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 tum things around into their opposites. 2. Now Isocrates (I don’t know how) has engaged in this childish 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?” You see, he has 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.
6. 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.
