Chapter 15: Images

In addition, young man, images also contribute to boldness and great­ ness of address and courtroom pleading; thus some speak of making pictures: though every sort of conception which gives birth to a speech or writing (no matter how it affects the soul) is commonly called an image, it has now become the vogue to use the word whenever, as a result of enthusiasm and emotion, you think you are gazing at what you are describ­ ing and you set it in the sight of those who hear you. 2. Thus it would not escape your notice that rhetorical imagery wishes to be one thing, that of the poets another, nor that the final end of poetry is the astounding of those who hear it, but in speeches and writings a clear envisioning; all the same, you see, both are seeking [the sublime and emotional] and the state of sympathetic excitement.

Ο Mother, I beseech you, do not release
The maids of eyes of blood, of hair of snakes:
For they, the maids themselves, are here leaping upon me!

and

Woe’s me! He slays me. Where am I to flee?

Here the poet himself sees the Furies, and he has almost compelled those hearing him to see what he has made an image of. 3. Now Euripides is the one who most loves to toil at utterly tragicizing these two emotions—madness and erotic passion—and in these (I don’t know whether it is true in other things) he is most lucky; but in fact he does not lack boldness in applying himself to other images also. Though, of course, he has very little natural greatness, still he has compelled his nature to become tragic, and in each of his great moments, as the poet Homer says, he

With tail lashing his flanks and loins
On both sides, he girds himself for battle.

Now, when the Sun presented the reins to Phaethon, he declares:

Choose not to drive yourself upon the Libyan sky: Its climate is not moist; it will let down your chariot.

and, most consistently:

“Go now, holding your course to the seven Pleiades.” So much the boy had heard, the reins he seized.
He struck the winged horses on the sides and
Let them go. And the mares to the folds of ether flew. On the back of Sirius, the father rode
To give advice to him: “Direct it here— Turn the car there—there.”

Would you not say that the soul of the writer steps up into the chariot with the boy and, sharing the danger with him, wings its way with the horses? You see, if he were not equally carrying himself in those celestial travels, he would never have made such images. His lines on Cassandra are similar:

Trojans, lovers of horses…

And Aeschylus is audacious for very heroic images, just as in his Seven Against Thebes he says:

Heroes, seven in all, each a swift captain at arms, Bull slaughterers on a black-rimmed shield,
Who dipping their hands in a bulls’ death swear an oath By Ares and Enyo and by Fear, who lusts for blood,

having sworn with each other (“without lamentation”) their own death—though sometimes Aeschylus brings in thoughts that are not worked out and are, as it were, like raw and untreated wool, all the same Euripides actually makes himself approach such dangers because of his love of esteem. 6. While in Aeschylus the royal palace of Lycurgus, during the epiphany of Dionysus, is divinely carried aloft in a manner contrary to opinion:

Enthusiastic is the house, bacchant the roof,
Euripides gave voice to the same idea in another way, making it pleasing: The mountain, a bacchant with them.

7. And Sophocles reached a height of imagery in Oedipus’ dying and burying himself, with a kind of divine expression, and in Achilles’ appear­ ance from his tomb before the Greeks at their sailing away—a scene which I do not know anyone has more clearly envisioned than Simonides. But I have no mechanism for setting down all examples. 8. But though in fact the images found in the poets have a way of going beyond what is mythic and of entirely transcending our sense of what is credible, in rhetoric the images are always best that are practical and correspond to the truth. And the digressions are strange and abnormal when the cast of the speech or writing is poetic or mythic and falls into all kinds of impossible things, as now, heaven knows, even our most powerful public speakers gaze on Furies—just like tragedians—and they—noble fellows—are not capable of learning that when Orestes says

Let go! You are one of my Erinyes;
You are holding me around my waist to cast me into Hell,

he is making these images because he is mad. 9. Now what is rhetorical imagery able to accomplish? It is equally able to bring into our speeches and writings what is characteristic of the courtroom and what is emotional, and when joined with attempts at practical arguments, it not only persuades the audience, it also enslaves it. Demosthenes says:

Only if at this very moment someone were to hear shouting in front of the courtroom, and then if someone were to say, “There’s been a jailbreak and the prisoners are escaping,” nobody young or old is so careless that he wouldn’t run to give as much help as possible. And if someone should come in and actually say, “He’s the one who let them loose,” he would, without a trial, be killed right on the spot.

10. Thus (by heaven) Hyperides also, on being accused, when after the defeat he voted for freeing the slaves, said:

It was not the speaker who brought this to a vote; it was the battle of Chaeronea.

You see, the public speaker here has simultaneously tried his hand at a practical argument and made an image; therefore he has exceeded the limit of persuasiveness in the point being taken up. 11. But somehow by nature in all such things we hear what is stronger; as a result we are dragged away from demonstrative arguments and are astounded by the image, by the dazzle of which the practical argument is hidden. And it is not unlikely that we should feel this: you see, when two things are arranged together, the stronger over and over again draws off to itself the capacity of the weak­ er. 12. So much will suffice for what is sublime in the faculty of conception and for what gTeatness of mind creates from mimesis or imagery.

Commentary

images: Russell translates “visualiza­ tion.” Prickard and Grube render the term “imagination.” Roberts, Fyfe, Einarson, and Dorsch all use “images.” Sir John Sandys remarks that “in the sense of ‘creative imagination’ we have lo wail for more than five centuries till we find it in Philostratus” (A History of Classical Scholarship. Cambridge, Eng­ land, 1906. Volume I, p. 72.).

sight: Longinus carefully follows Aris­ totle here (Poetics I455a22): “One ought to establish plots and work them out together with the style as far as possible with [the situation] set before his eyes. By seeing things very clearly and vividly he will find what is appropriate.”

Quintilian, in dealing with the emo­ tions, equates the word here translated as “images” with the Latin visio. To make the audience see what is not actually there the orator must himself see it first, which he does by means of images created from his ability Lo daydream and to fantasize. We may compare E. K.’s gloss on Spenser’s November eclogue in The Shepheardes Calendar, where Spenser writes: “I see thee, blessed soule, I see,” and E. K. says, “a lively icon or representation, as if he saw her in heaven present.”

astounding: a synonym for “ecstasy.” IL is that which “knocks you out” (Rus­ sell). Such impact results from situa­ tions which are by nature fantastic or horrible, either as direct sensory expe­ riences (e.g., the picture of Furies in the last part of the Oresteia) or of a sudden recognition of such a situation (see Aris­ totle’s Poetics l454a4), where he says that such recognition is better, since then there is nothing disgusting. Since the effect can be produced by direct sen­ sation, it can also be produced by images of such sensations and expe­ riences; to do so is one of the principal jobs of the public speaker.

In distinguishing the jobs of poetry and rhetoric on this point, Longinus is recognizing that the two are overlap­ ping spheres. Poetry can often afford to let its image be more powerful than the original experience, but the public speaker is generally tied to a more realistic and less theatrical scene. Later in this chapter, Longinus mildly censures Hy­ perides for letting his rhetorical image become too powerful and thus call attention to itself.

clear envisioning: The anonymous Art of Rhetoric (Spengel I.439) says that “clear envisioning” works together with emotion in producing persuasion, and defines it in words similar to those used here by Longinus. The artist or rhetori­ cian achieves it by molding and forming.

[the sublime and the emotional]: editors agree that there is a slight lacuna here. One may add either “the sublime” or “the emotional” or both.

0 Mother … leaping upon me: The lines quoted come from the mad-scene in Euripides’ Orestes (255-57), a scene extremely popular in antiquity. Except perhaps in certain kinds of epideictic writing, such language is out of place in prose, and even in the prose-threnody it quickly becomes rant and “para tragic.”

Longinus is about to make this criti­ cism of contemporary public speakers, who were beginning to indulge too much in such language.

Addison, in Spectator 44, contrasts the effect of “spectacle” with the effect produced by speech: his example is parallel to the one which Longinus cites from Euripides: Hamlet address­ ing the ghost of his father on the bat­ tlements. Addison remarks that he does not censure the use of props and stage­ devices “when they are introduced with skill and accompanied by proportional sentiments and expressions in the writ­ ing.”

Woe’s me … to flee: the quotation is from Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Tau­ rus (291). As ancient critics frequently refer to a whole speech or passage simply by the opening line, readers should consult the speech as a whole and its dramatic context.

most loves … at tragicizing: Aristotle (Poetics l 453a30) admits that Euripides is deficient in the organization of his plays but says that, on the stage, he appears to be the “most tragic” because he deals with those who suffer powerful emotions.

Although Longinus specifies “erotic passions,” and although such examples as Phaedra and Medea were justly fam­ ous, he cites only passages showing madness. Erotic passion, one may pre­ sume, would be a form of weak emo­ tion, and hence would lend itself less well to the sublime. That Longinus is not sure about the potential sublimity of such characters as Phaedra and Medea is made clear by his phrase “I don’t know.” Having granted in ch. 10 that Sappho was able to be sublime in treat­ ing erotic passion, he cannot simply rule out Euripides’ treatment of the same thing—though we may imagine that he might make a distinction on the basis of genre: lyric as distinct from tragedy.

Now Euripides … images also: Diony­ sius of Halicarnassus is similar: in his fragmentary work On Imitation (6) he says that Euripides is rhetorical in his words-but often from “much great­ ness” falls into empty prettiness … and lowness-and is not sublime.

Addison seems to echo this passage in his remarks on the tragedian Otway:

Otway has followed nature in the language of his tragedy, and therefore shines in the passionate parts, more than any other of our Eng­ lish poets. As there is something familiar and domestic in the fable of his tragedy, more than in those of any other poet, he has little pomp, but great force, in his expressions. For which reason, though he has admirably succeed­ ed in the tender and melting part of his tragedies, he sometimes falls into too great a familiarity of phrase in those parts which, by Aristotle’s rule, ought to have been raised by the dignity of ex­ pression.

the poet Homer says: the quotation is from the Iliad (20.170 f.). It describes Achilles, as he rages on the field to avenge Patroclus, just before his meet­ ing with Aeneas. We may compare the soliloquy delivered by Hamlet (II.ii), in which he contrasts the factitious frenzy of the actor with his own authentic motivation:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wanned,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in ‘s aspect …

he declares: Euripides, in a lost play, the Phaethon; a number of fragments survive. The lines are said by a mes­ senger who is describing the scene which takes place between Helios and his son and the subsequent rise and fall of the boy. Failure to observe the mean is the boy’s vice, as well as that of both Euri­ pides and the public speakers at whom Longinus is pointing.

and, most consistently: such passages are, of course, ones in which Euripides is successful. Longin us displays consid­ erable tact and wit in manipulating his various points: to praise and censure Euripides, to select passages which show him at his best, and simultaneously to use these to show the kind of thing that will work in poetry but not in oratory. Perhaps, in this picture of the anxious but futile Helios, Longinus is figuring his own effect on his contemporaries.

on Cassandra: we do not know with certainty what play this comes from. Presumably the passage was famous enough so that Longinus needed to do no more than allude to it briefly in this fashion.

in his Seven Against Thebes he says: the lines come from Aeschylus’ play (42-46). The passage serves a double function: 1) it is an instance of how Aeschylus man­ ages to be vivid in heroic material, in a way which Euripides could not man­ age; 2) it describes Aeschylus himself, as the passage describing the lion (10.3) had been used to describe contemporary orators or as the “para tragic” quotation in 3.2 was used to describe the ranting tragedian.

having sworn ... their own: this clause modifies the seven heroes, and itself con­ tains a further quotation from the pas­ sage in Aeschylus (“without lamenta­ tion”). The emotion found in lamen­ tation is low and vulgar, according to Longinus (see ch. 8).

raw and untreated wool: the image is drawn from the process of preparing wool; Aeschylus’ style is seen, on occa­ sion, as rough, shaggy, hairy, disco­ lored, unfinished. Longinus seems to have been alone in using the word metaphorically.

all the same: that is, even having the example of Aeschylus’ failure in front of him, and knowing that Aeschylus failed sometimes in material for which his nature was unsuited, Euripides forces his unsuited nature to try the same kind of heroic imagery. Observe that Longi­ nus does not credit Euripides with “emulation” here, but “love of esteem.”

epiphany: the English “appearance” is too weak. In Greek, the noun is very often used of deities as they manifest themselves. In late writers the noun denotes the sudden and unexpected appearance of an enemy; hence its use here serves Longinus as a transition from the military passages, just used to compare Aeschylus and Euripides, to religious imagery used to compare the two poets.

In English critical writing (as distinct from theology), the word “epiphany” figures importantly in the aesthetic the­ ory worked out by Aquinas in ch. v of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

divinely carried aloft: Such “divine madness” might be truly inspired, but, if not controlled by art and technique, it could fail, as the quotations from Aeschylus and Euripides are designed to show. Longinus balances his praise and blame neatly.

contrary to opinion: from the Greek word we derive our “paradoxical,” that is, contrary to general opinion or to what seems to be true. We may compare such passages as Milton’s closing lines in the Epitaphium Damonis or the famous passage in Isaiah (55.12):

… the mountains and the hills before you
shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall
clap their hands.

Enthusiastic … roof: Aeschylus (fr. 58, Nauck), from a lost play.

making it pleasing: i.e., a “pleasing touch.” Longinus seems to have felt that Aeschylus was too bold in his met­ aphors, as some critics feel about such metaphors in the Bible as the moun­ tains that skip like lambs. He is on the edge of formulating a distinction be­ tween “personification” and Ruskin’s “pathetic fallacy.” William Smith re­ marks that Milton “shews a greater boldness of diction than either Euri­ pides or Aeschylus, and tempers it with the utmost propriety, when, at Adam’s eating the forbidden fruit,”

Earth trembled from her entrails, as agam
In pangs, and nature gave a second groan:
Sky lowr’d, and mutt’ring thun­ der, some sad drops
Wept, at completing of the mortal sm.
Paradise Lost IX. I000-03

Longinus would, perhaps, have ap­ proved of Milton’s boldness for the same reason that he approves of Euri­ pides: the close linking of the internal psychic movement—the emotion—with the external symbol—what T. S. Eliot calls “the objective correlative.”

with a kind of divine expression: the phrase probably goes with Oedipus, but it can also refer to Sophocles’ art. The reference is to the closing scene-—done by means of a messenger’s speech, in the Oedipus at Co/onus. Both this and the passage from Aeschylus quoted in 10.5 are from messengers’ speeches; these would naturally be passages closely resembling the topics and situations available to public speakers, as in the passage cited from Demosthenes (10.7), which Longinus praises highly.

Simonides: perhaps in the lost work Polyxena; cf. fr. 52 (Page). Euripides describes the scene in The Trojan Women and the Hecuba. Longinus’ choice of Simonides would seem to be an indirect censure of Euripides. Simonides is praised by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (On Imitations 6) for his “selection of words,” his “precision of synthesis,” and for his power to evoke a sense of lamentation, not in a way appropriate to greatness, but emotion­ ally. Longinus classifies “lamentation” as one of the emotions which are separ­ ate from sublimity and low (8.2).

abnormal: in the word “abnormal,” Longinus points to the kind of “dis­ play” favored by his contemporaries, an imitation of tragedy in prose, where such language and emotion were not suitable. Longin us regarded his work as useful for men in political life (1.2); such excesses would be out of place, as Ovid discovered when he switched from his incipient political career to poetry.

as now: the phrase “as now” suggests that a growing tendency among lesser orators has now become prevalent. Longinus is referring to Asianism.

The founder of this later “Asianism” (earlier, “Asianism” was, according to Philostratus [Lives of the Sophists 509], introduced by Aeschines [397c.-322 bce]) was (again, according to Philos­ tratus) Nicetes of Smyrna, who lived in the second half (the first century ce Tacitus (Dialogue on Orators 13) re­ marks that Nicetes went far beyond Aeschines. Nicetes, says Philostratus (Lives of the Sophists 511), found rhe­ toric in reduced straits and made it glor­ ious by “stepping away from” the an­ cient political mode of public speaking and substituting sophistic devices and a “bacchic and dithyrambic” mode. The distinction is like that which Aristotle makes (Poetics I 450b7) between the older tragedians, who made their char­ acters speak “politically” and the newer crop, whose characters speak “rhetori­ cally.” Throughout Philostratus, one can observe the popularity of this Asia­ tic or inspired mode; and such extant orations as the late monody delivered by Himerius (very late) on his son display the vices of the mode. Scopelian, the pupil of Nicetes, was another extrava­ gant Asianist and was exceedingly pop­ ular. If Longin us wrote in the first cen­ tury ce, such rhetoricians as Nicetes and Scopelian would have been in his mind when he composed this passage. Quintilian, writing toward the end of the century, describes the mad appear­ ance of such speakers at length, and with sober reproof (2.12.9-10); his pic­ ture is very like that of Lucian, writing over half a century later. The trend toward such gesticulatory Asianism was clearly in full force by the end of the first century. In the second century, there occurred such a recrudescence of Asian­ ism as to allow Philostratus to mark it as one of his three divisions in the history of rhetoric (Lives of the Sophists 511).

Orestes says: from Euripides’ Orestes (264-65). Longin us returns to his point— that contemporary orators are too poetic—by quoting from the same play and same scene, with which he began. He is fond of quoting passages which mention Furies and Bacchants; but of course they were the normal examples of madness and daemonic inspiration.

he is mad: Longinus ends his criticism of contemporary oratory with a sting: the word for “he is mad” refers to the contemporary orators no less than to Orestes. The whole criticism looks back to the comments on “ranting” and the “paratragic” in ch. 3. Hermogenes, in his book On the Met hod for the Power­ ful (Spengel 11.453), has a section deal­ ing with the “tragic mode of speaking.” Homer invented it, he says, and Demos­ thenes imitated it. What it could degen­ erate into may be seen in the very late prose-threnody of Himerius referred to above in the note “as now.”

practical arguments: Longinus returns to his practical aim of helping those who intend a political career: the word translated “practical arguments” is a rhetorical term denoting a subdivision of the genus “proof” as used in speeches, especially those in lawsuits, where “facts” count.

Longinus does not wish to exclude emotion from practical oratory but to make it serve a function; having shown in the previous paragraphs what its excess can do to corrupt, he now wishes to show what its proper use can do to enhance. That use is tremendous, as he shows by his word “enslaves.”

persuades …enslaves: the contrast is very strong. In ch. 1.4 Longinus had contrasted the state of being persuaded with “ecstasy”; here he uses the notion of being “enslaved”—i.e., “enthralled”—as his contrasting term. The sublime and stunning may push us “up” or “outside” or “down”; so long as they move us suddenly and strikingly to some place other than that which we usually occupy, the effect will—logically—be the same. For example, whether one stands at the bottom of the Grand Canyon looking up, or at the top look­ ing down, one experiences the same sense of grandeur. The ancients ex­ pressed this awareness by using the same word for “high” and “deep.” St. Paul uses the image of “enslavement” everywhere to express his sense of trans­ cendent submission.

Demosthenes says: the passage comes from his speech Against Timocrates (24.208).

Hyperides ... said: from a lost speech (fr. 28, Kenyon). Hyperides was accused of having introduced an unconstitu­ tional motion when he proposed to enfranchise slaves after the disaster at Chaeronea. We may observe that Lon­ ginus is keeping up his motif of “slaves and freedom.” He is also distinguishing between Demosthenes and Hyperides by quoting parallel passages, in prepa­ ration for his comparison of them in ch. 34. And his quotation supports the gen­ eral point of the chapter, in which he cautions orators against letting the poetic oratorical devices become more important than the actual case or poli- tical situation.

So much will suffice: Longinus has now finished the first two of the five divisions listed at the beginning of ch. 8. Russell objects to the specific omission in Longinus’ summary of the word “emotion,” which has appeared in ch. 8, but Longinus had qualified the word “emotion there by the adjective “en­ thusiasic,” and such had been the logic of the last few chapters. The two great lacunae which occur between chs. 8 and 15 prevent us from knowing what tran­ sitions Longinus may have made. Still, the general outline is clear: after the prospectus given in ch. 8, Longinus begins with “greatness of mind” (9.2), the word used to introduce the second part of his summary in 15.12. Ch. 10 is a continuation of ch. 9, as the opening sentence makes clear: in ch. 10 Longi­ nus is dealing with the relationship between the nature of the material and the animal’s nature. Chapters 11 and 12 are a further continuation, for “devel­ opment” is closely allied to what im­ mediately precedes, as Longinus says at the start of ch. 11. Chapters 13 and 14 introduce a new topic, that of imitation; ch. 15 deals with imagery. Longinus’ summary in I5. I 2, then, is accurate: “what is sublime in conception” is covered in chapters 9-12; “greatness in nature”—which is allied with “what is sublime in conception” by being a nat­ ural gift—is covered in chapters 13-15.

Longinus will now turn to the next three categories listed in ch. 8, those which can be attained by a combination of nature and technique.