Chapter 40: Rhythm and Diction
And most important among those things which make for greatness in speech is the setting together of the members, as in living bodies: though one member sheared off from the rest has nothing in itself worthy of rational speech, all combined together complete a perfect system; thus, though greatnesses, scattered from each other, carry away their sublimity with them in various directions, when by their common association they form a body and, in addition, are clasped in a harmonious bond, they make a voice by their very periodic form. Actually, in periodic sentences, greatness is almost a contribution made by a multiplicity of elements. 2. But we have, in fact, made it sufficiently clear that many prose-writers and poets, although not naturally sublime, and perhaps even lacking in greatness, still, using words that are common and ordinary which do not lead to too much of anything in themselves, by the way they place them together and make them fit, throw around themselves a rough dignity and avoid getting a low opinion—as is shown by Philistus (among many others), Aristophanes in some passages, Euripides in most. 3. Of course, you know what Euripides’ Heracles says after the slaughter of his children:
I’m packed with ills, no place to put them left to me,
a remark spoken in an intensely ordinary way, but it has come to be sublime proportionately to the molding of the sentence: if you fit the sentence together differently, it will appear to you why Euripides is a poet of arrangement more than of thought. And in treating Dirce, when she was swept away by the bull, he says:
if he chanced to turn
Somewhere around, he dragged… and took at once
Oak, rock, woman, over and over again exchanging each.
Though the point is actually noble, it has been made more solid by not having its harmony hurried along, and, as it were, by not being brought in on rollers; but the words have for each other supports and the proppings of time-beats that result in a steady beat of greatness.
