Concerning the number of metaphors to be employed together Caecilius
seems to give his vote with those critics who make a law that not more
than two, or at the utmost three, should be combined in the same place.
The use, however, must be determined by the occasion. Those outbursts of
passion which drive onwards like a winter torrent draw with them as an
indispensable accessory whole masses of metaphor. It is thus in that
passage of Demosthenes (who here also is our safest guide):[1]
[Footnote 1: See Note.]
2
"Those vile fawning wretches, each one of whom has lopped from his
country her fairest members, who have toasted away their liberty, first
to Philip, now to Alexander, who measure happiness by their belly and
their vilest appetites, who have overthrown the old landmarks and
standards of felicity among Greeks,--to be freemen, and to have no one
for a master."[2] Here the number of the metaphors is obscured by the
orator's indignation against the betrayers of his country.
[Footnote 2: _De Cor._ 296.]
3
And to effect this Aristotle and Theophrastus recommend the softening of
harsh metaphors by the use of some such phrase as "So to say," "As it
were," "If I may be permitted the expression," "If so bold a term is
allowable." For thus to forestall criticism[3] mitigates, they assert,
the boldness of the metaphors.
[Footnote 3: Reading +hupotimesis+.]
4
And I will not deny that these have their use. Nevertheless I must
repeat the remark which I made in the case of figures,[4] and maintain
that there are native antidotes to the number and boldness of metaphors,
in well-timed displays of strong feeling, and in unaffected sublimity,
because these have an innate power by the dash of their movement of
sweeping along and carrying all else before them. Or should we not
rather say that they absolutely demand as indispensable the use of
daring metaphors, and will not allow the hearer to pause and criticise
the number of them, because he shares the passion of the speaker?
[Footnote 4: Ch. xvii.]
5
In the treatment, again, of familiar topics and in descriptive passages
nothing gives such distinctness as a close and continuous series of
metaphors. It is by this means that Xenophon has so finely delineated
the anatomy of the human frame.[5] And there is a still more brilliant
and life-like picture in Plato.[6] The human head he calls a _citadel_;
the neck is an _isthmus_ set to divide it from the chest; to support it
beneath are the vertebrae, turning like _hinges_; pleasure he describes
as a _bait_ to tempt men to ill; the tongue is the _arbiter of tastes_.
The heart is at once the _knot_ of the veins and the _source_ of the
rapidly circulating blood, and is stationed in the _guard-room_ of the
body. The ramifying blood-vessels he calls _alleys_. "And casting
about," he says, "for something to sustain the violent palpitation of
the heart when it is alarmed by the approach of danger or agitated by
passion, since at such times it is overheated, they (the gods) implanted
in us the lungs, which are so fashioned that being soft and bloodless,
and having cavities within, they act like a buffer, and when the heart
boils with inward passion by yielding to its throbbing save it from
injury." He compares the seat of the desires to the _women's quarters_,
the seat of the passions to the _men's quarters_, in a house. The
spleen, again, is the _napkin_ of the internal organs, by whose
excretions it is saturated from time to time, and swells to a great size
with inward impurity. "After this," he continues, "they shrouded the
whole with flesh, throwing it forward, like a cushion, as a barrier
against injuries from without." The blood he terms the _pasture_ of the
flesh. "To assist the process of nutrition," he goes on, "they divided
the body into ducts, cutting trenches like those in a garden, so that,
the body being a system of narrow conduits, the current of the veins
might flow as from a perennial fountain-head. And when the end is at
hand," he says, "the soul is cast loose from her moorings like a ship,
and free to wander whither she will."
6
These, and a hundred similar fancies, follow one another in quick
succession. But those which I have pointed out are sufficient to
demonstrate how great is the natural power of figurative language, and
how largely metaphors conduce to sublimity, and to illustrate the
important part which they play in all impassioned and descriptive
passages.
[Footnote 5: _Memorab._ i. 4, 5.]
[Footnote 6: _Timaeus_, 69, D; 74, A; 65, C; 72, G; 74, B, D; 80, E;
77, G; 78, E; 85, E.]
7
That the use of figurative language, as of all other beauties of style,
has a constant tendency towards excess, is an obvious truth which I need
not dwell upon. It is chiefly on this account that even Plato comes in
for a large share of disparagement, because he is often carried away by
a sort of frenzy of language into an intemperate use of violent
metaphors and inflated allegory. "It is not easy to remark" (he says in
one place) "that a city ought to be blended like a bowl, in which the
mad wine boils when it is poured out, but being disciplined by another
and a sober god in that fair society produces a good and temperate
drink."[7] Really, it is said, to speak of water as a "sober god," and
of the process of mixing as a "discipline," is to talk like a poet, and
no very _sober_ one either.
[Footnote 7: _Legg._ vi. 773, G.]
8
It was such defects as these that the hostile critic[8] Caecilius made
his ground of attack, when he had the boldness in his essay "On the
Beauties of Lysias" to pronounce that writer superior in every respect
to Plato. Now Caecilius was doubly unqualified for a judge: he loved
Lysias better even than himself, and at the same time his hatred of
Plato and all his works is greater even than his love for Lysias.
Moreover, he is so blind a partisan that his very premises are open to
dispute. He vaunts Lysias as a faultless and immaculate writer, while
Plato is, according to him, full of blemishes. Now this is not the case:
far from it.
[Footnote 8: Reading +ho mison auton+, by a conjecture of the
translator.]