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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None, I suppose, would dispute the fact that periphrasis tends much to sublimity. For, as in music the simple air is rendered more pleasing by the addition of harmony, so in language periphrasis often sounds in concord with a literal expression, adding much to the beauty of its tone,—provided always that it is not inflated and harsh, but agreeably blended. To confirm this one passage from Plato will suffice—the opening words of his Funeral Oration: “In deed these men have now received from us their due, and that tribute paid they are now passing on their destined journey, with the State speeding them all and his own friends speeding each one of them on his way.” Death, you see, he calls the “destined journey”; to receive the rites of burial is to be publicly “sped on your way” by the State. And these turns of language lend dignity in no common measure to the thought. He takes the words in their naked simplicity and handles them as a musician, investing them with melody,—harmonising them, as it were,—by the use of periphrasis. So Xenophon: “Labour you regard as the guide to a pleasant life, and you have laid up in your souls the fairest and most soldier-like of all gifts: in praise is your delight, more than in anything else.” By saying, instead of “you are ready to labour,” “you regard labour as the guide to a pleasant life,” and by similarly expanding the rest of that passage, he gives to his eulogy a much wider and loftier range of sentiment. Let us add that inimitable phrase in Herodotus: “Those Scythians who pillaged the temple were smitten from heaven by a female malady.”