The eighth and ninth volumes (really the ninth and tenth) present matter of more individual interest—the eighth because of the principal subject, which with comparatively little alteration is treated by a great number of authors, the ninth for other reasons. This subject—a subject which was to exercise a disastrous attraction on the Rhetoric of the Renaissance and even of later times—consists of the famous, or infamous, Figures.[[143]]
We know from a contemptuous phrase of Quintilian (see post) that long before his time the facility of compounds in |Treatises on Figures.| Greek had induced the Greeks to multiply Figures beyond all sense and endurance. Yet as we have partly seen, in the so numerously attended school of Hermogenes, these famous playthings, though not exactly neglected, did not receive the first attention. Others, however, made up for any apparent neglect of them. We have, specially devoted to the subject, under the head of σχήματα or of τρόποι, some fifteen or sixteen treatises—some by named authors, others anonymous. The first, by a certain Alexander, divides Figures as usual into those of the meaning and those of the style, and enumerates twenty of the former and twenty-seven of the latter; Phœbammon deals more shortly with a somewhat smaller number of figures, brought under more general heads; and Tiberius the rhetorician confines himself to the figures in Demosthenes. Herodian has a very large number of poetical examples—a device which, as we shall see, served to keep Rhetoric nearer and nearer to literature as time went on. The little treatise of Polybius of Sardis deals less with figures individually than with figurativeness; while an Anonymus, neglecting to some extent the usual phraseology, but reducing the usual procedure unawares to the absurd, manages to give a vast number by taking individual expressions from Homer and making a figure out of each. Zonæus follows more succinctly on the lines of Alexander; another Anonymus busies himself with Synecdoche only, and yet another adopts the dictionary arrangement, as do divers others with Tropes. One of the best pieces of the whole is the treatise of Georgius Choeroboscus, a writer of the fourth or fifth century. It is short, and deals with only a few figures; but these are the important ones, the definitions are mostly clear and sensible, and the examples, though not numerous, are well chosen.
The ninth volume opens with the not unimportant work to which reference has been made above, the De Interpretatione |The Demetrian De Interpretatione.| of Demetrius the Uncertain. But it also contains six other works on various divisions of Rhetoric, one of which is at least interesting for the great name of Longinus attached to it (as some would have it with greater certainty than in the case of the work that we would rather wish his), and others for other matter.
Demetrius takes a somewhat independent view of his subject, which he puts on a level with Poetics, but does not call Rhetoric. As Poetry, he states, deals with—or at least is distinguished and divided by—metres (this netteté is refreshing, and we shall go farther to fare very often worse), so what are called clauses[[144]] divide and distinguish the interpretation of prose speech. Then, directing attention directly to clauses, he illustrates their kinds from the respective beginnings of the histories of Hecatæus and the Anabasis of Xenophon, and prefers (though not to the exclusion of what he does not prefer) short clauses to long. From clauses he goes to periods, discussing and analysing their composition rather narrowly, and then returns to parallel clauses, whence striking off to homœoteleuta he continues his treatise under a great number of similar heads, betraying the slightly heterogeneous and higgledy-piggledy arrangement which, as we have said already, is so apt to beset these writers on Rhetoric. But he maintains throughout a creditable desire to identify his subject with the Art of Prose Composition, and not merely with Persuasion, or with the composition of an extremely artificial kind of prize essay on lines more artificial still.
The rhetor Menander, who has left us a treatise on the third division of rhetorical speeches, Epideictic (generally subdivided |Menander on Epideictic.| into encomia and invectives), is thought to have lived at the end of the third century. From the first his treatment is of considerable literary interest, because he handles the sources of the material of these curiously artificial compositions. First, he takes the hymns about the gods, and here, according to the way of his class, he rushes at once into a classification. There are, it seems, nine kinds of hymns—Cletic, apopemptic,[[145]] physic, mythic, genealogical, artificial, prayerful, deprecating, and mixed—the appearance of which last heading, here and elsewhere, always makes one wonder how a person of any logical gifts could write it down without seeing that he made his whole classification ridiculous if not fraudulent thereby. Then he quotes a great number of authors, ranging them under the heads. A separate chapter is next given to each kind, still referring to many authors, but unluckily seldom or never citing the actual passages. Next he passes to the Praising of Cities, that very important part of the bread-study of the travelling rhetor, who had to make himself welcome by accommodating his lectures to local patriotism, as we see, for instance, in Dion Chrysostom (v. infra). Hardly in the whole of this dully fantastic division of literature shall we find anything quainter than the sections devoted to this subject. If the city is a landward one, you will point out how safe it is from piratical attacks; if it is on the coast, you will dwell on the splendours and advantages of the sea. “How to praise Harbours,” “How to praise Gulfs,” “What is the best fashion of encomium for an Acropolis?”—these actual headings meet us. At even fuller length the orator is told how to praise not merely the site but the population and its origin, the neighbours (perhaps dispraising them might come in best here), the customs, and so forth. In short, the little treatise reminds one most of those modern cookery-books which—assuming the housewives who will read them to be of Paraguayan kin, and to continue idiots—give not only prescriptions for dishes but lists of dinners and rules of etiquette. One hardly wonders that a man like Lucian, of mother-wit compact to the finger-tips, should have soon left a profession in which the average practitioner seems to have been taken for granted as next door to a fool, without either common-sense or imagination enough to meet the most obvious requirements of his business.
One MS. of Menander stops here, but another gives us much more of the same kind, dealing with the βασιλικὸς |Others.| λόγος—flattery of kings—with epithalamia, with consolations, et cetera. The general scheme is much the same, and at least does not disincline us to believe it from the same hand. The short treatise of Alexander on Rhetorical Starting-points is very technical and not very profitable; but it falls in with the Menandrine books in showing how this business of flattery—the reducing to system of the “dodges” of the auctioneer or the advertising agent—was, latterly at least, the mainstay of the rhetorician. The two books of Aristides' Art of Rhetoric, on the other hand, busy themselves not with the epideictic but with the political speech, and deal chiefly with its technical qualities, our old friends. Apsines deals with the exordium only, and Minucianus with the epicheireme or imperfect rhetorical argument. Between them comes the treatise attributed to Longinus by some, and for that reason, if for no other, worth a little fuller examination.
“That[[146]], so to speak, there is nothing better in man’s possession than memory, who in his senses will deny? Some indeed praise Oblivion, as Euripides—
‘O blessed forgetfulness of woes,’
as he calls it. But I should say that Lethe and the outgoing of memory help us little or nothing, hurt the best and greatest things of life, defraud and keep us short of happiness. For the most hateful of sins and crimes, ingratitude, we find oft occurring when memory’s powers fail; but he who remembers benefits is neither ungrateful nor unjust. When men forget the laws and the doctrines that keep us straight, needs must they become poor creatures, and bad, and shameless. Yea, all folly and all inculture of soul occur through forgetfulness. But he who remembers best is chiefly wise.”
This may not itself be the very crown of wisdom; it is not Plato; it is not even Ecclesiasticus. But it is at any rate the work of a man who can look a little beyond stasis and diegema. As if we were to have nothing certain from this great critic, the attribution of this treatise also to him is only based on a conjecture of Ruhnken’s, itself depending on a citation by the commentator John of Sicily in the thirteenth century. It is devoted to the subject of Εὔρεσις—so badly translated by “Invention”—and it treats of its subject under the heads of prosopopœia, starting-points, elocutory mimicry, memory, topics |The Rhetoric or De Inventione of Longinus.| drawn from things connected with the chief good, and passion. There is a fairly wide range of literary reference, though few citations are given at length. And it is only fair to bear in mind that even in the Περὶ Ὕψους, short and broken as it is, there are signs of a certain weakness for Figures and other technicalities, indications that in his more professional moments, and when inspiration deserted him, even the author of that wonderful little masterpiece might have approached (though he never could long have been satisfied with) the endless, the fruitless, the exasperating distinguo which seemed to be art, and wisdom, and taste, to Hermogenes and the rest. And though one cannot quite agree with Walz that there is in this De Inventione a “doctrine drawn from Homer and the poets, elegantly and equably disposed,” yet one must admit that the handling shows something different from, and above, the heartbreaking jargon-mongering of the usual rhetorician. What follows is not the style of the Longinus that we know; it seems to come short of his manly sense almost as much as of his far-reaching flights of poetical appreciation. But it is a long way from the mere arrangement of compartments and ticket-boxes, and the mere indulgence in a kind of game of rhetorical “egg-hat” in and out of them when they are made.