Dionysius of Halicarnassus On Literary Composition / Being the Greek Text of the De Compositione Verborum - of Halicarnassus Dionysius

The effect of these lines would be sadly marred if we were to read “the branch is cut,” “that eloquent old man,” and “ich war auch schön.”[53] In Greek prose, no less than in Greek poetry, inversions like those just quoted would be quite legitimate. This at least we can affirm, though it would be rash to attempt to lay down any general rules with regard to the differences between Greek order in verse and in prose. It is better to follow Dionysius’ example and to cull illustrations from both alike impartially, with only two qualifications. First, the Greek word-arrangement is even freer in verse than in prose, though the clause-arrangement and the sentence-arrangement of Greek poetry show (as Dionysius implies in c. 26) a general tendency to coincide with the metrical arrangement. Second, an absolutely metrical arrangement is foreign to the best traditions of Greek prose. It is the second point that is of importance here; and notwithstanding the almost furtive character which he attributes to the metrical lines detected by him in the Aristocrates, it is obvious that Dionysius has in mind a very close and deliberate approximation to the canons of verse and is prepared to strain his material in order to attain it.[54] Here, again, some modern illustrations may be of interest. The writers of the Tudor period seem to have had a special fondness for, and an ear attuned to, what may be roughly regarded as hexameter measures. This predilection appears both in their rendering of the Bible and in the Book of Common Prayer:—

The rhythms into which modern prose-writers drop are usually iambic or trochaic. This is so with Ruskin and Carlyle, and it would be easy to quote examples from their writings.[56] But, as in ancient so in modern times, the best criticism looks with favour on rhythmical, with disfavour on metrical prose. Prose, it is held, loses its true character—as the minister primarily of reason rather than of emotion—if it is made to conform to the rigid laws of metre.

If Dionysius fails to prove that metrical lines, thinly disguised, are a marked feature of the style of Demosthenes, no greater fortune has attended some attempts made in our own day to establish such exact rhythmical laws as that of the systematic avoidance, in Greek oratory, of a number of short syllables in close succession. It is clear that Demosthenes’ ear, with that kind of instinct which comes from musical aptitude and long training (cp. C.V. [266] 13 ff., [268] 12), shunned undignified accumulations of short syllables, but not with so pedantic a persistency that he could not on occasion use forms like πεφενάκικεν or διατετέλεκεν or προσαγαγόμενον. If he formulated to himself a principle, instead of trusting to inspiration controlled by long experience, this principle would be that which Cicero attributes to a critic who was almost contemporary with Demosthenes: “namque ego illud adsentior Theophrasto, qui putat orationem, quae quidem sit polita atque facta quodam modo, non astricte, sed remissius numerosam esse oportere” (Cic. de Orat. iii. 48. 184).[57] The necessary limits to be observed in these curious inquiries are well indicated by Quintilian, who utters some sensible warnings against any attempts continually to scent metre in prose or to ban some feet while admitting others: “neque enim loqui possumus nisi syllabis brevibus ac longis, ex quibus pedes fiunt ... miror autem in hac opinione doctissimos homines fuisse, ut alios pedes ita eligerent aliosque damnarent, quasi ullus esset, quem non sit necesse in oratione deprehendi” (Quintil. Inst. Or. ix. 4. 61 and 87).[58]

On the subject of prose and poetry, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (ed. Shawcross, Clarendon Press, 1907) is likely long to hold its unique position. Theodore Watts-Dunton’s article on “Poetry” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica contains an appreciative estimate of the good service done to criticism by Dionysius in the de Compositione. The article by Louis Havet on La Prose métrique (in La Grande Encyclopédie, xxvii. 804-806) deals with what we should call “rhythmical prose,” the French terminology differing here from our own. Some account of enjambement (with ancient and modern illustrations) will be found in the Notes, pp. 270 ff. The recent writings on Greek rhythm and metre are almost endless. Some of them will be suggested by the names of: Rossbach, Westphal, Weil, Schmidt, Christ, Gleditsch, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Goodell, Masqueray, Blass.

With regard to the relation between metre and rhythm, there is not a little suggestiveness in the saying of the historical Longinus: μέτρου δὲ πατὴρ ῥυθμὸς καὶ θεός (Proleg. in Heph. Ench.; Westphal Script. Metr. Graeci i. 82). There is also, in our day, an increasing recognition of the intimate alliance between Greek poetry and Greek music; it is more and more seen that lyric stanzas are formed out of figures and phrases, rather than from mere mechanical feet. Nor is it to be forgotten that poetic rhythm may probably be traced back to the regular movements of the limbs in dancing. The views of Blass on ancient prose rhythm are given in his Die attische Beredsamkeit, Die Rhythmen der attischen Kunstprosa (Isokrates, Demosthenes, Platon), and Die Rhythmen der asianischen und römischen Kunstprosa (Paulus, Hebräerbrief, Pausanias, Cicero, Seneca, Curtius, Apuleius); and some of them are summarized in an article which he contributed, shortly before his death, to Hermathena (“On Attic Prose Rhythm” Hermathena No. xxxii., 1906). Probably his tendency was to seek after too much uniformity in such matters as the avoidance of hiatus and of successive short syllables, or as the symmetrical correspondences between clauses within the period. The best Attic orators were here guided, more or less consciously, by two principles to which Dionysius constantly refers: (1) μεταβολή, or the love of variety; (2) τὸ πρέπον, or the sense of propriety. This sense of propriety rejected all such obvious and systematic art as should cause a speech to seem, in Aristotle’s words, πεπλασμένος and ἀπίθανος (Rhet. iii. 2. 4; 8. 1). Still, Demosthenes’ greatest speeches were no doubt carefully revised before they were given to the world; and so the blade may have been cold-polished, after leaving the forge of the imagination. It is to be noticed that, in the matter of hiatus, for example, some of the best manuscripts of Demosthenes do seem to observe a strict parsimony; and this careful avoidance of open vowels may be due ultimately rather to Demosthenes himself than to an early scholar-editor. Whatever the final judgment on Blass’s work may be, he will have done good service by directing attention anew to a point so hard for the modern ear to appreciate as the great part played in artistic Greek prose by the subtle use of time,—of long and short syllables arranged in a kind of general equipoise rather than in any regular and definite succession. How singularly important that part was reckoned to be, such passages of Dionysius as the following help to indicate: οὐ γὰρ δὴ φαῦλόν τι πρᾶγμα ῥυθμὸς ἐν λόγοις οὐδὲ προσθήκης τινὸς μοῖραν ἔχον οὐκ ἀναγκαίας, ἀλλ’ εἰ δεῖ τἀληθές, ὡς ἐμὴ δόξα, εἰπεῖν, ἁπάντων κυριώτατον τῶν γοητεύειν δυναμένων καὶ κηλεῖν τὰς ἀκοάς (de Demosth. c. 39).

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Other Matters arising in the de Compositione

A. Greek Music: in Relation to the Greek Language

For the modern student there is perhaps no more valuable chapter of the de Compositione than that (c. 11) which treats of the musical element in Greek speech. It helps to bring home the fact that, among the ancient Greeks, “the science of public oratory was a musical science, differing from vocal and instrumental music in degree, not in kind” (μουσικὴ γάρ τις ἦν καὶ ἡ τῶν πολιτικῶν λόγων ἐπιστήμη τῷ ποσῷ διαλλάττουσα τῆς ἐν ᾠδῇ καὶ ὀργάνοις, οὐχὶ τῷ ποιῷ, [124] 20). The extraordinary sensitiveness of Greek audiences to the music of sounds is described by Dionysius, who also indicates the musical intervals observed in singing and in speaking, and touches on the relation borne by the words to the music in a song. His statements, further, give countenance to the view that “the chief elements of utterance—pitch, time, and stress—were independent in ancient Greek speech, just as they are in music. And the fact that they were independent goes a long way to prove our main contention, viz. that ancient Greek speech had a peculiar quasi-musical character, and consequently that the difficulty which modern scholars feel in understanding the ancient statements on such matters as accent and quantity is simply the difficulty of conceiving a form of utterance of which no examples can now be observed.”[59] Even Aristotle, Greek though he was, seems to have felt imperfectly those harmonies of balanced cadence which come from the poet, or artistic prose-writer, to whom words are as notes to the musician. And if Aristotle, a Greek though not an Athenian, shows himself not fully alive to the music of the most musical of languages, it is hardly matter for wonder that writers of our own rough island prose should be far from feeling that they are musicians playing on an instrument of many strings, and should be ready, as Dionysius might have said in his most serious vein, εἰς γέλωτα λαμβάνειν τὰ σπουδαιότατα δι’ ἀπειρίαν ([252] 16). It is true that, on the other side, we have R. L. Stevenson, who writes: “Each phrase of each sentence, like an air or recitative in music, should be so artfully compounded out of longs and shorts, out of accented and unaccented syllables, as to gratify the sensual ear. And of this the ear is the sole judge.”[60] Dionysius and Stevenson are, admittedly, slight names to set against that of Aristotle. But this is no reason why they should not be allowed to supplement his statements when he is too deeply concerned with matter and substance to say much about manner and the niceties and enchantments of form. And Dionysius is—it must in justice be conceded—no mere word-taster but a man genuinely alive to the great issues that dignify and ennoble style. He can, for example, thus describe the effect, subsequent and immediate, of Demosthenes’ speeches: “When I take up one of his speeches, I am entranced and am carried hither and thither, stirred now by one emotion, now by another. I feel distrust, anxiety, fear, disdain, hatred, pity, good-will, anger, jealousy. I am agitated by every passion in turn that can sway the human heart, and am like those who are being initiated into wild mystic rites.... When we who are centuries removed from that time, and are in no way affected by the matters at issue, are thus swept off our feet and mastered and borne wherever the discourse leads us, what must have been the feelings excited by the speaker in the minds of the Athenians and the Greeks generally, when living interests of their own were at stake, and when the great orator, whose reputation stood so high, spoke from the heart and revealed the promptings of his inmost soul?”[61]

In addition to D. B. Monro’s book on Greek music, reference may be made to such works as Rossbach and Westphal’s Theorie der musischen Künste der Hellenen, H. S. Macran’s edition of Aristoxenus’ Harmonics (from the Introduction to which a quotation of some length will be found in the note on [194] 7), and the edition of Plutarch’s de Musica by H. Weil and Th. Reinach. The articles, by W. H. Frere and H. S. Macran, on Greek Music in the new edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians should also be consulted, as well as the essay, by H. R. Fairclough, on “The Connexion between Music and Poetry in Early Greek Literature” in Studies in Honour of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve. The close connexion between music and verbal harmony is brought out in Longinus de Sublim. cc. 39-41. In Grenfell and Hunt’s Hibeh Papyri, Part i. (1906), p. 45, there is a short “Discourse on Music” which the editors are inclined to attribute to Hippias of Elis, the contemporary of Socrates.

IIIOther Matters arising in the de Compositione

A. Greek Music: in Relation to the Greek Language

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Other Matters arising in the de Compositione