of language, and that the greatest poets and prose writers have won their pre-eminence and clothed their fame with immortality from this source and no other.
For the effect of genius is not to persuade the hearers but rather to transport them out of themselves. Invariably what inspires wonder, with its power of amazing us, prevails over what is merely convincing and pleasing. For our persuasion is as a rule something we can control, whereas these things, exerting a sovereign and irresistible power, master every hearer. Skill in invention, and the due ordering and marshalling of facts, do not show themselves in one or two touches but emerge gradually from the whole tissue of the composition; the sublime, on the other hand, brought out at the right moment, tears everything up like a thunderbolt and at one stroke reveals the full power of the orator. Such observations, my dearest Terentianus, and others like them, you could yourself supply from your own experience.
But we must first raise the question whether there is any art of the sublime or of profundity at all, since some hold that those who reduce such things to technical rules are altogether deceived. For greatness, they say, is born, not taught, and the one art that produces it is to be born for it; the works of nature, in their view, are weakened and made altogether feebler when reduced to the dry bones of rules.
But I maintain that this will be found to be otherwise if one observes that Nature, though for the most part a law to herself in matters of passion and elevation, is yet no random force operating without method in every case; and that, while she is the first and original element of production underlying all things, it is method that is able to determine and provide the right measure for each occasion, and the most unerring practice and use; and further, that great endeavours are more perilous when left to themselves, without knowledge, unsupported and unballasted, abandoned to mere impulse and untaught daring. For they need the spur often, but also the bridle.
What Demosthenes declares of human life in general, that the greatest of goods is to enjoy good fortune, but second and not inferior is to take good counsel, since the absence of the latter wholly destroys the former, this we may say of literature too: Nature holds the place of good fortune, art that of good counsel. And, what is most important, the very fact that some things in literature depend on nature alone we can learn from no other source than from art. If, then, as I said, the critic of those eager to learn would reckon all this with himself, he would no longer, I think, regard the study of our present subject as superfluous and useless . . .
. . . and let them hold in check the furnace's farthest blaze. For if I see one hearth-keeper alone, I will weave in a single torrent-coil and burn the roof and char it all to ash; but I have not yet shrieked my noble strain. This is no longer tragic but mock-tragic—the "coils," the spewing up to heaven, the making of Boreas a flute-player, and all the rest. For the language is turbid and confused with imagery rather than made forcible, and if you examine each phrase in the light, it slips little by little from the terrible into the contemptible. But when in tragedy, a thing naturally swollen and admitting of bombast, an ill-timed turgidity is still beyond pardon, much less, I think, could it suit discourses of plain truth.
So too the phrases of Gorgias of Leontini are laughed at when he writes "Xerxes the Persians' Zeus" and "vultures, living tombs," and some of the expressions of Callisthenes, which are not lofty but up in the air, and still more those of Cleitarchus; for the man is all bark and bluster, "piping," in the words of Sophocles, "on slender reeds, but without the mouth-band." The like is true of Amphicrates, Hegesias, and Matris; for often, when they think themselves inspired, they are not in a frenzy but at play.
On the whole, turgidity seems to be among the hardest faults to guard against. For all who aim at grandeur, in their flight from the charge of weakness and aridity, are somehow carried away into this, persuaded that "to slip in the pursuit of greatness is yet a noble fault."
But swellings are bad in writing as in the body, hollow and unreal, and apt to turn into their opposite; for nothing, they say, is drier than a man with dropsy. Now while turgidity seeks to outsoar the sublime, puerility is the direct opposite of grandeur; for it is wholly low and mean-spirited, and truly the most ignoble of faults. What then is puerility? Plainly it is a schoolboy notion, which through over-elaboration ends in frigidity. Men slip into this kind when, reaching after the unusual, the elaborate, and above all the pleasing, they run aground on the trivial and the affected.
Beside this lies a third kind of fault in matters of passion, which Theodorus called false enthusiasm. It is passion out of season and empty where no passion is needed, or unmeasured where measure is required. For often men are carried away, as if drunk, into emotions of their own and merely academic, which no longer belong to the subject; then they make fools of themselves before hearers who feel nothing, naturally, for they are beside themselves before men who are not. But the subject of the passions I reserve for another place.
Of the second of the faults I mentioned, namely frigidity, Timaeus is full, a man otherwise capable, and not without power on occasion to reach grandeur of language, learned and inventive; only he is most keen in detecting the faults of others while blind to his own, and through his passion for forever starting strange conceits he often falls into the most utter childishness.
I will cite one or two instances from the man, since Caecilius has already anticipated most. In praising Alexander the Great he says that he conquered all Asia in fewer years than Isocrates took to write his Panegyric oration urging war against Persia. Marvellous indeed is the comparison of the Macedonian with the rhetorician! For plainly, Timaeus, the Spartans were on this reckoning far inferior in valour to Isocrates, since they took thirty years to capture Messene, while he composed his Panegyric in only ten.
And on the Athenians captured in Sicily, in what manner does he exclaim? That because they had committed impiety against Hermes and mutilated his statues, for this they paid the penalty, and not least on account of one man, who on his father's side was descended from the wronged god, Hermocrates the son of Hermon. So that I wonder, my dearest Terentianus, how he does not also write of Dionysius the tyrant, that, since he was impious toward Zeus and Heracles, it was for this that Dion and Heracleides deprived him of his tyranny.
But why speak of Timaeus, when even those heroes, I mean Xenophon and Plato, though they came from the school of Socrates, nevertheless sometimes forget themselves for the sake of such petty graces? The one, in his Constitution of the Lacedaemonians, writes: "You could less hear a voice from them than from figures of stone, less turn their eyes than those of bronze, and you would think them more modest than the very maidens in their eyes." To speak of "the maidens in our eyes" as modest was worthy of Amphicrates, not of Xenophon. And, good Heracles, what a thing it is to be persuaded that the pupils in all men's eyes alike are bashful, when they say there is no surer sign of a man's shamelessness than his eyes: "drunkard, with the eyes of a dog," as one says.
Timaeus, however, as if laying hold of stolen goods, would not leave even this frigid touch to Xenophon. At any rate he says of Agathocles that, in carrying off his cousin, who had been given to another, from the unveiling ceremony, he "made off"—a thing which whoever would do who had not whores, and not pupils, in his eyes?
And again, the otherwise divine Plato, wishing to say "tablets," writes: "Having written, they shall set up in the temples memorials of cypress wood." And again: "Concerning walls, Megillus, I should side with Sparta in letting the walls sleep, lying upon the ground, and not rousing them up."
Nor far off is the saying of Herodotus, that beautiful women are "torments of the eyes." Yet this has some excuse, for the speakers in him are barbarians and in their cups; still, not even from such characters is it well, through pettiness of spirit, to play the fool in the judgement of all time.
All such unseemly things take root in literature from one cause, that passion for novelty of thought about which the men of today are especially crazed. For from the very sources of our excellences come, as a rule, our faults as well. Hence beauty of expression, sublimity, and besides these the pleasing graces, lend themselves to success in composition; but these same things become, just as they are foundations of success, so also of its opposites. Much the same may be said of variations, hyperboles, and the use of plurals; we shall show in what follows the danger they seem to carry. It is therefore necessary now to raise the question and propose how we may be able to escape the faults that are so closely mingled with the sublime.
And we shall be able to do so, my friend, if first of all we acquire a clear understanding and discernment of true sublimity. Yet the matter is hard to grasp, for the judgement of literature is the last fruit of long experience. Nevertheless, to speak by way of precept, it is perhaps not impossible to derive the means of discerning these things from some such source as this.
You must know, my dear friend, that, just as in common life nothing is truly great the contempt of which is itself great, such as riches, honours, reputations, sovereignties, and all else that has much outward show of pomp—these would not, to a man of sense, seem surpassing goods, since the very disdain of them is no small good; for men admire, rather than those who have such things, those who could have them but through greatness of soul look down on them—so too with what is elevated in poetry and prose we must consider whether it has only some such semblance of grandeur, to which much is attached at random by way of false embellishment, but which, when unfolded, proves to be hollow, things which it is nobler to despise than to admire.
For naturally, by some instinct, our soul is uplifted by the true sublime, and taking a proud flight is filled with joy and exultation, as though it had itself produced what it heard.
Whenever, then, a thing heard repeatedly by a man of sense and experienced in literature fails to dispose his soul to greatness, and leaves in his mind no more food for reflection than the words themselves convey, but on close and continued scrutiny sinks in his esteem, it cannot be true sublimity, being preserved only so long as it is heard. For that is truly great which bears much reflection, which it is hard, or rather impossible, to resist, and the memory of which is strong and indelible.
In general, regard those sublimities as fine and genuine which please always and please all. For when men differing in pursuits, ways of life, ambitions, ages, and modes of speech hold one and the same opinion about the same things, then the verdict and assent of so many discordant voices lend strong and indisputable confirmation to the object of their admiration.
There being, as one might say, five most productive sources of sublimity in discourse, with the power of expression as a kind of common ground presupposed beneath all five of these forms, without which nothing avails at all: first and most powerful is the faculty of grasping great conceptions, as I defined it in my work on Xenophon; second is vehement and inspired passion. These two constituents of the sublime are for the most part innate, whereas the others come also through art: the proper formation of figures—these being of two kinds, figures of thought and figures of speech—and, after these, noble diction, of which the parts are in turn the choice of words and the use of figurative and elaborated language; and the fifth source of grandeur, embracing all that went before it, is dignified and elevated composition. Come now, let us examine what is contained under each of these heads, premising only that of the five divisions Caecilius omitted some, as for instance passion.
Now if he thought that sublimity and passion were one and the same thing, and held that they always exist together and are by nature inseparable, he is mistaken. For some passions are found which are far from sublime and even mean, such as pity, grief, and fear; and conversely many sublimities exist apart from passion, as, among countless other instances, the poet's daring lines about the Aloadae: Ossa upon Olympus they strove to set, and on Ossa Pelion with its shaking leaves, that heaven might be scaled; and the still mightier conclusion he adds: "And they would have accomplished it."
Among the orators, too, panegyrics and ceremonial and display speeches contain throughout an element of dignity and sublimity, yet are for the most part devoid of passion; whence the least passionate of orators are the panegyrists, and conversely the encomiasts are least passionate.
But if, on the other hand, Caecilius thought that the emotional never contributes at all to the sublime, and therefore judged it not worthy of mention, he is wholly deceived. For I would confidently affirm that nothing makes for grandeur so much as noble passion, where it is in place, breathing out its words as if in a frenzy and possessed by some divine inspiration, and making them, as it were, prophetic.
Nevertheless, since the first of the sources, I mean grandeur of conception, holds the chief place above the rest, here too, even though the gift be rather bestowed than acquired, we must, so far as is possible, nourish our souls to greatness and make them, as it were, ever pregnant with noble inspiration.
In what way, you will ask? I have written elsewhere something to this effect: sublimity is the echo of greatness of soul. Hence even a bare thought, without utterance, is sometimes admired for the mere greatness of soul it reveals, as the silence of Ajax in the Summoning of the Dead is great and loftier than any speech.
First, then, it is altogether necessary to lay down the source from which it springs, that the true orator must have no low or ignoble spirit. For it is impossible for those who think small and servile thoughts, and pursue them throughout their lives, to produce anything admirable and worthy of all time. Great words, in the nature of things, belong to those whose conceptions are weighty.
Thus the most extraordinary utterances fall to men of the loftiest spirit. When Parmenio said, "I should have been content . . ." [Alexander replied with words measuring] the distance from earth to heaven. And one might call this the measure not so much of Strife as of Homer.
Unlike this, however, is the line of Hesiod about Gloom—if indeed the Shield is to be reckoned Hesiod's—"from her nostrils ran the mucus." For he has made the image not terrible but loathsome. But how does Homer magnify the divine powers? As far as a man's eye reaches into the misty distance, seated upon a watchtower, gazing over the wine-dark sea, so far do the loud-neighing horses of the gods leap at a bound. He measures their stride by a cosmic interval. Who then, because of this excess of grandeur, would not justly exclaim that, if the gods' horses took two such bounds in succession, they would no longer find room within the universe?
Sublime too are the imaginings in the Battle of the Gods: Round about, the great heaven and Olympus pealed like a trumpet. And the lord of the dead below, Aïdoneus, took fright, and in fear leapt from his throne and cried aloud, lest above him Poseidon the earth-shaker should split the earth asunder, and the houses of mortals and immortals be laid bare, ghastly and dank, which even the gods abhor. You see, my friend, how, when the earth is rent from its foundations, when Tartarus itself is laid bare, and the whole world is overturned and torn apart, all things at once—heaven and Hades, things mortal and immortal—share in the war and peril of that battle.
But these things, though terrible, are, unless taken allegorically, altogether impious and inconsistent with what is fitting. For Homer seems to me, in handing down the wounds of the gods, their factions, vengeances, tears, bonds, and manifold sufferings, to have made the men in the Iliad gods, so far as their power goes, and the gods men. Yet for us, in our misery, death lies as a harbour from our ills, while of the gods he has made not the nature but the misfortune everlasting.
Far better than these scenes of the Battle of the Gods are the passages that present the divine as something undefiled and great, truly pure and unmixed, such as the lines on Poseidon, a passage worked out by many before us: The long mountains and the forest trembled, and the peaks and the city of the Trojans and the ships of the Achaeans beneath the immortal feet of Poseidon as he went. He set out to drive over the waves, and the sea-beasts gambolled beneath him from every side out of their lairs, and knew their lord. The sea parted for joy, and the horses flew on.
So too the lawgiver of the Jews, no ordinary man, since he both conceived and expressed the power of the Deity as it deserved, wrote at the very beginning of his Laws: "God said"—what? "Let there be light, and there was; let there be earth, and there was."
I shall perhaps not seem tiresome, my friend, if I cite one further passage from the poet, this one of human affairs, for the sake of showing how he is wont to enter into the grandeur of heroic themes. A sudden darkness and impenetrable night hold back the battle of the Greeks. Then Ajax, at a loss, says: Father Zeus, deliver the sons of the Achaeans from the mist, make a clear sky, grant that our eyes may see; and in the light destroy us, if such be your will. This is in truth the feeling of Ajax. For he does not pray for life—that would have been too mean a request for the hero—but, since in the helpless darkness he could turn his valour to no noble use, he is angry at being idle in the fight, and prays for light as soon as may be, sure of finding at least a burial worthy of his valour, even though Zeus himself be arrayed against him.
But here Homer breathes with the contest like a favouring wind, and feels nothing less than this: he rages, as when Ares the spear-brandisher, or destructive fire, rages among the mountains in the thickets of a deep wood, and foam gathers about his mouth. Yet he shows throughout the Odyssey—for this too must be considered for many reasons—that when a great genius is on the decline, the love of storytelling is characteristic of old age.
For it is plain from many things that he composed this work second, and not least from his introducing into the Odyssey, as episodes of the Trojan war, the remnants of the sufferings at Troy, and from his there rendering to the heroes the laments and mournings already long since foreknown. For the Odyssey is nothing but an epilogue to the Iliad: There lies Ajax the warlike, there Achilles, there Patroclus, a counsellor equal to the gods, there too my own dear son.
From the same cause, I think, the Iliad, written at the height of his power, has its whole frame dramatic and full of conflict, while the Odyssey is for the most part narrative, which is characteristic of age. So in the Odyssey one might liken Homer to the setting sun, whose grandeur remains without its intensity. For he no longer keeps here the same pitch as in those poems of Troy, nor are his sublimities level and never sinking, nor the same outpouring of crowding passions, nor the supple, political quality, packed with images drawn from reality; but, as when Ocean withdraws into itself and is left deserted about its own bounds, so we are shown the ebbings of his grandeur and its wandering into the fabulous and the incredible.
In saying this I do not forget the storms in the Odyssey, the adventures of the Cyclops, and certain other things; I am describing an old age, but an old age of Homer's. Yet in all these the fabulous prevails over the active throughout. I have digressed into this, as I said, to show how in the decline of genius the greatest minds sometimes turn most readily to trifling, such as the matter of the wineskin, and the men turned into swine by Circe—whom Zoïlus called "weeping piglets"—and Zeus reared like a nestling by the doves, and the man ten days without food after the shipwreck, and the improbable details of the slaying of the suitors. For what else could we call these but in truth the dreams of Zeus?
There is a second reason why these matters of the Odyssey should be mentioned: that it may be plain to you how the decline of passion in great writers and poets relaxes into character-drawing. For such are the domestic doings of Odysseus, depicted by Homer with an eye to character, a kind of comedy of manners.
Come now, let us consider whether we have anything else that can make our discourse sublime. Since with all things there are by nature attendant certain elements coexisting in their substance, it would necessarily be a source of sublimity for us always to select from these the most essential, and to be able, by combining them with one another, to make as it were a single body. For one writer attracts the hearer by the choice of materials, another by the massing together of those chosen. Thus Sappho takes the emotions attendant on the madness of love from its actual symptoms and from real life. And wherein does she show her excellence? In that she is skilful both to select the extreme and intense among them and to bind them together.
He seems to me equal to the gods, that man, whoever he is, who sits facing you, and close at hand listens to your sweet speaking,
and your lovely laughter—which truly has set the heart in my breast a-flutter; for when I look on you a moment, then can I no longer speak;
but my tongue is broken, and at once a subtle fire has run beneath my flesh; with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears are ringing;
the sweat pours down me, and a trembling seizes me all over; I am paler than grass, and I seem to myself but a little short of dying.
But all must be endured, since even a poor man . . .
Do you not marvel how at one moment she summons soul, body, ears, tongue, eyes, complexion, all as though they had left her and were another's, and by contraries at once freezes and burns, is irrational and yet rational? For she is either in terror or near death; so that not one passion appears in her, but a concourse of passions. All these things happen to lovers; but, as I said, the seizing of the extremes and the bringing of them into one made the excellence. Just so, I think, does the poet, in his storms, single out the most violent of their attendant circumstances.
The author of the Arimaspeia thinks these lines terrible: This too is a great marvel to our minds: men dwell upon the water, far from land, in the deep; wretched are they, for they have toilsome tasks, their eyes among the stars, their lives upon the sea; truly, often, lifting their hands to the gods, they pray, while their inward parts heave wretchedly. It is plain to all, I think, that there is more flowery prettiness than terror in these words.
But Homer—how? Let one example out of many be given: He fell upon them, as when a wave falls upon a swift ship, a furious wave reared by the winds from beneath the clouds, and the whole ship is hidden in foam, and the terrible blast of the wind roars in the sail, and the sailors tremble in their hearts in fear; for they are borne but a little way out of the reach of death.
Aratus too attempted to transfer this same idea: "and a little plank wards off Hades." Only he made it petty and polished instead of terrible, and besides he removed the danger when he said, "the plank keeps off Hades"; for it does keep it off. But the poet does not once for all set a limit to the peril; he pictures the men as forever, all but at every wave, perishing again and again. Moreover, by forcibly compelling together against nature, and pressing into one another, two prepositions not usually compounded—"out from under death"—he has tortured the verse to match the disaster it expresses, and by the compression of the verse he has perfectly moulded the disaster, and all but stamped upon the phrase the very character of the peril: "they are borne out from under death."
Not otherwise does Archilochus write of the shipwreck, and Demosthenes of the bringing of the news: "It was evening," he says. But they cleared away the salient points, as one might say, choosing them by merit and combining them, inserting nothing tawdry or undignified or academic in between. For such things spoil the whole, producing as it were chinks and crevices in the structure of grandeur built up and walled together by the close relation of its parts.
Akin to the qualities already mentioned is that excellence which they call amplification, when, the matters and the contests admitting of it, in successive sections fresh grandeurs are continually brought in, rolling one upon another in mounting succession.
Whether this be done by way of commonplaces, or of intensification, or of strengthening of facts or arguments, or of the marshalling of deeds or passions—for there are countless kinds of amplification—the orator must nevertheless recognise that none of these can stand complete by itself apart from sublimity, except perhaps in expressions of pity or in disparagement. In the other kinds of amplification, if you take away the sublime, you will take out, as it were, the soul from the body; for at once their effective power is enfeebled and emptied if it is not braced up together with the sublimities.
But in what respect the present precepts differ from what was just said—for that was a circumscribing of the salient points and their composition into a unity—and in what generally sublimity differs from amplification, I must, for the sake of clearness itself, briefly determine.
Now the definition given by the writers of handbooks does not satisfy me. Amplification, they say, is language that invests the subject with grandeur. But this definition might equally serve for sublimity and passion and figures, since these too invest the discourse with a certain grandeur. To me they seem to differ from one another in that sublimity lies in elevation, amplification also in mass; hence the former often subsists in a single thought, the latter always with quantity and a certain abundance.
And amplification is, to define it in outline, a filling out drawn from all the elements and topics inherent in the matter, strengthening by accumulation the structure already built up, differing herein from proof, that the one demonstrates the point at issue . . . most richly, like some sea, it is poured out into widely extended grandeur in many directions.
Hence, I think, in the natural order of things the orator, being more passionate, has much that is fiery and kindled with feeling, whereas the writer settled in dignity and stately grandeur is not cold, but is not so impetuous.
On no other grounds than these, it seems to me, my dearest Terentianus—if indeed we Greeks too may be allowed an opinion—does Cicero differ from Demosthenes in their grandeurs. For the one is sublime chiefly in his abruptness, Cicero in his diffuseness; and our master, because he burns and ravages everything at once, as it were, with violence, with speed, force, and intensity, might be likened to a thunderbolt or a flash of lightning, while Cicero, like some spreading conflagration, ranges and rolls over the whole field, with a fire that is abundant and lasting, distributed now here, now there, and fed by succession.
But of these things you can judge better. The opportunity for the Demosthenic sublimity and high tension is in passages of intensification and violent passion, and wherever the hearer must be wholly amazed; that for diffuseness, where one must overwhelm with a flood. The latter is fitting for the most part in commonplaces, perorations, digressions, and all descriptive and display passages, in histories and discourses on nature, and in not a few other kinds.
That Plato, however—for I return to him—flowing on in such a noiseless stream is none the less grand, you cannot fail to know, having read the passage in the Republic. He says: "Those who are without experience of wisdom and virtue, but are always engaged in feastings and the like, are carried downward, it seems, and there wander throughout life; toward the truth above they have never looked up nor been borne, nor have they tasted of pure and stable pleasure, but, like cattle, ever looking downward and bent toward the earth and their tables, they graze, fattening themselves and breeding, and through greed for these things kicking and butting one another with horns and hoofs of iron, they kill one another in their insatiate desire."
This man shows us, if we will not slight it, that there is another road besides those mentioned that leads to the sublime. What is it, and of what kind? The imitation and emulation of the great writers and poets of the past. And to this aim, my friend, let us cling fast. For many are carried away by a spirit not their own, in the same manner as the Pythian priestess is said, when she approaches the tripod where there is a cleft in the earth breathing forth, as they say, a divine vapour, to be straightway impregnated with the divine power and to prophesy on the instant by inspiration. So from the genius of the ancients there flow into the souls of those who emulate them, as from sacred openings, certain effluences, by which even those not greatly given to prophecy are inspired and share in the grandeur of others.
Was Herodotus alone most Homeric? Stesichorus before him, and Archilochus; and beyond all these Plato, who drew off into himself countless rills from the Homeric spring. And perhaps we should have needed proofs of this, had not Ammonius and his school collected and recorded particular instances.
The thing is no plagiarism, but rather like a taking of impressions from beautiful forms or figures or works of art. Nor would Plato, I think, have brought such things to flower among the doctrines of philosophy, nor have entered so often into poetic themes and phrases, had he not striven with all his heart, by Zeus, for the first prize against Homer, like a new combatant against one already admired—perhaps too eagerly and as it were in single combat, yet not without profit; for, as Hesiod says, "this strife is good for mortals." And truly this is a fair contest and a crown most worthy of fame, in which even to be defeated by one's predecessors is no disgrace.
Therefore, when we too are working at something that needs sublimity of thought and grandeur, it is well to form in our souls the image of how, if it chanced, Homer would have said this same thing, or how Plato or Demosthenes would have given it sublimity, or Thucydides in history. For those persons, presenting themselves to us in emulation and shining as it were before us, will somehow lift our souls toward the standards we have imaged forth.
And still more, if we add to our minds this further thought: how would Homer, if present, or Demosthenes have heard this that I am saying, and how would they have been affected by it? For truly it is a great contest, to set before oneself such a tribunal and theatre for one's own words, and to render account of one's writings before such heroes as judges and witnesses.
More stimulating than these is it, if you add: how would all time to come hear me, having written this? And if any man, from the very outset, fears lest he utter something passing beyond his own life and age, then must the conceptions of such a soul be incomplete and blind, like things born untimely, never brought to bear toward the time of after-fame.
For grandeur and elevated language and contest, besides these, my young friend, visualisations also are most effective in preparing the way. So at least some call them image-makings. For the name "imagination" is commonly given to every thought, however arising, that produces speech; but the term has now prevailed for those cases where, under the influence of inspiration and passion, you seem to see what you describe and set it before the eyes of your hearers.
That rhetorical visualisation aims at one thing and that of the poets at another will not escape you, nor that the end of the latter, in poetry, is amazement, of the former, in oratory, vividness; yet both alike seek the emotional and the stirring. O mother, I beseech you, do not let loose upon me those bloody-faced and serpent-shapen maidens; they are here, here, leaping upon me! And: "Alas, she will kill me; where shall I flee?" Here the poet himself saw the Furies, and what he imagined he all but compelled his hearers also to behold.
Now Euripides is most laborious in dramatising these two passions, madness and love, and in these is more successful than, I scarcely know, in any others; nevertheless he is not without daring in attempting the other kinds of visualisation as well. Though by no means greatly gifted by nature, he yet compelled his own nature in many places to become tragic, and at every point of grandeur, like the poet, with his tail he lashes his flanks and haunches on both sides, and stirs himself to fight.
Thus the Sun, handing the reins to Phaethon, says: Drive on, but enter not the Libyan sky; for, having no moisture in its temper, it will let your wheel sink down; and then, further: hold your course toward the seven Pleiades. So much he heard, then snatched the reins; he struck the flanks of the winged team and let them go, and they flew up the folds of air. The father behind, riding on Sirius' back, rode on, counselling the boy: "Drive there, turn the car this way, this way." Would you not say that the soul of the writer mounts the chariot, and, sharing the danger with the horses, takes wing with them? For never, had it not been borne along on a level with those heavenly works, could it have imagined such things. Like is the passage on Cassandra, "But, O horse-loving Trojans."
Aeschylus ventures upon visualisations of the most heroic kind, as in his Seven against Thebes: Seven men, he says, fierce captains of companies, slaughtering a bull over a black-bound shield, and touching the bull's blood with their hands, swore by Ares and Enyo and blood-loving Terror, binding themselves by oath, without pity, to one another's death; though at times he carries his conceptions raw and as it were unwrought and rough, yet Euripides, through ambition, pushes himself even to such hazards.
And in Aeschylus, in a strange manner, the palace of Lycurgus is god-possessed at the manifestation of Dionysus: "the house is rapt, the roof revels"; while Euripides, sweetening the same thought in another way, expressed it: "and all the mountain joined in the Bacchic revel."
Sophocles too has visualised supremely the dying Oedipus, who buries himself amid some sign from heaven, and the appearing of Achilles above his tomb to the departing Greeks as they put out to sea—a vision which I do not know that anyone has made more vivid than Simonides; but it is impossible to cite all.
Nevertheless the visualisations of the poets, as I said, have a more fabulous excess, going altogether beyond belief, whereas the finest quality of rhetorical visualisation is always its practicality and truth. Strange and outlandish are the transgressions when the texture of the speech is poetic and fabulous and runs out into every impossibility, as nowadays, by Zeus, even our able orators, like the tragedians, "see Furies," and the worthy men cannot even learn this, that when Orestes says, Let go! you, being one of my own Furies, grip me by the waist, to hurl me into Tartarus, he imagines these things because he is mad.
What then can rhetorical visualisation do? Many other things, perhaps, it can bring to discourse, things contentious and full of passion; but when blended with the practical handling of the case it not only persuades the hearer, but enslaves him. "Why, if a man," says Demosthenes, "should this very instant hear a clamour before the courts, and then someone should say that the prison has been opened and the prisoners are escaping, no one, however old or however young, is so careless that he would not run to the rescue with all his might; and if someone should come forward and say that this is the man who let them loose, he would be put to death on the spot, without even a hearing."
So too, by Zeus, Hyperides, when on trial, after he had carried a decree freeing the slaves after the defeat, said: "This decree was drafted, not by the orator, but by the battle of Chaeronea." For here the orator, at the same time as he handles the practical point, has used visualisation, and so by his conception has gone beyond the bounds of mere persuasion.
By nature, somehow, in all such cases we always give ear to the stronger; hence we are drawn away from the demonstrative to the astonishing power of visualisation, beneath whose splendour the practical reasoning is hidden. And this we feel not unreasonably; for of two things ranged under one, the stronger always draws to itself the power of the other.
So much on the sublimities of thought, and on those produced by greatness of soul, by imitation, or by visualisation, may suffice.
Here next in order comes the subject of figures; for these too, if handled in the right way, would be no small part of grandeur, as I said. But since to treat them all with precision would be a long, or rather an endless task at present, we shall, by way of confirming our argument, go through only a few of those that produce grandeur of language.
Demosthenes is bringing forward a proof in defence of his policy. What was the natural way of using it? "You did not do wrong, you who took up the contest for the freedom of the Greeks; you have examples of this at home, for neither did the men at Marathon do wrong, nor those at Salamis, nor those at Plataea." But when, as if suddenly inspired by a god and possessed by Apollo, he utters the oath by the champions of Greece—"It cannot be that you did wrong, no, by those who bore the brunt of danger at Marathon"—he appears, by the single figure of adjuration, which here I call apostrophe, to have deified his ancestors, showing that one must swear by those who so died as by gods; he instils into the judges the spirit of those who there faced the peril; he has transformed the nature of a demonstration into surpassing sublimity and passion and the credibility of strange and extraordinary oaths; and at the same time he lets sink into the souls of his hearers a word that is healing and a remedy, so that, lightened by these praises, they are brought to think no less proudly of the battle against Philip than of the victories at Marathon and Salamis. By all this, sweeping the hearers away through the figure, he carried them off.
And yet they say the seed of the oath is to be found in Eupolis: For, by my battle at Marathon, no one of them shall vex my heart with joy. But it is not greatness merely to swear by something, but where and how and on what occasions and for what purpose. There, however, there is nothing but an oath, and that addressed to Athenians still prosperous and needing no comfort; nor did the poet, in swearing, immortalise the men so as to beget in his hearers a worthy estimate of their valour, but, wandering from those who bore the peril, he turned aside to a lifeless thing, the battle. But with Demosthenes the oath has been so framed toward men defeated that Chaeronea should no longer appear a disaster to the Athenians; and, as I said, the same thing is at once a demonstration that they did no wrong, an example, an oath, a credential, an encomium, and an exhortation.
And since the objection met the orator—"You speak of a defeat in your policy, and then swear by victories"—for this reason he thereafter keeps measure and goes by way of safety even in his words, teaching that even in revelries one must be sober. "Those who bore the peril," he says, "at Marathon, and those who fought at sea at Salamis and at Artemisium, and those who stood in the line at Plataea." Nowhere did he say "the victors"; in every case he has stolen away the word of the outcome, since it was a fortunate one and contrary to Chaeronea. Therefore, forestalling the hearer, he at once adds: "All of whom the city buried at public expense, Aeschines, not the victorious only."
It is not right at this point to pass over one of my own observations, my friend; it shall be very brief: that figures by their nature somehow lend support to the sublime, and again are wonderfully supported by it in return. Where and how, I shall explain. The use of figures has of itself a peculiar tendency to rouse suspicion, suggesting some ambush, design, or fallacy; and this is so especially when the speech is addressed to a judge with absolute power, above all to tyrants, kings, and rulers in their high places. For he is at once indignant if, like a foolish child, he is cunningly tricked by the artistry of a skilled orator, and, taking the fallacy as a slight upon himself, he sometimes turns altogether savage; and even if he masters his anger, he is wholly hardened against the persuasion of the words. Therefore a figure is then thought best when the very fact that it is a figure escapes notice.
Now sublimity and passion are a defence and a wonderful aid against the suspicion attaching to the use of figures; and the art of trickery, once taken up in company with beauty and grandeur, henceforth sinks out of sight and escapes all suspicion. Sufficient proof is the passage already quoted, "by those at Marathon." By what did the orator there conceal the figure? Plainly by its very brilliance. For just as dim lights vanish when the sun pours round them, so the sophistries of rhetoric are darkened when grandeur is shed around them on all sides.
Something not far from this happens also in painting; for though shadow and light lie side by side in colours upon the same surface, yet the light meets the eye first, and appears not only more prominent but also much nearer. So too the passions and sublimities of discourse, lying nearer to our souls both through a certain natural kinship and through their brilliance, always show themselves before the figures and overshadow their art and keep it as it were under a veil.
And what shall we say of inquiries and questions? Do not these very forms of figure make what is said far more vivid and stirring? "Or tell me—do you wish, going about, to ask one another, Is any news being told? For what could be more strange than this, a Macedonian man subduing Greece? Is Philip dead? No, by Zeus, but sick. And what difference does it make to you? For even if anything should happen to him, you will quickly make yourselves another Philip." And again: "Let us sail against Macedonia," he says. "Where shall we put in?" someone asked. "The war itself will find out the rotten parts of Philip's affairs." Now if this had been said plainly, it would have been altogether weaker; but as it is, the inspired and rapid play of question and answer, and the meeting of his own objection as though it were another's, has made the saying, by the figure, not only more sublime but also more credible.
For passion moves more when it seems not to be premeditated by the speaker himself but begotten by the moment; and the question and answer to oneself imitates the spontaneity of passion. For nearly as men questioned by others, roused on the instant, answer back with vigour and from the very truth, so the figure of question and answer carries the hearer along into thinking that each premeditated point was stirred and uttered on the spur of the moment, and so deceives him. Furthermore—for one of the most sublime things is the passage of Herodotus that is so accounted—if thus . . .
. . . the words pour out and as it were gush forth, almost outrunning the speaker himself. "And closing shields," says Xenophon, "they pushed, fought, slew, died."
And the words of Eurylochus: We went, as you bade, through the thickets, glorious Odysseus; we saw in the glens a fair house, well built. For phrases cut off from one another and none the less rapid carry the impression of a struggle that at once checks and yet hurries on. Such effects the poet produced by asyndeton.
Supremely too the meeting together of figures upon the same point is wont to stir, when two or three, as it were combined in a band and mingling with one another, contribute their strength, persuasion, and beauty, as in the speech against Meidias, where the asyndeta are interwoven with the repetitions and the vivid description. "For the man who strikes might do many things which the man struck could not even report to another, by his attitude, his look, his voice."
Then, that the discourse, going on among the same things, might not stand still—for in standstill is the quiet, but in disorder the passion, since passion is a movement and agitation of the soul—he at once leaps to other asyndeta and repetitions: "by his attitude, his look, his voice, when as one insolent, when as an enemy, when with the knuckles, when as a slave." By these the orator does nothing other than what the striker does: he batters the minds of the judges with blow upon blow.
Then from this again, like a hurricane, he makes another onset: "when with the knuckles, when on the cheek," he says; "these things stir, these put men beside themselves, when they are unused to being outraged; no one reporting these things could set before another their terror." Thus throughout he preserves the nature of the repetitions and asyndeta by continual variation; so with him order is disordered and, conversely, disorder takes on a kind of order.
Come then, add the connectives, if you will, as the followers of Isocrates do; and indeed this too must not be passed over, that "the man who strikes might do many things, first by his attitude, then by his look, then again by his very voice"; and you will perceive, as you write it in this connected way, that the pursued and roughened quality of the passion, if you smooth it down to evenness with the connectives, falls flat and stingless, and is at once quenched.
For as, if one were to bind together the bodies of runners, you would have taken away their speed, so passion, hindered by the connectives and other appendages, frets; for it loses the freedom of its course and the quality of being shot, as it were, from some engine.
Of the same class we must reckon hyperbata also. These are an arrangement of words or thoughts removed from their natural sequence, and the truest mark of vehement passion. For as men truly angry, or afraid, or indignant, or under the sway of jealousy or some other emotion—for the passions are many and numberless, and no one could say how many—at each turn fall aside, often putting forward one thing and then leaping to another, throwing in something irrationally in the middle, and then again wheeling back to the first, and, driven by their agitation as by an inconstant wind, this way and that, are swept abruptly about, and shift the order of their words and thoughts in countless ways from its natural sequence—so among the best writers, through hyperbata, imitation is carried toward the works of nature. For art is then perfect when it seems to be nature, and nature again hits the mark when she contains art unobserved. So Dionysius of Phocaea speaks in Herodotus: "Our affairs are on a razor's edge, men of Ionia, whether we are to be free or slaves, and runaway slaves at that. Now therefore, if you are willing to endure hardships, there is toil for you for the moment, but you will be able to overcome your enemies."
Here the natural order would have been: "Men of Ionia, now is the time for you to take up toils; for our affairs are on a razor's edge." But he transposed the words "men of Ionia"; he thus plunged in at once from fear, as though, in the face of the impending dread, he could not even at the outset address his hearers; and then he reversed the order of his thoughts. For before saying that they must toil—which is what he urges—he first gives the reason for which they must toil, saying, "our affairs are on a razor's edge"; so that he seems to speak not from premeditation but from compulsion.
Still more is Thucydides most skilful in separating, by transpositions, even things naturally united and indivisible. Demosthenes is not so wilful as he, but of all men most lavish in this kind, and produces much that is dramatic by his transpositions, and, by Zeus, much of the air of extempore speaking, and besides draws his hearers along into the danger of his long hyperbata.
For often he holds in suspense the thought he has set out to express, and, as if interposing into a foreign and alien arrangement, one thing upon another in the middle and bringing in something from outside, he throws the hearer into fear of the utter collapse of the sense, and compels him in his agitation to share the speaker's peril; then unexpectedly, after a long interval, rendering at the end the long-sought thought in its due place, he amazes far more by the very hazard and risk of his transpositions. But let me spare examples, because of their number.
The so-called cases of polyptoton—accumulations, variations, climaxes—are, as you know, very contentious and effective, contributing to ornament and to all sublimity and passion. And again, how do interchanges of cases, tenses, persons, numbers, and genders diversify and quicken expression?
I say that, of changes in number, not those alone adorn the style which, singular in form, are found on consideration to be plural in force; for instance: "Straightway a countless host, spreading out along the shores after the tunny, raised a shout"; but those rather are worthy of remark, where there are cases in which the plurals fall with a grander ring and impress us by the very multitude of the number.
Such are the lines in Sophocles upon Oedipus: O marriages, marriages! you begot us, and having begotten, again sent up the same seed, and revealed fathers, brothers, sons, kindred blood, brides, wives, mothers, and all the foulest deeds done among men. For all these are one name, Oedipus, and on the other side Jocasta; yet, poured out into the plural, the number multiplied the misfortunes too. And so it is that elsewhere there "came forth Hectors and Sarpedons"; and the Platonic passage, which I have also quoted elsewhere, concerning the Athenians:
"For no Pelopses nor Cadmuses nor Aegyptuses and Danauses, nor others, barbarians by birth, dwell with us; but we live as Greeks ourselves, not as half-barbarians," and the rest. For naturally things sound more pompous when the names are thus heaped together in a crowd. But one must not do this except where the subjects admit of amplification, multitude, hyperbole, or passion—one of these or more—since to hang bells everywhere is too sophistical.
But indeed the contrary too—the gathering together of plurals into singulars—is sometimes most sublime in effect. "Thereupon all Peloponnesus was divided," he says. And when Phrynichus produced the drama The Capture of Miletus, the theatre fell to weeping. To compress the number from the divided into the unified is more bodily.
The cause of the ornament in both, I think, is the same: where the nouns are singular, to make them many is the mark of unlooked-for passion; where they are plural, to bring the many to a head in one sonorous whole is the mark of the transformation of things into their opposite, contrary to expectation.
Whenever you bring in things past in time as happening and present, you will make your discourse no longer a narrative but a living action. "A man fallen," says Xenophon, "beneath Cyrus' horse and trodden underfoot, strikes with his sword the horse in the belly; and the horse, plunging, throws off Cyrus, and he falls." Of this kind is Thucydides in most places.
Equally vivid is the interchange of persons, and often, in the very midst of dangers, it makes the hearer think himself turned about: You would say they met unwearied and unworn in battle; so eagerly they fought. And Aratus: in that month may you not be flooded over by the sea.
So too somewhere Herodotus: "From the city of Elephantine you will sail upward, and then you will come to a smooth plain; and having crossed this region, embarking again in another boat you will sail two days, and then you will reach a great city, whose name is Meroë." Do you see, my friend, how, taking your soul along, he leads it through the places, making the hearing into sight? All such things, bearing directly upon the persons themselves, set the hearer in the midst of the actions.
And when you speak as though not to all but to some single person— But the son of Tydeus you could not tell with which host he was— you will make him at once more passionate, more attentive, and full of contest, roused by being addressed to himself.
Yet again, sometimes a writer, in narrating about a person, suddenly turns aside and changes into that very person; and such a thing is a kind of outbreak of passion. But Hector, with a great shout, called to the Trojans to rush upon the ships and let be the bloody spoils. Whomever I see willing to hold back from the ships, for him I will contrive death on the spot. So the poet attached the narration to himself, as fitting, but to the abrupt threat in the wrath of the leader he suddenly, with no warning, attached the words of Hector; for it would have grown cold had he inserted, "Hector said some such things as these." As it is, the transition of the discourse has overtaken him in the act of transition.
Therefore the use of this figure comes in then, when the moment is sharp and gives the writer no time to delay, but at once compels him to change from person to person, as in Hecataeus: "Ceyx, taking these things ill, at once bade the descendants of the Heracleidae depart; for I am not able to help you. So that you may not perish yourselves and harm me too, go off to some other people."
Demosthenes, in another manner, in the speech against Aristogeiton, has rendered the multiplicity of persons passionate and swiftly changing: "And will none of you be found," he says, "with gall or anger at the things this loathsome and shameless man does by force—who, O foulest of all men, when your free speech was barred to you, not by gratings nor by doors, which one might even open a little"—leaving the sense unfinished, he quickly shifts and all but tears one phrase, through his wrath, into two persons—"who, O foulest of men"—and then, turning his words away to Aristogeiton, and seeming to leave off, yet through his passion he turned upon him far more.
Not otherwise Penelope: Herald, why have the proud suitors sent you forth? To tell the handmaids of godlike Odysseus to cease from their tasks and prepare a feast for them? Would that, ceasing their wooing and consorting no longer elsewhere, they might dine here now their last and latest dine— you who, gathering ever, waste much substance, the goods of wise Telemachus; nor at all of your fathers of old did you hear, when you were children, what manner of man Odysseus was.
And indeed, that periphrasis makes for sublimity, no one, I think, would doubt. For as in music the principal note is made sweeter by what are called the accompanying notes, so periphrasis often sounds in concert with the literal expression and chimes in greatly to its adornment, especially if it have nothing turgid and unmusical, but be blended agreeably.
Plato is sufficient witness of this at the opening of the Funeral Oration: "In deed, these men have from us what is due to themselves, on obtaining which they go their appointed journey, escorted in common by the city and severally each by his own kindred." Death, then, he called "the appointed journey," and the receiving of the customary rites "a public escort by the fatherland." Has he by these means but moderately dignified the thought, or, taking a bare expression, has he set it to music, shedding round it, as it were, a certain harmony, the sweet melody that comes of periphrasis?
And Xenophon: "Toil you account the guide to a pleasant life; and the fairest and most warlike of all possessions have you gathered into your souls; for you rejoice in praise more than in all else." By saying "you make toil the guide to a pleasant life" instead of "you are willing to toil," and by extending the rest in like manner, he annexed to his praise a certain great conception.
And that inimitable phrase of Herodotus: "Upon those of the Scythians who plundered the temple the goddess sent a female sickness."
Yet periphrasis is a thing perilous, more than the rest, if it be not taken with due measure; for it at once falls weak, smelling of empty talk and grossness. Hence they mock even Plato—who is always able in figures, and in some untimely so—for saying in the Laws that "neither silver nor golden wealth should be allowed to settle and dwell in a city"; "as if," they say, "he had forbidden the keeping of sheep, he would plainly have spoken of 'sheepish' and 'oxish' wealth."
But enough has been said, by way of digression, my dearest Terentianus, about the use of figures in relation to the sublime; for all these make discourse more passionate and stirring, and passion partakes of sublimity as much as character partakes of pleasure.
Since, however, the thought of discourse and its expression are for the most part interwoven each through the other, come now, let us consider whether there is anything still left in the department of expression. That the choice of proper and grand words wonderfully attracts and enchants the hearers, and that all orators and writers make it their supreme study, since it of itself causes grandeur, beauty, mellowness, weight, force, mastery, and the rest to bloom upon discourse as upon the fairest statues, and puts as it were a living, speaking soul into things—this would perhaps be superfluous to set forth at length to those who know. For beautiful words are in truth the very light of thought.
Yet their grandeur is not everywhere serviceable, since to invest petty matters with great and stately words would seem the same as if one were to fit a great tragic mask upon a little child; only in poetry and . . .
. . . most nourishing and fertile; while that of Anacreon: "No longer do I turn my mind to Thrace." In the same way the novel phrase of Theopompus is praiseworthy; through its aptness it seems to me most expressive, though Caecilius somehow finds fault with it. "Philip," he says, "is clever at stomaching things." Now common idiom is sometimes far more expressive than ornament; for it is recognised at once from common life, and the familiar is the more readily believed. So of a man who, for the sake of gain, endures shameful and sordid things with patience and even with pleasure, "to stomach things" is most vividly applied.
Such too are the phrases of Herodotus: "Cleomenes," he says, "having gone mad, cut his own flesh into small pieces with a dagger, until, chopping himself all up like sausage-meat, he destroyed himself." And: "Pythes fought on aboard the ship until he was wholly cut to mincemeat." For these come close to the vulgar, but are not vulgar, because they are so expressive.
As to the number of metaphors, Caecilius seems to agree with those who lay down the law that two or at most three may be set on the same subject. For Demosthenes is the standard in such matters too. But the right occasion is where the passions are driven like a torrent, and necessarily sweep along with them the multitude of metaphors.
"Men foul and flatterers," he says, "each having maimed his own fatherland, having pledged away their freedom first to Philip and now to Alexander, measuring happiness by the belly and the basest things, and overturning that freedom and the having no master, which to the Greeks of old were the standards and rules of good." Here the orator's wrath against the traitors screens the multitude of the figures.
Therefore Aristotle and Theophrastus say there are certain softenings of bold metaphors—the saying "as it were," and "as one might say," and "if one may put it so," and "if one must speak somewhat hazardously." For the apology, they say, heals what is daring.
And these too I accept; nevertheless, as I said also of figures, I declare that timely and vehement passion and noble sublimity are the proper antidotes for a multitude and boldness of metaphors, because by the rush of their movement they naturally sweep along and force forward all the rest, or rather demand the hazardous as altogether necessary, and do not allow the hearer leisure to scrutinise the number, because he shares the speaker's transport.
But indeed, in commonplaces and descriptions, nothing is so expressive as continuous and successive metaphors. By these the anatomy of the human frame is described pompously in Xenophon, and still more divinely portrayed in Plato. The head he calls its "citadel"; the neck, he says, is built as an isthmus set between it and the breast; the vertebrae, he says, are placed beneath like hinges; pleasure is "a bait of evil for men"; the tongue is "the touchstone of taste"; the heart is "the knot of the veins and the fountain of the blood that races vehemently round," and is stationed in the "bodyguard's quarters"; the passages of the pores he names "alleys"; and for the leaping of the heart, in the expectation of dangers and the rousing of anger, since it was on fire, they devised, he says, an aid, implanting the form of the lung, soft and bloodless and having cavities within like a sponge, that, when anger boils up in it, the heart, leaping against something yielding, might not be harmed. The seat of the desires he called, as it were, the "women's quarters," and that of anger the "men's quarters"; the spleen he called the "napkin of the inward parts," whence, filled with the impurities cleansed away, it grows great and festering. After this, "they shadowed all," he says, "with flesh," setting the flesh before as a defence against things outside, like padding; and the blood he called "the pasture of the flesh." "And for the sake of nourishment," he says, "they channelled the body, cutting conduits as in gardens, so that, as from a flowing stream, the body being a narrow channel, the streams of the veins might flow." And when the end is at hand, he says the cables of the soul, as of a ship, are loosed, and it is let go free.
These and countless like them follow in order; but what has been shown suffices to prove that figurative expressions are by nature grand, that metaphors make for sublimity, and that passionate and descriptive passages rejoice in them most.
That the use of figures, however, like all other fine things in literature, ever tends toward excess, is already plain, even though I do not say it. For on these grounds especially they pull Plato to pieces, as one often carried, as if by some Bacchic frenzy of language, into harsh and intemperate metaphors and into allegorical bombast. "For it is not easy to conceive," he says, "that a city must be mixed like a bowl, where the maddening wine, poured in, seethes, but, chastened by another sober god, taking a fair fellowship, produces a good and moderate drink." For to call water "a sober god," and the tempering "chastisement," is, they say, the mark of a poet truly not sober.
Attacking such faults, Caecilius nevertheless ventured, in his writings on Lysias, to pronounce Lysias in every respect better than Plato, indulging two uncritical passions; for, loving Lysias more than even his own self, he yet hates Plato more in every respect than he loves Lysias. But he did this out of contentiousness, and his premises are not, as he supposed, agreed. For he brings forward the orator as faultless and pure, though Plato has erred in many places; but the case was not so, no, far from it.
Come then, let us take a writer truly pure and faultless. Is it not worth while to raise the general question about this very thing: which is better in poetry and prose, grandeur with some flaws, or moderate success that is wholly sound and without a fall? And again, by Zeus, should the prize in literature justly be borne off by the more numerous virtues, or by the greater? For these are inquiries proper to the subject of the sublime, and altogether in need of decision.
Now I know that the loftiest natures are least pure; for exactness in everything runs the risk of pettiness, while in things great, as in excessive wealth, there must be something also overlooked. Perhaps it is even necessary that lowly and middling natures, because they nowhere take risks and reach not for the heights, remain for the most part without fault and more secure, while great things are made perilous by their very greatness.
Nor again am I ignorant of the second point, that by nature all human things are always more recognised from their worse side, and the memory of faults remains indelible, while that of beauties quickly flows away.
Having myself cited not a few faults of Homer and of the other greatest writers, and being least pleased with their stumblings, yet calling them not so much voluntary errors as oversights brought in at random and by chance, through carelessness, by greatness of genius unattended—nevertheless I think the greater virtues, even if they do not maintain an even level throughout, ever rather carry off the vote for the first place, were it for nothing else, for the sake of greatness of soul itself. For although Apollonius is faultless as a poet in the Argonautica, and Theocritus most successful in his pastorals, save in a few external things, would you choose rather to be Apollonius than Homer?
And what of Eratosthenes, who in his Erigone—a flawless little poem throughout—is yet a greater poet than Archilochus, with his sweeping along of much disorder, and that outburst of the divine spirit, which is hard to bring under rule? And in lyric, would you choose to be Bacchylides rather than Pindar, and in tragedy Ion of Chios rather than, by Zeus, Sophocles? For these are unfailing and everywhere finely written in the polished style; but Pindar and Sophocles at times set everything ablaze with their rush, yet are often quenched without reason and fall most unfortunately. Yet no one in his senses, setting all the works of Ion together, would value them as worth one drama, the Oedipus.
If successes were to be judged not by their true standard but by number, then Hyperides too would be in every way superior to Demosthenes. For he is more many-voiced and has more virtues, and is, like the pentathlete, second-best in all, so that in every event he falls short of the foremost among the other competitors, but is first among amateurs.
Hyperides, besides imitating in everything but composition the successes of Demosthenes, has further compassed the virtues and graces of Lysias in abundance. For he talks with simplicity where he ought, and does not say everything continuously and in one tone, as Demosthenes does; he has the power of character with sweetness, pleasantly seasoned with a light touch; his urbanities are unspeakable, the most political of raillery, good breeding, dexterity in irony, jests not without taste nor uncouth but well placed, after the manner of those Attic writers, skilful mockery, much of the comic and a sting that goes with well-aimed wit; and inimitable is the charm that lies in all this. He is most apt to move pity, and gifted besides in telling tales fluently and in carrying a digression through with a flowing breath, supremely supple; as, for instance, the legends about Leto he treated more poetically, and the Funeral Oration with a display such as I know not whether any other man has equalled.
But Demosthenes is no painter of character, not diffuse, least of all fluent or given to display, almost wholly without share in all the qualities just mentioned. Where he forces himself to be witty and urbane, he raises laughter against himself rather than provokes it; and when he wishes to come near being charming, then is he furthest from it. Had he attempted to write the little speech about Phryne or Athenogenes, he would all the more have set off Hyperides by contrast.
But since, I think, the merits of the one, though many, are without grandeur, idle as the heart of a sober man, and leave the hearer at rest—no one at any rate is terrified reading Hyperides—whereas the other, taking up from the point of supreme genius virtues carried to the highest pitch, the tone of lofty utterance, living passions, abundance, readiness, swiftness, and, where it is in place, that mastery and power which none can approach—since, I say, he drew all these, as god-sent and awful gifts (for it is not lawful to call them human), gathered into himself, for this reason by the fine qualities he has he ever conquers all, and even on behalf of those he has not, and, as it were, thunders down and outshines the orators of all time; and one could sooner open his eyes against the bolts of falling lightning than face the unbroken succession of his passions.
In the case of Plato, however, there is also another kind of difference, as I said. For Lysias, though far inferior to him not only in the greatness but also in the number of his virtues, yet exceeds him still more in his faults than he falls short in his virtues.
What then did those god-like men perceive, who reached after the greatest things in writing and disdained exactness in everything? Among many other things, this: that Nature judged man to be no lowly or ignoble creature, but, bringing us into life and into the whole universe as into some great festival, to be spectators of all her achievements and most ambitious competitors, straightway implanted in our souls an unconquerable love of all that is ever great and, in relation to ourselves, more divine.
Therefore not even the whole universe suffices for the contemplation and thought of human enterprise, but our conceptions often pass beyond the bounds of what surrounds us; and if anyone should look round upon life and see how much the extraordinary, the great, and the beautiful prevail in all things, he will quickly know for what we were born.
Thus, led on by a kind of natural instinct, we admire, by Zeus, not the small streams, however clear and useful, but the Nile, the Danube, or the Rhine, and far more the Ocean; nor are we so amazed at this little flame kindled by us, because it keeps its light pure, as at the heavenly fires, though they are often darkened; nor do we deem it more worthy of wonder than the craters of Etna, whose eruptions cast up rocks from the deep and whole hills, and at times pour forth rivers of that earth-born and single fire.
But of all such things we might say this, that the useful, or even the necessary, is easily come by for men, but the marvellous is ever that which passes their expectation.
Therefore, in the case of greatness of mind in literature, where grandeur does not fall outside use and profit, it is fitting to observe at once that those mighty men, though far removed from faultlessness, are nonetheless all above the mortal. Other things prove their possessors merely human, but sublimity lifts them near to the grandeur of God; and freedom from fault wins no blame, but greatness wins admiration besides.
What need is there to add to this, that each of those men often redeems all his faults by a single sublimity and success; and, most important of all, that if one were to choose out the faults of Homer, of Demosthenes, of Plato, and of the other greatest writers, and gather them all together into one heap, they would be found a very small part, or rather not the smallest fraction, of what those heroes everywhere achieve aright? Therefore all time and all life, unable to be convicted of madness by envy, have borne and rendered to them the prizes of victory, and keep them to this day inviolate, and seem likely to preserve them "so long as waters flow and tall trees flourish."
To the writer who says that the faulty Colossus is not better than the Doryphorus of Polycleitus, one may reply, among much else, that in art the most exact is admired, but in the works of nature, grandeur, and man is by nature a rational being; and that in statues likeness to a man is sought, but in discourse, as I said, that which surpasses the human.
Yet it is fitting nonetheless—for our exhortation comes back here to the beginning of our treatise—since freedom from flaws is for the most part the achievement of art, but eminence, though not even, of genius, that art should everywhere be provided as an aid to nature; for their mutual interlocking would perhaps produce perfection. So much it was necessary to determine concerning the matters set before us; but let each man take pleasure in what pleases him.
Akin to metaphors—for we must return to them—are comparisons and similes, differing from them only in . . .
. . . and such as these: "unless you carry your brain trodden down in your heels." Therefore one must know how far each thing is to be carried; for sometimes to overshoot the mark destroys the hyperbole, and such things, overstrained, are relaxed, and sometimes turn round into their opposites.
Isocrates, for instance, somehow fell into a childish blunder through his ambition to say everything by way of amplification. The theme of his Panegyric is that the city of Athens surpasses Sparta in its benefits to the Greeks, but at the very outset he sets down this: "Words have such power that it is possible both to make great things small and to invest small things with greatness, and to express the old in a new way and to treat of recent events in an old fashion." "So then, Isocrates," says someone, "are you going thus to interchange the cases of the Lacedaemonians and the Athenians?" For his eulogy of words has all but published to the hearers a warning and preface to distrust himself.
Therefore perhaps the best hyperboles, as we said of figures too, are those that conceal the very fact that they are hyperboles. And this comes about when, under stress of strong feeling, they are uttered together with a certain greatness of circumstance, as Thucydides does with those perishing in Sicily. "For the Syracusans," he says, "coming down upon them, slaughtered most of all those in the river, and the water was at once defiled; but none the less it was drunk, foul with mud and blood, and for most it was still a thing to fight for." That blood and mud, though drunk, should still be a thing fought for, is made credible by the surpassing greatness of the passion and the circumstance.
And the passage of Herodotus on those at Thermopylae is like it. "In this place," he says, "defending themselves with daggers, those of them who chanced still to have any left, and with hands and mouths, the barbarians buried them with missiles." Here, what it is to fight even with the mouth against armed men, and of what kind it is to be buried with weapons, you may ask; but none the less it carries belief. For the fact does not seem to be brought in for the sake of the hyperbole, but the hyperbole seems reasonably begotten of the fact.
For, as I never cease to say, the loosening and panacea of every daring of language is to be found in deeds and passions near to ecstasy; whence even comic phrases, though falling into incredibility, are persuasive because of the ludicrous: "he had a field smaller than a Laconian letter." For laughter too is a passion that lies in pleasure.
Hyperboles tend to the lesser as well as to the greater, since intensification is common to both; and disparagement is in a sense an amplification of meanness.
The fifth of the sources contributing to sublimity, of those we set forth at the beginning, still remains to us, my excellent friend: the particular kind of composition of the words themselves. Concerning this, having given a sufficient account in two treatises, so far as our inquiry could reach, we would by necessity add only so much for the present purpose: that harmony is not only something natural to men for persuasion and pleasure, but also a wonderful instrument of grandeur and passion.
For does not the flute instil certain passions into its hearers and render them as it were beside themselves and full of frenzy, and, setting a kind of rhythmic step, compel the hearer to move in rhythm and to liken himself to the tune, even if he be wholly unmusical? And, by Zeus, the notes of the lyre, signifying nothing in themselves, by the changes of their sounds and by their mutual striking and the blending of the harmony often bring, as you know, a wonderful enchantment—
and yet these are images and bastard imitations of persuasion, not, as I said, genuine workings of human nature—are we not then to think that composition, being a kind of harmony of words that are inborn in men and reach the soul itself, not the hearing alone, rousing manifold ideas of words, thoughts, things, beauty, and melody, all of them familiar and akin to us, and at the same time, by the blending and variety of its own sounds, bringing into the souls of those near the passion present in the speaker, and ever setting the hearers to share in it, and by the building up of the words fitting together the grandeurs—are we not, I say, to think that by these very means it at once enchants us and ever disposes us toward dignity, weight, and sublimity, and all that it embraces in itself, mastering our minds in every way? But it is madness to dispute about things so agreed, for experience is sufficient proof.
Sublime, surely, and truly marvellous is the thought which Demosthenes attaches to his decree: "This decree caused the danger then surrounding the city to pass away, like a cloud." But it is given voice no less by the harmony than by the thought itself. For it is delivered wholly in dactylic rhythms; and these are most noble and grand, wherefore they make up the heroic, the fairest metre we know. For take the words and shift them from their own place wherever you will—"This decree, like a cloud, caused the danger then to pass away"—or, by Zeus, cut off but a single syllable—"caused it to pass like a cloud"—and you will perceive how far the harmony chimes in with the sublimity. For the very phrase "like a cloud" rests on a long first rhythm, measured by four beats; but with the one syllable removed, "like a cloud," it at once maims the grandeur by the abridgement; just as, conversely, if you lengthen it, "caused it to pass away as it were a cloud," it means the same, but no longer falls the same upon the ear, because the abrupt sublimity is relaxed and slackened by the lengthening of the final beats.
Among the things that most magnify discourse, just as they do bodies, is the joining together of the members; of these no single one, cut off from another, has any worth by itself, but all together complete a perfect system. So too grandeurs, scattered from one another, carry their sublimity off this way and that along with themselves; but bodied together by fellowship and bound besides by the chain of harmony, by the very rounding they become full-voiced; and in the periods, so to speak, the grandeurs are a contribution of the many.
But indeed, that many writers and poets, not sublime by nature, perhaps even without grandeur, yet using common and ordinary words that bring in nothing out of the way, for the most part, by the mere putting together and fitting of these have nevertheless compassed dignity and elevation and the seeming not to be low—of this, among many others, Philistus, Aristophanes in places, and Euripides in most places, are sufficient proof for us.
After the slaying of his children Heracles says: I am laden with woes, and there is no room for more. The saying is exceedingly common, but it has become sublime, as the moulding answers to the sense; and if you fit it together otherwise, it will appear to you that Euripides is a poet of composition rather than of meaning.
And on Dirce, dragged by the bull, and if perchance he chanced to wheel about, he hauled all together as he went, the woman, the rock, the oak, shifting them ever— the conception is noble, but it has become weightier in that the harmony is not hurried, nor borne along as in a rolling, but the words have supports against one another and props of time, set firmly toward a steadfast grandeur.
Nothing so diminishes the sublime as broken and agitated rhythm of words, such as pyrrhics and trochees and dichorees, which run out wholly into the dance; for at once all overrhythmic writing appears pretty and trifling and utterly without passion, floating on the surface through its monotony.
And, worst of all in these, that just as little songs draw the hearers away from the matter and force them to themselves, so over-rhythmed speech imparts to the hearers not the passion of the discourse but that of the rhythm, so that sometimes, foreseeing the due endings, they beat time to the speakers and, anticipating them as in a chorus, render the cadence beforehand.
Equally without grandeur are passages too closely packed and chopped into small and short-syllabled pieces, and bound together as it were with successive pegs by notches and roughnesses.
Yet again, excessive cutting short of the phrasing diminishes sublimity; for it maims grandeur when it is contracted into too small a compass. Let it be understood now not of what is duly compressed, but of what is downright small and minced. For cutting short curtails the sense, but conciseness goes straight to the mark; and plainly, on the other hand, things drawn out at length are lifeless, being recalled to life by untimely length.
Terrible too is the meanness of words for disgracing grandeur. In Herodotus, for instance, the storm is in its conceptions described with divine power, but it contains, by Zeus, some things meaner than the subject. Such, perhaps, is "the sea seething," where "seething" much detracts from the sublimity through its ill sound; and "the wind," he says, "grew weary," and those clinging about the wreck "awaited a graceless end." For "to grow weary" is undignified and vulgar, and "graceless" is unbecoming to so great a disaster.
Likewise Theopompus, after preparing in extraordinary fashion the descent of the Persian king upon Egypt, discredited the whole by certain paltry words. "For what city or what nation of those in Asia did not send envoys to the king? What of the fair or precious things produced from the earth or perfected by art was not brought to him as a gift? Were there not many costly coverlets and cloaks, some purple, some embroidered, some white; many golden tents furnished with all things useful; many robes and costly couches besides? Moreover, there was hollow plate and wrought gold, cups and mixing-bowls, of which you might have seen some set with jewels, others carefully and richly finished. Besides these, countless myriads of weapons, Greek and barbarian; baggage-animals beyond number, and victims fattened for slaughter; many bushels of seasonings, and many bags and sacks and sheets of papyrus and of all other useful things; and so much salted flesh of all kinds of victims that there were heaps of them so great that those approaching from afar took them for mounds and hills rising against one another."
He runs off from the higher to the meaner, where he should have made his amplification the other way; but, mingling with the marvellous announcement of the whole equipment the bags and seasonings and sacks, he produced the impression of a kitchen. For just as if, among those very adornments, in the midst of the golden and jewelled mixing-bowls and the hollow silver and the all-golden tents and the cups, one were to bring and set down bags and sacks, the work would have been unseemly to the sight; so too such words in expression become disgraces and as it were brand-marks, when set in out of season.
He might have gone over the matter wholesale, and, as he speaks of "mounds" heaped up, so of the rest of the equipment to have said "waggons and camels and a multitude of baggage-animals carrying all that furnishes the table for luxury and enjoyment"; or to have named "heaps of all kinds of grain and of the things that contribute most to cookery and good cheer"; or, if he absolutely wished to set it down so concretely, to have spoken of "all the dainties of caterers and cooks."
For in sublimities one must not come down to the sordid and outraged, unless under some strong compulsion; but it is fitting that the very words should be worthy of the matters, and that one should imitate Nature, who fashioned man and set the unmentionable parts of us not in the face, nor the drainings of the whole frame, but concealed them as best she could, and, as Xenophon says, turned the conduits of these as far off as possible, in no way disgracing the beauty of the whole creature.
But there is no need to enumerate the things that make for littleness one by one; for since we have already shown what makes discourse noble and sublime, plainly the opposites of these will for the most part make it low and unseemly.
One thing remains—and for the sake of your love of learning we shall not shrink from adding it—to make clear, my dearest Terentianus, a question that one of the philosophers raised not long since. "It amazes me," he said, "as no doubt it amazes many others, how it is that in our age there are natures supremely persuasive and fit for public life, keen and clever and especially gifted for pleasing discourse, but sublime and surpassingly great natures, except perhaps rarely, no longer come into being. So universal a dearth of literature, ordered as by a law of the world, holds sway over life."
"Or, by Zeus," he said, "must we believe that hackneyed saying, that democracy is the good nurse of great men, with whom alone the masters of eloquence have, one may almost say, flourished and died together? For freedom, they say, is able to nourish the conceptions of high-minded men and to fill them with hope, and at the same time to send abroad the eagerness of mutual rivalry and ambition for the first place.
Moreover, because of the prizes set before them in republics, the spiritual gifts of orators, by practice, are whetted and as it were polished, and shine forth, free, along with public affairs, as is natural. But we of today," he said, "seem to have learned from boyhood a just servitude, all but swaddled from our tenderest thoughts in its customs and pursuits, and untasting of the fairest and most fertile spring of literature—I mean freedom; wherefore we turn out nothing but flatterers, however great our gifts."
For this reason, he said, all other faculties fall even to the lot of household slaves, but no slave ever becomes an orator; for at once the lack of free speech wells up in him, and that prison-like quality, as it were, ever buffeted by habit.
"For," as Homer says, "the day of slavery takes away half a man's virtue." "Just as, then, if this be credible that I hear," he says, "the cages in which the so-called Pygmies, or dwarfs, are reared not only hinder the growth of those shut up in them but even shrink them, through the bond that lies about their bodies, so all slavery, even the most just, one might pronounce a cage of the soul and a common prison-house."
But I, taking him up, said: "It is easy, my good sir, and characteristic of man, to find fault with whatever is present for the time. But consider whether it be not the peace of the world that corrupts great natures, but far more this boundless war that holds our desires in its grip, and, by Zeus, besides this the passions that garrison our present life and utterly plunder it. For the love of money, with which we are all now insatiably sick, and the love of pleasure enslave us, or rather, as one might say, drown our very lives, men and all. Love of money is a sickness that makes us petty, love of pleasure a most ignoble one.
Nor can I find, on reflection, how it is possible for those who prize boundless wealth, or rather, to speak more truly, who deify it, not to admit into their souls the evils that grow with it and come in with it. For upon measureless and unbridled wealth there follows, linked to it and keeping equal step, as they say, extravagance; and as soon as wealth opens the entrances of cities and houses, extravagance straightway enters and dwells there too. And when these have long lodged in our lives, they build their nests, as the wise say, and quickly setting about begetting offspring, they breed boastfulness and vanity and luxury, no bastard issue of their own but quite legitimate. And if one let these descendants of wealth also come to maturity, they soon beget in our souls inexorable masters: insolence, lawlessness, and shamelessness.
For thus it must needs be, and men no longer look up nor have any further account of fame, but the ruin of their lives is gradually perfected in such a round, and their spiritual grandeurs wither and waste away and cease to be sought after, when they admire the mortal parts of themselves and neglect to make the immortal grow.
For one who has been bribed in a trial could no longer be a free and sound judge of what is just and fair; for to the man who takes bribes his own interest must needs appear fair and just. But where bribes now arbitrate the whole lives of each of us, and the hunting of others' deaths, and plots over wills, and where we each buy gain from everything, enslaved in our souls for the price, can we think, in so deadly a corruption of life, that there is left any free and uncorrupted judge of things great or reaching toward eternity, one not bought up by the desire of getting more?
But perhaps for men such as we are it is better to be ruled than to be free; since greed, if wholly let loose against our neighbours, like beasts let out of a cage, would set the whole world ablaze with evils."
In sum, I said that what consumes the natures now being born is the indolence in which, save for a few, we all pass our lives, toiling or taking up anything only for the sake of praise and pleasure, but never for that profit which is worthy of emulation and honour.
It is best to let these things go at random, and to pass on to what comes next; and this was the subject of the passions, concerning which we promised to write before in a separate treatise, since they hold a share, as we think, of discourse in general and of sublimity itself . . .