Project Gutenberg #17957
On the Sublime
Longinus
50The ancient treatise on what makes writing great: grand thought, strong feeling, figures, noble diction, and dignified composition, in H. L. Havell's translation with Andrew Lang's introduction.
Project Gutenberg #17957 Public domain in the United States Cover source Local typographic cover created for The Missing Workbook from public-domain source metadata
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But nothing is so conducive to energy as a combination of different figures, when two or three uniting their resources mutually contribute to the vigour, the cogency, and the beauty of a speech. So Demosthenes in his speech against Meidias repeats the same words and breaks up his sentences in one lively descriptive passage: “He who receives a blow is hurt in many ways which he could not even describe to another, by gesture, by look, by tone.” Then, to vary the movement of his speech, and prevent it from standing still (for stillness produces rest, but passion requires a certain disorder of language, imitating the agitation and commotion of the soul), he at once dashes off in another direction, breaking up his words again, and repeating them in a different form, “by gesture, by look, by tone—when insult, when hatred, is added to violence, when he is struck with the fist, when he is struck as a slave!” By such means the orator imitates the action of Meidias, dealing blow upon blow on the minds of his judges. Immediately after like a hurricane he makes a fresh attack: “When he is struck with the fist, when he is struck in the face; this is what moves, this is what maddens a man, unless he is inured to outrage; no one could describe all this so as to bring home to his hearers its bitterness.” You see how he preserves, by continual variation, the intrinsic force of these repetitions and broken clauses, so that his order seems irregular, and conversely his irregularity acquires a certain measure of order.