Page - 2282 - in The Complete Aristotle

it later on, ‘Here we have once more the man of Carpathus and his hare’, says he. For both alike went through the said experience. It has now been explained fairly completely how liveliness is secured and why it has the effect it has. Successful hyperboles are also metaphors, e.g. the one about the man with a black eye, ‘you would have thought he was a basket of mulberries’; here the ‘black eye’ is compared to a mulberry because of its colour, the exaggeration lying in the quantity of mulberries suggested. The phrase ‘like so-and-so’ may introduce a hyperbole under the form of a simile. Thus Just like Philammon struggling with his punchball is equivalent to ‘you would have thought he was Philammon struggling with his punchball’; and Those legs of his curl just like parsley leaves is equivalent to ‘his legs are so curly that you would have thought they were not legs but parsley leaves’. Hyperboles are for young men to use; they show vehemence of character; and this is why angry people use them more than other people. Not though he gave me as much as the dust or the sands of the sea… But her, the daughter of Atreus’ son, I never will marry, Nay, not though she were fairer than Aphrodite the Golden, Defter of hand than Athene… (The Attic orators are particularly fond of this method of speech.) Consequently it does not suit an elderly speaker. 12 It should be observed that each kind of rhetoric has its own appropriate style. The style of written prose is not that of spoken oratory, nor are those of political and forensic speaking the same. Both written and spoken have to be known. To know the latter is to know how to speak good Greek. To know the former means that you are not obliged, as otherwise you are, to hold your tongue when you wish to communicate something to the general public. The written style is the more finished: the spoken better admits of dramatic delivery-like the kind of oratory that reflects character and the kind that 2282