Chapter 38: Hyperbole
… and such examples as: “Unless you carry your brains in your feet and tramp on them.” For this reason one must know how far each thing may extend to its limit. You see, sometimes falling too far outside the limit destroys the hyperbole, and by being hypertensed such expressions become slack, and there are even times when they turn things around into their opposites. 2. Now Isocrates (I don’t know how) has engaged in this chil dish business because of his ambition for saying everything in a developed way. Though the basis of his Panegyric is that the city of Athens surpasses that of the Spartans in conferring good works on the Greeks, directly in the introduction he says:
Speeches have a capability so great as to be able both to make great things low and to set greatness around petty things—both to say old things in a novel way and to express new occurrences in an antique guise.
Now, then, someone might say, “Isocrates, are you actually about to interchange thus Spartan and Athenian matters?” He has, you see, almost set his encomium of speeches and writings as a pronouncement and notice to his hearers to feel a lack of confidence in him. 3. Now perhaps the most excellent hyperboles (as we also said earlier when we dealt with figures) are those which escape our notice that they are hyperboles. This happens whenever, from utter emotion, they are voiced in conjunction with some great dramatic circumstance; this is just what Thucydides does when he describes the men perishing in Sicily. He says:
The Syracusans came down after them and slaughtered those in the river, and at once the water was polluted; but nevertheless it was drunk bloodied as it was and mud died, and many fought over it.
The preeminence and dramatic circumstance of the emotion assure us that although blood and mud were being drunk, still they were things to be fought over. 4. Also similar is the Herodotean passage describing the men at Thermopylae; he says:
Here as they defended themselves with knives—as many as still happened to have them—and with hands and mouths, the barbarians buried them.
Here you will say, “What sort of thing is this fighting with mouths against armored men?” and “whatever kind of thing is ‘being buried with missiles’?”; notwithstanding this, it carries credence: you see, the matter was not, in my opinion, taken up for the sake of the hyperbole, but the hyperbole was bred with good reason by the situation. 5. You see—as I never stop saying—the works and emotions which come near to ecstasy are a release and a cure-all for every audaciousness in spoken and written style; as a result, even comic things, and they, certainly, fall off into a lack of the believable, are persuasive because they are laughable.
For he had a farmland small as a Laconic letter.
Laughter, you see, is actually an emotion of pleasure. And hyperboles, just as they apply to what is greater, also apply to what is lesser, since indeed exaggeration is common to both: and in a way ridicule is a development of what is low.
Commentary
tramp on them: the chapter lacks a beginning because of the lacuna of about two manuscript pages. The pas sage with which the fragmentary chap ter begins appears in a speech attributed to Demosthenes (On Halonnesus 45); this passage, as Russell notes, was used even in antiquity to prove the speech spurious, because of its colloquial vul garity: the ancient argument against the speech remarks on the lack of restraint displayed in the reviling tone of the language. Longinus seems to have ob jected to this hyperbole also, for his fol lowing remarks emphasize the need for knowing when not to go too far.
hyperbole: a technique for exaggerat ing things up or down for dramatic effect. Aristotle uses “hyperbole” both in a general sense meaning “excess” (Rhetoric I 463a2) and as a technical term in rhetoric (14l3a22): colloquial hyperboles, he says, are really meta phors, e.g., such English phrases as “chicken-hearted” or “lily-livered” or “bird-brained” or “her teeth were like stars-they came out every night.” Such hyperboles are examples of “under graduate wit” (see ch. 3), he adds, and are characteristic of intense anger; the device is most used by Attic orators and is not suitable for older men. Aristotle’s example of poetic hyperbole comes from the Iliad (9.385, 388-90), where Achilles rejects Agamemnon’s offer in hyperbolic vehemence:
Not if he should give me gifts as many in number
as sand or dust. . .I will not marry the daughter of Agamemnon, son of Atreus, not
if she vied with Aphrodite m beauty and Athena in skills.
The Greeks distinguished two kinds of hyperbole, which may be glossed by the English terms “overstatement” and “understatement.” Hyperbole that exaggerates to magnify is a kind of development; hyperbole that exaggerates in order to cut down is a kind of belittling. The first allows a comic delivery; the second, which is close to being irony, requires a “straight face,” or what the Venerable Bede calls gravitas pronuntiationis (Halm p. 615). The handbooks are in general agreement that hyperbole is a speech which goes beyond the truth, and some even see Longinus’ point that it can make things bigger or smaller. Demetrius (On Style 124-27) divides hyperbole into three kinds:
- similarity: they ran like the winds
- pre-eminence: whiter than snow
- impossibility: she hit her head on the sky.
It would be hard, sometimes, to dis tinguish between metaphor (and simile) and hyperbole, for they are often combined, e.g., as when Mercutio “amplifies” on the smallness of Queen Mab (Romeo and Juliet I.iv), or when Romeo says (II.ii):
What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!
Timon’s line (Timon of Athens I.ii), though it does not really fit any of Demetrius’ three categories, is clearly hyperbolic:
Methinks I could deal kingdoms to my friends,
And ne’er be weary.
Marlowe’s line “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” is a hy perbole; Henn (p. 45) quotes Shake speare’s imitation of it (Troilus and Cressida II.ii), of which, as he says, “The explosive suddenness is lost, the image is weakened and expanded, the rhythm has completely changed”:
Is she worth keeping? Why, she is a pearl,
Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships,
And turned crowned kings to merchants.
childish business: the phrase is an oxymoron in Greek, for it juxtaposes the roots for “business” or “action” and “passion,” in violation of what Russell calls the more normal idiom. Behind the oxymoron lies the paradoxical but true definition given by Aristotle in the Poetics (1452b11) of an emotion as a kind of action and his description of hyperbole as a characteristic of the young. Isocrates had a passion for development, says Longinus (see ch. 11), and hyperbole is used for develop ment.
Panegyric: the title recalls the imagery of athletic competition sustained throughout the past few chapters. Since this is generally accounted the greatest of Isocrates’ speeches, and since he spent ten years composing it, Longinus is almost malicious to discover an error “right in the introduction,” a word on which he puns because of its etymologi cal connection with “hyperbole.” Of course, he is entitled to be a little mali cious, since Isocrates challenges his readers, right in the introduction, to find anything wrong with his chef d’oeuvre: one can see Longinus picking up the Panegyric, reading those pre sumptuous words—Isocrates says that he is even going to disdain the normal function of an introduction, to dispose the readers towards his subject—and then saying, “Why you old—I’ll do just that.”
We should remember, however, be fore passing judgment on Isocrates, that he was in his nineties when he wrote the speech; that he had labored over it for years; and that at the end (187) he sadly confesses that he has not taken up to the worth of his theme. When he let the speech be published as is, he may have forgotten this discrepancy, or he may have deliberately let it stand, hoping that readers would be as charitable as Milton and remember that he died as he lived, upholding Greek culture in the face of the Athenian defeat at Chaero nea, which Killed with report that old man eloquent.
To this we must add two other things: one, Isocrates said, in the “intro duction” to his epideictic speech Helen, that one should not criticize others unless one were willing himself to “de scend into the arena” as a competitor, and that his speech on Helen was com petitive; two, that Isocrates never deli vered his speeches because of his weak voice-in contrast to Demosthenes, who overcame his weak voice by assiduous exercise.
If we put these allusions together, we find that Longin us is mocking Isocrates that rhetorical theorist par excellence for having made an error not only in the introduction of his greatest speech, but also in his theory.
encomium: Isocrates intends his defini tion of rhetoric to serve as a means of emphasizing and exaggerating the worth of his subject; such a statement, however, would be appropriate as the “introduction” to a rhetorical hand book; but as the “prelude” to an epi deictic speech it is sadly lacking.
An encomium ought to start from the birth and nature of the thing being praised: Isocrates’ definition suggests a bastard parentage for rhetoric, such as Plato attacked in his dialogue the Gorgias-named for that rhetorician who introduced this base idea of rhe toric into Athens.
as we said. . .hyperboles: the earlier statement of the principle occurred in 17.1. The American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens used to teach his pupils: “Develop technique and then hide it.” (quoted in Time magazine, Nov. 21, 1969, p. 61 [Canadian ed.]).
He says: the passage comes from Thucy dides 7.84. Russell points out that Lon ginus is concerned with the literary effect and does not ask whether the facts be historically true. Both Russell and Grube, throughout their notes, are disrurbed because the examples chosen by Longin us do not seem to be true hyper boles, although Grube recognizes that the solution to the problem probably lies in the lacuna. There Longinus must have given his definition of hy perbole. Since it is his custom not to use the technical terms of rhetoric with the rigidity found in the handbooks, we may expect that both his definition and critical practice were broader and more inclusive than those either found in the handbooks or used by modern critics like Russell and Grube, who are dis turbed because so many of Longinus’ examples in this chapter are not techni cally hyperboles. Russell is even more rigorous than Grube, who says that the passage from Herodotus is a “true hy perbole”; Russell thinks it is not. Lon ginus uses the term as he uses most rhetorical terms—with full awareness of their normal as well as technical meaning. See above, note on hyperbole.
pre-eminence and dramatic circum stances of the emotion: Longinus here combines the three elements which make up his working definition of hy perbole: an emotion characterized by height, or sublimity, and by actual dramatic circumstances. The passage quoted from Isocrates lacks all three; that quoted from Thucydides has all three—even if it lacked the external form of hyperbole as defined by the handbooks, it nevertheless exemplifies by its very austerity Longinus’ concep tion; the passage quoted from Herodo tus has all three plus the technical form. The sequence of quotations is beauti fully arranged, as is usual in Longinus.
he says: from Herodotus 7.225.3. Lon ginus selects a moment marked by high emotion and dramatic circumstance; from Herodotus’ words he selects two details which reveal what he thought hyperbole was: men using their teeth to fight armed enemies so numerous as to bury the defenders alive. In the second we have a clear metaphor exaggerated enough to qualify technically as a hy perbole; in the first we have so great a discrepancy between our normal expec tation of how men behave and the intensity of their conduct in this partic ular circumstance that, as in the pre vious quotation from Thucydides, the mere statement of fact becomes hyper bole. Such is what is meant by Longi nus’ general observation (35.3) on what is “contrary to expectation.”
with good reason: a play on words that is not translatable. Literally, the Greek word means “having a good logos”; from it we derive our English “eulogy.” The verbal form means “to speak well of,” “to give a good account of,” “to be reasonable,” and “to speak finely.” Longinus probably intends all of these, for his last specimen of hyperbole com bines a rational use of the device applied Lo a situation of high emotion and dra matic circumstance, all combined in a “good speech or writing” that is at the same time a eulogy of the dead Greeks.
For he had a farmland: the source of the quotation is unknown. Strabo (1.2.30) speaks of hyperbolic hyperboles e.g., “paler than the ghost of an albino,” or Churchill’s famous description of Russian foreign policy as “a mystery wrapped inside of a riddle hidden in an enigma.” Among the samples which Strabo cites is the same one used by Longinus, except that in Strabo’s text the word “Laconic” modifies “letter.” This is a pun which we can translate into English, since the word “laconic” means “brief,” “terse,” “condensed.” Spartan speech was notoriously terse: Demetrius (8) cites a letter sent by Sparta to Philip, which consisted of only three words: “Dionysius, in Corinth”—that is, Philip should remember the case of the tyrant Dionysius, once a powerful ruler like Philip but now a poor school teacher living in Corinth, the ancient Paris. As Demetrius observes, the pithi ness has an “intense animus,” like a wild beast “straining” to leap; if, he says, you “stretch out” the statement, it becomes a narrative and loses its power Lo “stun.”
Laughter...pleasure: the word “plea sure” is also a technical term in rhetoric to signify a “pleasing touch.” Longin us is probably using the term in both the technical and generic senses.
Aristotle in the Rhetoric (137Ib35) says that playfulness and laughter are “pleasant.” He says too (137la27) that men take pleasure in a “hyperbole” or excess of psychic state, since variation is pleasant. Demetrius (126 and 161) says that comedy produces delight by means of impossible hyperboles.
In 40.2, Longinus indicates that there can be sublimity in comedy. Since one can be in “ecstasy” (i.e., beside oneself) with laughter as well as with grief, by Longinan standards there can be comic sublimity.
