Chapter 29: Excessive Periphrasis

Surely periphrasis is a business open to disaster, more than the other figures, if one does not take it up in moderation; you see, it imme­diately falls into feebleness, smacking of light-mindedness and coarseness; this is why they even scoff at Plato (he is over and over again powerful at the figure, even if he does use it in some places at the wrong moment) when in the Laws he says:

We must allow neither silvern nor golden wealth to reside in our city so that if he had kept men from obtaining cattle, it is clear that he would have spoken of “ovine and bovine wealth.”

2. But this philological parenthesis on the use of figures for sublime effect is enough, my dearest Terentianus; all these things make speeches and writings turn out more emotional and more sympathetically exciting; and emotion has a part in sublimity to the same extent that characterization has in pleasing touches.

Commentary

open to disaster: the word is generally medical; as this is the only use by Lon­ginus, we can assume he intended the medical sense, especially since it serves as a transition from the “female disease” with which he closed the preceding chapter to the “disease” of bad periphrasis. For the use of “disease” as a metaphor for vice, see the use of such words in 44.6.

smacking of light-mindedness: the verb “smack” can refer either to a sweet smell or a stink. The term “light-minded­ness” refers in its rhetorical sense to an attempt at great writing which is banal and preposterous. The translators dif­fer: “empty talk” (Roberts); “trifling” (Prickard); “hollow talk” (Grube); “empty phrases” (Russell); “empty chatter” (Dorsch).

coarseness: the Greek word is pachys, from which we get one of the roots of “pachyderm,” that is, elephant (lit, “thick and coarse-skinned”). In Greek the word can be applied lo trees, ankles, rich soil, the flesh of a pig, a coarsely woven cloak, curdled or cloned liquids, coarse speech, and a stupid man.

Laws: the passage comes from Book 7 (801B) of Plato’s last and longest work, which constitutes one-fifth of his cor­pus. The word “silvern” gets some of the hyper-poetic quality of Plato’s dic­tion, though “golden” in English is not at all unusual.

cattle… ‘ovine and bovine wealth’: In Greek the word for cattle is cognate with the word “bovine,” and so the sting in the irony is greater than in Eng­lish. The words “bovine” and “ovine” are, fortunately, nice equivalents for the Greek.

Longinus twice attributes the jibe to others; either he wished to give credit to others (even anonymously) or—because of his own admiration for Plato—to recognize his faults without himself damning him.

emotion has a part. . .in pleasing touches: Longinus sums up his analy­sis of figures: use of figures contributes to emotion, and since emotion contri­butes to sublimity, figures will produce sublimity to the degree that they have evoked and enhanced emotion. If the figures fail in tension, if they strain too much and collapse into what evokes laughter, they will not produce emo­tion and will not contribute to sublim­ity. Chapter 29 serves to make this point by both analysis and example.

Longinus had closed ch. 9 with a comparison of the Iliad and the Odys­sey, in which the principal point is that the Odyssey is marked by its emphasis on characterization, caused by a decline in Homer’s emotion. And emotion and characterization are two of the four terms he uses in summing up the part played by figures in sublimity here at the end of the parenthesis (29.2):

emotion has a part in sublimity to the same
extent that characterization has in pleasing touches.

Awareness of the linking of emotion and characterization will clarify the seemingly cryptic abruptness of the analogy which concludes this chapter. And, in addition, it will serve as a transi­tion to the next set of chapters, which deal with the fourth item on the list given in 8.1: diction. The present con­trast of emotion and characterization alludes to the so-called “characters of style.” This topic—the subject of an enormous literature—is treated with admirable lucidity by Russell in his introduction (esp. p. xxxvi, where he has charted the salient features of each style); for now it will suffice to say that the three styles were, under a variety of terms, the low, the middle, and the high: each had its assigned function, its principal exemplars, and its attendant vices. Thus the low style was appro­priate for teaching; its exemplars were Lysias and Xenophon; its vices were a certain dry and bloodless dullness. The middle style was appropriate for pleas­ing touches; its exemplars were Iso­crates and Herodotus; its vice was a kind of diluted expansiveness. The high style was appropriate for the purpose of rousing the emotions; its exemplars were Gorgias and Thucydides; and its vices were those catalogued by Longi­nus in chs. 3-4: swelling and false wit.

Clearly the best style—for sublimity—would combine the virtues of the middle and high styles without any of their attendant vices. Although Longinus, with his characteristic originality, does not utilize these traditional terminologies, he has them in mind as he marks out his own definitions and terms. Hence he can draw his illustrations, for both virtues and vices, from authors who range across all three styles. Most conspicuously he finds no examples of the sublime in the writers of comedy, especially the kind of comedy which stressed characterization, for its end was only the pleasure of pleasing touches. It is for this reason that he makes his analogy:

emotion  :  characterization
sublimity   pleasing touches

He prizes figures only to the extent that they contribute to emotion, the con­stituent of sublimity that Caecilius omitted but Longinus felt to be of major importance even if it was not essential.