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 describing 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.

0 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.

2. 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…

3. 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 am1s, 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’ appearance 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 weaker. 12. So much will suffice for what is sublime in the faculty of conception and for what greatness of mind creates from mimesis or imagery.