Chapter 34: Demosthenes and Hyperides
But if correctness were decided by number, not by true greatness, Hyperides would be better than Demosthenes in every point. He is, you see, able to create more voices than Demosthenes and he has more excellences, and he is just below the top in everything, like a competitor in the pentathlon, so that he is left behind all the others struggling in the competition for first prizes but is first among the private amateurs.
2. Hyperides, in addition to imitating all the Demosthenian correctnesses (except, of course, for the way he puts things together), is too much taken with both the excellences and graces of Lysias. You see, he talks with simplicity when it is necessary and does not say everything consistently and in one tone, as Demosthenes does; his characterization has a pleasing and sweet quality, made pleasing by its simplicity; his urbanities are ineffable: a most politic sneer, good breeding, well trained irony, jokes neither unrefined nor ill-bred as in the Attic orators but placed fittingly, a dexterity at ridicule, much comic skill, and a spur well aimed with playfulness—and in all of these an inimitable charm; his nature is most able to evoke a sense of the lamentable, and he is utterly flexible at pouring out myth-making and with his fluid spirit at finding his way through digressions, as in his rather too poetic passage on Leto, and (and I don’t know whether any other writer did so) he did make his Funeral Oration an epideictic speech. 3. Demos thenes, on the other hand, is not given to characterization; he does not pour himself forth; he is least fluid and epideictic, and of the qualities just listed he more often than not has no share. And surely when he forces himself to generate laughter and urbanities, he does not so much excite laughter as make himself laughable; and when he wishes to approach being graceful, he is all the farther from it. And, of course, had he tried his hand at writing on Phryne or the little speech on Athenogenes, he would surely have established still more the reputation of Hyperides as the superior of the two. 4. But indeed I take it that the fine things of Hyperides, even if they are numerous, are all the same lacking in greatness and achieve no effect because they come from “the heart of one sober” and allow the audience to remain still-no one is frightened when reading Hyperides—but Demosthenes takes up the tale, drawing on excellences which start from what is great in nature and end up on the height: a tone of sublime address, emotions with a soul, resources, quickness of conception, swiftness, and, where important, a power and capacity unreachable by all others. And since, I say, he has concentrated all these into himself, like heaven-sent gifts (one cannot rightly say they are human), by means of his fine qualities he is victorious over all others and, as compensation for those he does not have, he outthunders, as it were, and outshines public speakers of all ages: one might actually be more capable of opening his eyes towards a thunderbolt bearing in on him than to set his eyes on the emotions of this man as they come one on top of another.
Commentary
correctness: Longinus now proceeds to “number” the “correctnesses” found in Hyperides; the comparison is one of the most sustained, elegant, and accu rate pieces of ancient literary criticism which we possess. It is part of his prepa ration for establishing a set of critical principles better than those used by Caecilius. What these principles are has appeared throughout the work so far and will receive its most philosophical expression in the next chapter.
Hyperides: Hyperides flourished in the fourth century bce. As an orator he was good enough to be classified in the canon of ten, named as the greatest ora tors by Alexandrian critics. Since Caeci lius wrote a book on the ten great ora tors, he would have treated Hyperides; apparently he rated him below Lysias. In raising Hyperides to a competitive status with Demosthenes, Longinus is himself competing with Caecilius.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in his fragmentary work On Imitation (5), discusses Hyperides in terms some of which are highly similar to those of Longinus: e.g., he is moderate, full of graces, and especially to be emulated for his powers of narrative. To these Dio nysius adds that Hyperides surpasses Lysias in the artistic treatment of his phrasing, the last topic of Longinus’ long parenthesis on figures; that he surpassed everybody in the readiness of his invention to do everything; and that, although seeming to be simple, he really had power. Longinus concedes the simplicity but denies the power.
Hermogenes (On Ideas 11.382) com pares Hyperides to Demosthenes and finds him most deficient in power, although he seems to agree with Diony sius, saying that where Hyperides has power, it both seems and is power. Hermogenes also says that the greatness of Hyperides is “over-bold.”
more voices: Dionysius, in On Com position (16), uses the same word of Homer in praising him for his skill at manipulating sounds, i.e., vowels and consonants, to express the emotions, dispositions, and actions of his perso nae. It thus indicates ability in charac terization, a point in which Longinus readily concedes superiority to Hyper ides. The concession is, of course, stra tegic: Hyperides will suffer from the defect of his qualities, for his extensive diversity precludes the kind of intensive power which is the mark of sublimity. This strategy is the reason for Longi nus’ use of the bloc-technique in his comparison of the two orators (rather than a set of balanced clauses), for the sustained and perceptive catalogue of Hyperides’ felicities is a build-up pre paratory to knocking him down. It is clever of Longinus to make Hyperides include all of the virtues of Lysias, plus his own, and at the same time to make the qualities of Lysias Lysias’ own weaknesses.
pentathlon: a contest consisting of five events: running, jumping, wrestling, throwing a discus, and throwing a javelin. As we know from the modern version of this—the decathlon of the Olympic Games—athletes who win all or most of these events cannot really compete with those who specialize in one.
In using this analogy, Longinus probably has in mind the kind of writer whom he put in the faultless but middle class in the previous chapter, notably Eratosthenes, whose nickname was Pentathlos.
struggling: Longinus exploits all the’ meanings of the word he uses here; from the Greek (agon) we derive “antago nist” and “protagonist.” Primarily it refers to one who competes in athletic contests; in Isocrates and Thucydides, the word is specifically opposed to “critic.” Since there is a double competi Lion going on—between Demosthenes and Hyperides as contestants and be tween Caecilius and Longinus as critics— the joke is obvious. We have generally translated the word with some form of “struggle.”
private amateurs: in Greek the word literally means “private citizens.” Since Longinus is interested in training men for public life, the suggested contempt is withering: Demosthenes could take the “heal” of political struggle; Hyperides, Longinus may be implying, could not.
he talks: here begins the “bloc” of terms with which Longinus character izes Hyperides. It falls into three parts:
- his variety of tone and characteriza tion;
- his wit;
- his skill at the emo tion of lament, al myth, and al display speeches.
In this bloc, Longinus seems simply to enumerate the “correctnesses” to be found in the work of Hyperides; as suc ceeding notes will show, he places and phrases these so neatly as to be simul taneously an enumeration and a judi cious evaluation of virtues and vices.
simplicity: a technical term in rhetoric, the word is treated al length by Hermo genes, in his book On Ideas (Spengel 11.351-7). The essence of simplicity, says Hermogenes, is purity, that is, percep tions that are common to all men and that have nothing deep or highly con ceptual in them—the kind of thing that children would grasp. The word also had special reference to philosophical style as distinct from that of practical legal style; we may think of such Eng lish writers as Matthew Arnold, with his patient and often maddening repeti tions, or G. E. Moore. Hermogenes says that the method for this style is to be pleonastic (Spengel II.354).
in one tone: Rhys Roberts, in the Glos sary to his edition of Dionysius of Hali carnassus’ book On Composition, de fines the term we have translated as “tone” by four English nouns: tone, tension, pitch, accent. Our English “tone” is so loosely used nowadays as to be almost meaningless. Still, we can speak of the prevailing “tone” of a piece of music, a speech, or even a situation. Although Longinus knew that no one could be sublime all the time, but would have “peak” moments, he seems at first glance to be conceding to Hyper ides a variety of pitch or tone and hence the unevenness which he associates with sublime writing. But analysis will show that Hyperides’ variety of tone takes form in his graceful characterization and his mastery of its manners. Within his range he is more various, but his range is itself narrow.
urbanities: with this word Longinus commences an almost pyrotechnically brilliant, and exhaustive, catalogue of the Lysias-like “excellences and graces” of Hyperides; in damning one he damns the other, too. Each of the items listed is a technical term in rhetoric, which Longinus manipulates with his own urbane ease and raillery. No better way can be found to demonstrate the great ness of Longinus than to compare his casual definitions and deployments of these technical terms with the way they are treated in the rhetorical handbooks. “Urbanities” derives from the old Greek word for city; it embraces all of what we call “city-manners.” The term begins to become a part of the technical vocabulary of rhetoric in Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1410b7 ff.), where it denotes these bon mots, those well put points, which men have a good opinion of. To think these up is the mark and the job of a man who is clever-natured and trained. For such clever talk in English, see Lyly’s novel Euphues and the long tra dition of English wits like Sidney Smith and Oscar Wilde. Aristotle lists three basic devices for achieving this effect: metaphor, antithesis, and a sense of sprightly vividness.
In the later rhetorical handbooks, the term is classified as a figure and as a trope; it is generally one species of the genus irony; but the distinctions are not always clear or consistent. In Cocon drius’ book On Tropes (Spengel 111.235-36) we find the most subtle treatment of it. Irony, says Cocondrius, is a speech which makes something clear by saying the opposite with a characteristic delivery: it is sometimes directed at ourselves, sometimes at oth ers. He lists two kinds of self-irony: urbanity and antimetathesis: in the first we cast aspersions on another by a speech in which we allude to our rela tionship with him, as Telemachus does in the Odyssey (I 7.397): “Anti nous, what a fine fatherly concern you show for me!”; in the second we deprecate ourselves, suggesting a pretence of self censure at the same time that we pretend to praise another.
ineffable: perhaps such graces are “nameless” and “inexpressible”-but Longinus names and expresses them. In view of the detailed list that follows, the use of “ineffable” is probably a joke.
sneer: Cocondrius (Spengel 111.235-6) defines sneer as a speech said with a smile with an additional contraction of the nostrils. The anonymous work On Tropes (Spengel III.213) gives more anatomical details in its illustrative example: when someone has been caught in the act of doing something bad we sneer if we say “What a fine thing you did, so characteristic of a pru dent man,” blowing a breath out through the nostrils. It was, apparently, a sophisticated snort.
good breeding: a certain assumption of aristocratic inheritance underlies the term. By including it in the list of Hyper ides’ urbanities, Longinus softens any implication that the orator was mali cious. To Cardinal Newman’s famous definition of a gentleman as one who never hurt anybody else Oscar Wilde added “unintentionally.”
well-trained: the Greek word suggests experience in the kind of training given in a gymnasium or wrestling school. Both the word translated well-trained and “gymnasium” came to be regular words for schools of the mind as well as the body. So too in Germany high school is called gymnasium. Aristotle had said (see above n. on urbanities) that urbanity was the result of good nature and training. The conventional metaphors enable Longinus to sustain his simultaneous athletic and critical parallels.
irony: the only use of this term in Lon ginus. It is peculiar that, although the Greeks practiced irony more than any other culture, both in tragedy and in philosophy, and that the phrase “Socratic irony” is a commonplace in English, theorizing on irony is very late and not very impressive. The rhetorical handbooks define it badly and classify species, but its treatment is meager. We find nowhere in the handbooks, except for a few hints in Cocondrius (see above n. on urbanities), our distinction be tween irony and dramatic irony. For us, both sarcasm and irony fit under the genus of saying the opposite of what is meant with an intention of being under stood by somebody: in sarcasm, we wish the person addressed to understand the truth; in irony, we wish some third person-either an observer or ourselves to appreciate the truth. And dramatic irony consists of words expressing a truth opposite to that stated which are understood not by the speaker but by someone else, either a character in the play or the audience or both.
The Greek writers on irony, of course, understood the principle that the genus consisted of saying the opposite of what was meant (Spengel 1.208, 111.22, 53, 60, 91, etc.); but its species for them became a matter of facial gestures accompany ing the irony, e.g., the smile, the smile with teeth showing, the sniff or sneer, etc.
Hermogenes did not treat the subject a most curious omission by the subtlest and most copious of the ancient writers on rhetorical theory. The anonymous work On Figures (Spengel 111.141) shows a knowledge that irony can be achieved by overstatement or under statement. Zonaeus, in his book On Figures (Spengel III.164), suggests that Greeks knew of the connection between the pathetic and the ironic, but his observation is brief and does not reveal much. The rhetoricians also knew that it was closely connected with deliv ery (e.g., the anonymous On Tropes in Spengel III.213), but again there is only a brief treatment. Of course, irony may have been discussed at length in some lost work, or the Greeks may simply have understood its workings so well that they did not bother to analyze it, just as Plato and Aristotle never define imitation.
unrefined: literally, “lacking in music or the muse.” In 28.1, Longin us uses the word-the only other time in the extant text. There, in discussing periphrasis, he had drawn an analogy between ornamentation, or “pralltrillers,” in music and periphrasis in writing; both are effective if there is nothing over blown or “unrefined.” Here, in ch. 34, he emphasizes again that Hyperides controls his ironic and sarcastic wit with gentlemanly discretion, a point he will stress again in the next phrase, “nor ill-bred.”
Attic orators: a vexed passage; Russell summarizes the dispute and interpreta tions. Prickard translates it correctly: “as in those great Attic Orators.”
inimitable charm: given Longinus’ high opinion of imitation, we may assume that “inimitable” is not wholly complimentary.
the lamentable: once again Longinus stresses the weakness of Hyperides, for this is the word which Longinus had used as an example of the “low” emo tions in 8.2. To translate it “pity,” as do Roberts, Einarson, Grube, Fyfe, Rus sell, and Dorsch, or “compassion,” as does Prickard, is misleading. Longinus is engaged in his own “hatchet-job” on Hyperides.
myth-telling: Dionysius of Halicarnas sus had praised Hyperides as being supreme at narrative, a word which Longinus uses of Homer’s love for mythic tales in the Odyssey (9.13). With arch malice, Longinus makes the same point, but by using the word for “myth” rather than the word for “narrative,” he again undercuts Hyperides’ claim to greatness. Hermogenes, in his book On Ideas (Spengel 11.287-88), praises Hyper ides for his treatment of myth, but the praise is partly damning: there is not much of this kind of thing done in a poetic manner by public speakers, says Hermogenes, although there is in Hyperides. In the Progymnasmata of Nicholas the Sophist (Spengel III.451 ), an elementary set of rhetorical exercises for beginning rhetoricians, myth is placed as the first exercise because, Nicholas says, it is “simple” by nature and like poetry in its appeal to the young. One kind he classifies as “mythic narrative.”
fluid: the word is not complimentary, for it implies a facile, dainty, languish ing, and even feeble nature.
passage on Leto: from a lost speech entitled Deliacus; it is the speech cited by Hermogenes when he praises Hyper ides’ use of myth.
Funeral Oration: the speech survives; it was first published, in modern times, in 1858. Longinus expresses an almost grudging surprise that Hyperides has somehow converted the genre of the funeral oration into an epideictic speech, a kind of speech which he did not rate highly. The later rhetoricians, however, (e.g., Menander in Spengel III.418) do classify the funeral oration as a species of the epideictic speech. Presumably Longinus had in mind the deliberative and advisory nature of such funeral orations as that of Pericles.
characterization: Russell cites Marcel linus (Thucydides 57) on the lack of characterization in the speeches of Thucydides. Since characterization was closely connected with comedy, it neces sarily lacked austerity, grandeur, sub limity.
Phryne: the famous speech, now lost, by Hyperides defended the celebrated hetaira (courtesan) Phryne, whom Hyperides brought into court so that her beauty might supplement the beauty of his pleading. Athenaeus (13.590e) says that Hyperides hoped Phryne’s beauty would enhance the appeals to lamentation usually contained in a peroration. Longinus says that Hyper ides was a specialist in exploiting the lamentable (34.2).
little speech of Athenogenes: the speech survives in extensive fragments; it is marked by much characterization. The word for “little speech” is, like most of the diminutives in Longin us, pejorative.
“the heart of one sober”: the metrical quality of the phrase suggests that it is a quotation; Russell cites a similar pro verbal expression from Plutarch (De Garrulitate 503 f.). Longinus seems to be alluding also to the critics of Plato who censured his imagery as seeming like that of a poet who was himself not sober (32.7). Wine as a kind of inspira tion is a well-known phenomenon: Longinus disliked Dionysiac frenzy in authors but admired Apollonian trans port: Hyperides has neither the virtue nor the vice of inspiration, for he is onlyThe Spectator papers are among the correct. best examples in English of characterization.
to remain still: in 20.2, Longinus had praised Demosthenes for his ability to avoid monotony and to excite emotion: stillness, he said, comes with what is stationary, emotion with disorder. Be cause Hyperides is always in control, he does not himself feel emotion and hence cannot communicate or express excite ment to his audience. That passage and this are the only two places in which Longinus uses the verb “to be still.”
We may compare Johnson’s remarks on Addison (Lives of the Poets):
His prose is the model of the mid dle style; on grave subjects not formal, on light occasions not groveling; pure without scrupul osity, and exact without apparent elaboration; always equable, and always easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences. Addi son never deviates from his track to snatch a grace; he seeks no ambitious ornaments, and tries no hazardous innovations. His page is always luminous, but never blazes in unexpected splen dour.
takes up the tale: A glancing quotation from the Odyssey (8.499), where Demo docus begins his song of the Trojan war from a particular point. Russell observes that the quoted phrase had a kind of vogue in late Greek as a way of saying “thereupon.” Since Demodocus begins at a high point of the tale, the allusion is well placed and not merely voguish, for Demosthenes starts from a nature well endowed with excellences and works his way up from there to sublimity.
power and capacity: in 8.1, Longinus had prefaced his fivefold division of the parts of sublimity by conceding, as a foundation for all of them, “capacity for speaking”; here in ch. 34 he conjoins that fundamental quality with the out standing characteristic of Demosthenes: power. No other ancient writer on rhe toric makes power the central criterion for greatness and sublimity: it is Lo Longin us what “pleasing” was to John son, who said of Pope’s version of the Iliad:
To a thousand cavils one answer is sufficient; the purpose of a wri ter is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside.
Demosthenes is the choice both of Lon gin us and of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (On Composition 18) precisely be cause he has this mastering power. He is cited more times by the various rhetori cal writers in Spengel’s Rhetores Graeci than any other author, even Homer.
