Chapter 27: Shifts in Person

Furthermore, there are in fact times when the prose-writer, telling a tale about a person, is suddenly carried away and assumes the point of view of the person himself, and this species of figure is a kind of outburst of emotion:

And shouting loud Hector bid them
Toward the ships to speed, to leave alone bloody plunder.
“Whomever I shall see going off of his own volition,
Death for him is what I have in mind.”

Now, then, though the poet has taken it upon himself to tell the tale, as is appropriate, he has set the abrupt threat, without showing it beforehand, suddenly in the animus of the chief. You see, it would have had a cold effect, if he had said parenthetically, “Hector said such and such”; but as it is, the transition in the passage has suddenly overtaken the author even as he is making his transition. 2. For this reason the use of this figure should have priority when the right moment is urgent and does not present the writer a chance to delay, but imposes on him the necessity of making his shift from person to person, as we see also in this passage from Hecataeus:

Ceyx, making a terrible fuss over this, straightway ordered the sons of Heracles to depart. “For I am unable to protect you. In order not to destroy yourselves and injure me, go away into some other country.”

3. Demosthenes, in his speech on Aristogeiton, has aroused emotion in another way by a rapid shift of persons. He says:

And will none of you be found to have anger and indignation at those violent things which this shameless beast, who—0 most foul of all men, when your licentiousness is blocked not by bolts and gates, which someone might open up—

With his conception unfinished, he swiftly shifts, and, on account of his animus, almost tears apart the expression into two persons (“who—O most foul of all men”), and then, having seemed to turn away from his speech against Aristogeiton and to have left off, he has all the same, through his emotion, turned himself to it much more. 4. No differently does Penelope say:

Herald, why have those glorious wooers sent you here?
To order each serving-maid of noble Odysseus
To leave her tasks and prepare a feast for them?
Would that they had not wooed me nor gathered elsewhere;
Would that on one last feast they’d banquet—you that often
Meet to devour the provender of others, never as infants
Hearing from your fathers what sort of man was Odysseus.