Chapter 23: Polyptota, Athroismoi, Variations, Climaxes
The figures called polyptota, athroismoi, variations, climaxes, which give one a sense of struggle, work together, as you understand, for ornamental effect and complete sublimity and emotion. And what of the changes of case, tense, person, number, gender—how they sometimes diversify and wake up the sentence! 2. But I say—concerning number— that these things are not only found to be ornamental which, while singular in form are, when theorized about, plural in force, as when the poet says:
At once an innumerable people
Were scattered along the seashore and shouted, “Look! Tunny!”
But it is more worth keeping in mind that there are places where plurals used for singular strike us as more magniloquent and court our good opinion by the sense of a crowd of numbers. 3. Such are Oedipus’ lines in Sophocles:
O weddings, weddings,
You are the ones, conceiving and begetting us, Who again let loose the selfsame seed, and showed Father, brothers, sons as kindred blood,
Brides, mother, wives—all deeds that are Most shameful among mankind.
You see, all these are one word—”Oedipus,” and on the other side, “Jocasta”; but all the same, having been spilled into the plural, the number actually pluralizes the misfortunes. These also are made more in number:
Out came the Hectors and the Sarpedons
And the Platonic passage which we have cited in another place:
4. For no Pelopses or Cadmuses or Aegyptuses and Danauses nor any other of the many who are barbaric in nature dwell with us, but we ourselves, Greeks-not a barbarian mixture—live here…and the rest of the passage consistent with this. By nature matters are heard as more ostentatious when the words are set one on another in herds. Still one ought not to do this except when the subject admits of exaggeration in the form of pluralizing, hyperbole, or emotion:…_either one or more of these-for to fasten bells everywhere is certainly too much like a sophist.
Commentary
polyptota: Longinus deals with several rhetorical tricks in this chapter; whether the first one mentioned, polyptoton, is to be taken as the genus and the next three as species, or whether he intends all four to be co-equal, is unclear.
Literally, polyptoton means having “many case-endings.” Herodian, in his book On Figures (Spengel III.97), de fines it as the use of a noun in differing cases in successive clauses or sentences. Since English has lost almost all of its case-endings, or inflections, examples are not easy to produce. A simple one would be “She is my girl; I love her.”
athroismoi: in the singular, this noun is usually translated as “accumulation.” The device takes two forms: (1) heaping up or accumulating a series of individ ual words whose unity is established not by their meaning but by their rele vance to the particular situation; e.g., as when Hamlet (IV.iv) reviews the rea sons obliging him to kill Claudius: “Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means/To do ‘t.’ Form (2) consists of heaping up or accumulating phrases or clauses rather than individual words; e.g., in Hamlet’s soliloquy “To be or not to be” (III.i):
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs ol despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes?
Walt Whitman made a poetic career out of simple-minded exploitation of athroismos; for him it was a way of comprehending the cosmos.
variation: the word in its technical sense denotes an intermixing not only of cases but also of words. Because English lacks case-endings, examples are not available, but a crude parallel would be to re-write Lincoln’s famous phrase “of the people, by the people, and for the people” with different nouns: “of the people, by the populace, for the citi zenry.” Or, if we can imagine the appro priate case-endings, such a sequence as this from Hamlet (I.iv): ”I’ll call thee Hamlet,/King, father, royal Dane. Oh, answer me!/Let me not burst in ignor ance…”This example combines “variation,” athroismos, and asyndeton (see ch. 19).
climaxes: literally, a “ladder”; as, in climbing a ladder, we start from the rung on which we have stopped, so in climax the speaker voices clauses con sisting of two parts, the second of which becomes the first part of the next clause:
Russell aptly cites Paul as a master of the device, e.g., Romans 8:29-30.
For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate…
whom he did predestinate, them also he called: and
whom he called, them he also jus tified: and
whom he justified, them he also glorified.
George Herbert’s poem A Wreath is a virtuoso employment of the device:
A wreathed garland of deserved praise,
Of praise deserved, unto thee I give,
I give to thee, who knowest all my ways,
My crooked winding ways, where in I live,
Wherein I die, not live; for life is straight,
Straight as a line, and ever tends to thee,
To thee, who art more far above deceit,
Than deceit seems above simplicity.
Give me simplicity, that I may live,
So live and like, that I may know thy ways,
Know them and practice them: then shall I give
For this poor wreath, give thee a crown of praise.
In Latin, the device was sometimes called a catena because its parts were tied together, as in a daisy-chain or wreath.
Both climax and an athroismos based on climax can be seen in this stanza by Spenser (The Faerie Queene 11.vi. l 3):
No tree, whose branches did not bravely spring;
No braunch, whereon a fine bird did not sitt;
No bird, but did her shrill notes sweetely sing;
No song, but did contain a lovely din:
Trees, braunches, birds, and songs were framed fin
For to allure fraile mind to care less ease.
Careless the man soon woxe, and his weake witt
Was overcome of thing that did him please;
So pleased, did his wrathful pur pose faire appease.
Ordinarily, in a climax, items are listed in ascending order so as to finish with a “bang.” As a specimen of, liter ally, anti-climax we may cite Hamlet’s observation of the skull of Yorick (V.i):
Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam, and why of loam whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer barrel?
ornamental effect: the Greek word is transliterated into English as “cosmos,” i.e., the world or universe, from which we derive “cosmetic.” The word sig nifies both order and, by natural associ ation, beauty or ornament. The follow ing passage from Moby Dick (ch. xiii) makes the double sense vivid:
And when we consider that other theory of the natural philo sophers, that all other earth hues— every stately or lovely emblazon ing—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substance—, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose al lurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless….
And what: to begin a sentence with this kind of “What” is a familiar rhetorical device used by speakers who wish to pull in some material in a way which will suggest that the wealth of evidence is beyond that speaker’s capacity to keep up with it. Longinus used the fuller form of this device in 18.1, where he introduced the question of “questions and-answers” with a rhetorical ques tion.
number: the use of singular for plural is taken up separately in ch. 24. There is a kind of academic wit in Longinus’ multiplicity of plurals-eight words in a row all plural in number. It seems almost malicious of Longinus, after this monotonous athroismos of terms, to talk about how such devices “diver sify and wake up” a sentence.
Longin us has now listed nine rhetor ical devices: polyptota, athroismoi, var iations, climaxes, and changes of case, tense, person, number, and gender. Then, out of all these items, he selects the eighth for discussion! At no point in the chapter does he discuss any of the others, although a few of them are taken up in later chapters. It would seem, then, that either there are lacunae which we do not suspect or else—as is much more likely—Longinus is partly joking at the elaborate nomenclature and jar gon of the rhetorical handbooks, partly willing to rely on their being known to his audience; for he does, at one point or another, employ most of the devices listed.
singular: continuing with his ath roismos of academic jokes, Longinus reaches a kind of climax by putting the word “singular” in the plural; unfortu nately, the effect is not duplicable in English.
theorized about: perhaps this transla tion stretches English idiom a little. From the root of the Greek word we derive our ”theory.” It means to have an understanding of the nature of a whole by means of the relationship of its parts to the whole and of the causes thereof. Idiomatically “inspect” would be bet ter, but it would lose the philosophic force of the Greek word.
as when the poet says: we do not know the source of this quotation. Despite a textual problem in the quotation (see Russell), it seems to refer to fishing for tunny-fish, an activity which caught the imagination of many ancient writers, e.g, Aeschylus (Persians 424). Oppian (Fishing 3.631 ff.), and Aelian (Natural History 15.5). D’Arcy Thompson’s book A Glossary of Greek Fishes (London: Oxford University Press, 1947) collects the sources.
people...were scattered: the noun is singular in form (though plural in meaning); the verb is plural in form. In Greek this shift is much more notice able than in English, whether that spoken in Britain or in America.
magniloquent: the word is generally used in a pejorative sense in Greek; though it can have good connotations, it is combined here with a phrase which is also pejorative.
courts our good opinion. . .crowd of numbers: the word for “courts our opin ion” is, like “magniloquent,” generally pejorative; it means “to curry favor with, to work at getting a good opinion of yourself.” Combined with the phrase “crowd of numbers” it seems, as Russell suggests, to be a conceit, and one that comes perilously close to being “false wit.” Perhaps the parallel passage in Caecilius would shed light on the choice of words and the conceit.
The real reason for the ambiguous language, however, becomes clear in the next chapter. There Longinus dis cusses the opposite device—using sin gulars for plurals—which he much prefers because it resembles an organic unity. See ch. 24, n. on compressing the number.
in Sophocles: the passage quoted, some what loosely, is from Oedipus Rex (1403-08).
pluralizes: the subject is plural in form, singular in meaning; the verb is singular in form, plural in meaning.
made more: probably another in Lon ginus’ accumulation of rhetorical jokes. The Greek verb is cognate with the rhe torical term “pleonasm”: using more synonymous terms than necessary “for the sake of ornament or emphasis” (Alexander, On Figures [Spengel IIl.32]). The pleonasm, of course, is the second quotation, from an unknown tragedy—”Out came the Hectors and the Sarpedons”—since the point is per fectly clear from the first quotation.
in another place: we do not know where; Russell suggests that it might be another work entirely or in one of the lacunae—perhaps that in 12.2, where Demosthenes and Plato were compared. Longinus’ only other use of the word for “in another place” (9.2) suggests that it came from another work. The quota tion is from Plato’s Menexenus (245D).
Pelopses ...Danauses: these plural forms are nowadays illiterate, but trans lated Greek plurals would not convey either the sense or the force to a Greek less reader. David Hume pluralizes clas sical names anglice in Essay XIII, Of Eloquence:
Our orators would then have done honour to their country, as well as
our poets, geometers, and philo sophers; Archimedeses and Virgils.
in herds: the word seems to be the anti climax of a sequence: “people,” “crowd,” “herd”: see above, n. on climax. Longinus is probably joking on Plato’s combination of athroismos and rhetorical use of the plural for the singular.
emotion: Longinus is insistent, as al ways, that there be a natural coherence and inherence of subject and rhetorical device: see his comments on artistic selection and “synthesis” in 10.1. Caeci lius had omitted mention of emotion; hence Longinus includes itas the climax of his brief athroismos (combined with polysyndeton) of places appropriate for the use of the plural.
fasten bells...sophist: the image is an echo of Longinus’ favorite orator, Demosthenes (25.90). The metaphor appears, as Russell argues, to be drawn from the strings or straps of bells put on warhorses or circus animals, or perhaps even domestic horses, as in our song Jingle Bells. The image presents a pic ture of bright jingling sounds meant to attract the attention by their multiplic ity and motion, but which, on analysis, are dull, repetitive, and empty.
