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[3] A third cause is the use of epithets that are either long or unseasonable or too crowded; thus, in poetry it is appropriate to speak of white milk, but in prose it is less so; and if epithets are employed to excess, they reveal the art and make it evident that it is poetry. And yet such may be used to a certain extent, since it removes the style from the ordinary and gives a
foreign air. But one must aim at the mean, for neglect to do so does more harm than speaking at random; for a random style lacks merit, but excess is vicious. That is why the style of Alcidamas appears frigid; for he uses epithets not as a seasoning but as a regular dish, so crowded,
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so long, and so glaring are they. For instance, he does not say
sweat but
damp sweat; not
to the Isthmian games but
to the solemn assembly of the Isthmian games; not
laws, but
the laws, the rulers of states; not
running, but
with a race-like impulse of the soul; not
museum, but
having taken up the museum of nature
1
; and
the scowling anxiety of the soul;
creator, not
of favor, but
all-popular favor; and
dispenser of the pleasure of the hearers;
he hid, not
with branches, but
with the branches of the forest;
he covered, not
his body, but
the nakedness of his body. He also calls desire
counter-initiative of the soul—an expression which is at once compound and an epithet, so that it becomes poetry—and
the excess of his depravity so beyond all bounds. Hence those who employ poetic language by their lack of taste make the style ridiculous and frigid, and such idle chatter produces obscurity; for when words are piled upon one who already knows, it destroys perspicuity by a cloud of verbiage. People use compound words, when a thing has no name and the word is easy to combine, as
χρονοτριβεῖν, to pass time; but if the practice is abused, the style becomes entirely poetical.
1406b
1
This is why compound words are especially employed by dithyrambic poets, who are full of noise; strange words by epic poets, for they imply dignity and self-assertion; metaphor to writers of iambics, who now employ them, as we have stated.
Rhetoric. Aristotle. John Henry Freese (Translator). London. 1926.
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