Page - 2277 - in The Complete Aristotle

private interests’, where there is an antithesis between war and peace. It is also good to use metaphorical words; but the metaphors must not be far- fetched, or they will be difficult to grasp, nor obvious, or they will have no effect. The words, too, ought to set the scene before our eyes; for events ought to be seen in progress rather than in prospect. So we must aim at these three points: Antithesis, Metaphor, and Actuality. Of the four kinds of Metaphor the most taking is the proportional kind. Thus Pericles, for instance, said that the vanishing from their country of the young men who had fallen in the war was ‘as if the spring were taken out of the year’. Leptines, speaking of the Lacedaemonians, said that he would not have the Athenians let Greece ‘lose one of her two eyes’. When Chares was pressing for leave to be examined upon his share in the Olynthiac war, Cephisodotus was indignant, saying that he wanted his examination to take place ‘while he had his fingers upon the people’s throat’. The same speaker once urged the Athenians to march to Euboea, ‘with Miltiades’ decree as their rations’. Iphicrates, indignant at the truce made by the Athenians with Epidaurus and the neighbouring sea-board, said that they had stripped themselves of their travelling money for the journey of war. Peitholaus called the state-galley ‘the people’s big stick’, and Sestos ‘the corn-bin of the Peiraeus’. Pericles bade his countrymen remove Aegina, ‘that eyesore of the Peiraeus.’ And Moerocles said he was no more a rascal than was a certain respectable citizen he named, ‘whose rascality was worth over thirty per cent per annum to him, instead of a mere ten like his own’.There is also the iambic line of Anaxandrides about the way his daughters put off marrying— My daughters’ marriage-bonds are overdue. Polyeuctus said of a paralytic man named Speusippus that he could not keep quiet, ‘though fortune had fastened him in the pillory of disease’. Cephisodotus called warships ‘painted millstones’. Diogenes the Dog called taverns ‘the mess-rooms of Attica’. Aesion said that the Athenians had ‘emptied’ their town into Sicily: this is a graphic metaphor. ‘Till all Hellas shouted aloud’ may be regarded as a metaphor, and a graphic one again. Cephisodotus bade the Athenians take care not to hold too many ‘parades’. Isocrates used the same word of those who ‘parade at the national festivals.’ Another example occurs in the Funeral Speech: ‘It is fitting that Greece should cut off her hair beside the tomb of those who fell at Salamis, since her freedom and their valour are buried in the same grave.’ Even if the speaker here had only said that it was right to weep when valour was being buried in their grave, it would have been a metaphor, and a graphic one; but the coupling of ‘their valour’ and ‘her freedom’ presents a kind of antithesis as well. ‘The course of my words’, said Iphicrates, ‘lies straight through the 2277