Chapter 32: Number and Use of Tropes

But concerning the number of metaphors, Caecilius is like a man who has set himself down with those who have set it as a rule that two or, at the most three, are to be arranged in the same passage. Demosthenes, you see, is the norm in such matters: the right moment for their use comes when the emotions sweep themselves like a winter’s torrential flood and drag with them, as a necessity, a polymultiplicity of metaphors. He says:

2. Men, disgusting flatterers, each mutilating his father­ land, who drank away their freedom in toasts to Philip first and now to Alexander, measuring their happiness by their bellies and most shameless appetites, having overturned the liberty and freedom from despots which were, to the earlier Greeks, the norms and standards of what is good.

Here the animus of the public speaker against traitors occults the number of the tropes. 3. For this reason Aristotle and Theophrastus say that expressions like “just as if” and “as it were” and “if one ought to say it in this manner” and “if one were to run the risk of speaking thus” are mollifiers of metaphors; their self-assessment, they say, is a cure for their audacity. 4. I too admit this view; all the same, I say what I said in dealing with figures, that intense emotion, put in at the right moment, and a nobly bred sublimity are a kind of appropriate cure for the number and audacity of metaphors because their rushing impulsiveness naturally sweeps and pushes everything before it-but, even more, they actually exact the asides as something necessary and do not allow the audience to have the leisure to scrutinize the number of metaphors because they become enthusiastic along with the speaker. 5. But, in fact, in addressing oneself to commonplaces, and in descriptions, nothing is so thoroughly expressive as continuous tropes, one after the other. By means of these, the anatomy of the human tabernacle is ceremoniously paraded in Xenophon and is still more divinely painted in Plato. He says that the head is its acropolis, the neck is constructed like an isthmus between it and the chest, and the vertebrae he says underprop it like pivots; pleasure is for men a bait for vice; the tongue is what delivers opinions on taste; and the heart is a knot of veins and the spring of the blood as it is vigorously carried around, having been placed on duty in the guardhouse of the body; and his word for the courses of the passageways is alleys; “the gods,” he says, “having devised the idea of the lungs as an aid to the leaping of the heart in its expectation of powerful enemies and in its animus when it is worked up—since it is very fervent—planted lungs in the body, for they are soft and bloodless and have cavities within, as a sort of cushion, so that the seething animus of a human being may leap and throb against something yielding and not be spoiled”; and the house of cravings he speaks of as the women’s quarters, that of the animus as the men’s quarters; in fact the spleen is the napkin of the inner parts, so that when it is filled with what has been purged from them, it develops into a great festering. “After this,” he says, “the gods canopied all the body with flesh, and the flesh was set up against things coming from outside as a defense, like felt”; and the blood, he said, was the pabulum of the flesh: “For the sake of nourishment,” he says, “they channeled it throughout the body, just as if cutting irrigation channels in gardens, so that as from an ongoing stream—the body being a narrow tunnel—the streams of the veins might How.’’ And when our last day stands before us, the cables of the soul (as though the soul were a ship) are loosed, and the soul itself is let to go free. 6. These and tens of thousands of related ones are consistent; but what I have already cited is ample to show that tropes are great by nature and that metaphors contribute to sublimity and that emotional and expressive passages for the most part delight by means of these. 7. But certainly, that the use of tropes—as of all fine things in speeches and writings-over and over again falls into excess is now dear, even if I do not say it. On these grounds they even ridicule Plato, and him not least, as if he were often carried away by a kind of Dionysic revelry in his speeches and writings into harsh and undiluted metaphors and into allegorical mouthings. He says:

It is not easy to think that a city ought to be mixed like a bowl of wine, where the maddened wine seethes once poured in, but when curtailed by another and sobering god, having taken on fine company, it produces a good and moderate drink.

You see, they say that speaking of water as a “sober god” and of mixing “curtailing” is the mark of one who is in reality a poet, and not a sober one. 8. And turning his hands to such defects, Caecilius has actually had the overconfidence, in his prose account of Lysias, to use two uncritical emotions as he offers to explain that Lysias is in every way better than Plato. You see, though he loves Lysias as he does not even love himself, Caecilius still hates Plato in every way more than he loves Lysias. In fact, he hates out of a love for contention, and what he has set down as premises are not, as he thought, agreed to. He thinks he is preferring a public speaker without mistakes and pure of defects to Plato, who was often thoroughly mistaken; but the matter was not at all like this, not even close to it.