22. ἐπὶ σαυτοῦ = per te ipsum, tuopte Marte: cp. [96] 21 ἐσκόπουν δ’ αὐτὸς ἐπ’ ἐμαυτοῦ γενόμενος.
23. πολυφωνότατος In this respect Homer’s great compeer is Shakespeare, in whose dramas “few things are more remarkable than the infinite range of style, speech, dialect they unfold before us” (Vaughan Types of Tragic Drama p. 165).—The passage of Dionysius which follows might be endlessly illustrated from Shakespeare; e.g. from Sonnet civ., Romeo and Juliet ii. 2 and v. 3, Antony and Cleopatra ii. 2 (speeches of Enobarbus), Tempest iii. 1. In the scene of the Tempest, correspondence and variety are alike conspicuous. Ferdinand’s address (beginning “Admired Miranda!”) tallies—to the line and even to the half-line—with Miranda’s reply, and the concluding lines are, in the one case,
But you, O you,
So perfect and so peerless, are created
Of every creature’s best;
and, in the other,
But I prattle
Something too wildly, and my father’s precepts
I therein do forget.
In the same scene the lines—
O, she is
Ten times more gentle than her father’s crabbed,
And he’s composed of harshness,
would have a very different effect (cp. quotation from Aristotle’s Poetics on [78] 9 supra) if written as follows:—
O, she is
Ten times more gracious than her sire is stern,
And he is merely cruel
(‘merely’ being understood, of course, in the Shakespearian sense of ‘absolutely’).