Chapter 29: Excessive Periphrasis

Surely periphrasis is a business open to disaster, more than the other figures, if one does not take it up in moderation; you see, it immediately falls into feebleness, smacking of light-mindedness and coarseness; this is why they even scoff at Plato (he is over and over again powerful at the figure, even if he does use it in some places at the wrong moment) when in the Laws he says:

We must allow neither silvern nor golden wealth to reside in our city

so that if he had kept men from obtaining cattle, it is clear that he would have spoken of “ovine and bovine wealth.”

2. But this philological parenthesis on the use of figures for sublime effect is enough, my dearest Terentianus; all these things make speeches and writings turn out more emotional and more sympathetically exciting; and emotion has a part in sublimity to the same extent that characterization has in pleasing touches.