Page - 2265 - in The Complete Aristotle

are discordant and unmeaning. Further, in using metaphors to give names to nameless things, we must draw them not from remote but from kindred and similar things, so that the kinship is clearly perceived as soon as the words are said. Thus in the celebrated riddle I marked how a man glued bronze with fire to another man’s body, the process is nameless; but both it and gluing are a kind of application, and that is why the application of the cupping-glass is here called a ‘gluing’. Good riddles do, in general, provide us with satisfactory metaphors: for metaphors imply riddles, and therefore a good riddle can furnish a good metaphor. Further, the materials of metaphors must be beautiful; and the beauty, like the ugliness, of all words may, as Licymnius says, lie in their sound or in their meaning. Further, there is a third consideration-one that upsets the fallacious argument of the sophist Bryson, that there is no such thing as foul language, because in whatever words you put a given thing your meaning is the same. This is untrue. One term may describe a thing more truly than another, may be more like it, and set it more intimately before our eyes. Besides, two different words will represent a thing in two different lights; so on this ground also one term must be held fairer or fouler than another. For both of two terms will indicate what is fair, or what is foul, but not simply their fairness or their foulness, or if so, at any rate not in an equal degree. The materials of metaphor must be beautiful to the ear, to the understanding, to the eye or some other physical sense. It is better, for instance, to say ‘rosy-fingered morn’, than ‘crimson-fingered’ or, worse still, ‘red-fingered morn’. The epithets that we apply, too, may have a bad and ugly aspect, as when Orestes is called a ‘mother-slayer’; or a better one, as when he is called his ‘father’s avenger’. Simonides, when the victor in the mule-race offered him a small fee, refused to write him an ode, because, he said, it was so unpleasant to write odes to half-asses: but on receiving an adequate fee, he wrote Hail to you, daughters of storm-footed steeds? though of course they were daughters of asses too. The same effect is attained by the use of diminutives, which make a bad thing less bad and a good thing less good. Take, for instance, the banter of Aristophanes in the Babylonians where he uses ‘goldlet’ for ‘gold’, ‘cloaklet’ for ‘cloak’, ‘scoffiet’ for ‘scoff, and ‘plaguelet’. But alike in using epithets and in using diminutives we must be wary and must observe the mean. 3 2265