On hyperbolical ideas.
In the category of false ideas must be reckoned the hyperbolical. These are not false in a given word, for we dealt with this above, but false in the whole train of thought. Of this kind is that epigram of Ausonius, the absurdity of which is unbearable:
Riding in state, as on an elephant,
Faustus fell backwards off a silly ant;
Abandoned, tortured to the point of death
By the sharp hooves, his soul stayed on his breath
And his voice broke: "Envy," he cried, "begone!
Laugh not at my fall! So fell Phaethon."[13]
Ausonius was imitating in this epigram the Greeks, who were quite open to this sort of bad imitation, as may be seen in their Anthology which is stuffed full of such hyperboles. A good many fall into the same fault either because their talent is weak or because they write for the unskilled—a consideration which should move those who have no compunction about reading, let alone praising, the silly tales of Rabelais which are filled with stupid hyperboles.
On debatable and controvertible ideas.
Furthermore, debatable and double-edged ideas, about which the reader is in doubt whether they be false or true, fall under the same category of falseness. For this doubtfulness, since it takes away all pleasure, removes also the beauty. For this reason I have never approved the conclusion of Martial's epigram:
Equal the crime of Antony and Photinus:
This sword and that severed a sacred head—
The one head laurelled for your triumphs, Rome!
The other eloquent when you would speak.
Yet Antony's case was worse than was Photinus':
One for his master moved, one for himself.[14]
The reader is bothered by a sort of quiet annoyance that the poet should so confidently take a dubious idea for a certain one. He might easily argue against the poet that on the contrary it seemed to him that a man who commits a crime for his master is more at fault than one who commits it for himself, and he could support his position with rational arguments. For one who sins for his own advantage is driven to his deed by such emotions as rage, lust, and fear, and these as they diminish the power of willing in like measure diminish the magnitude of the offence. But one who effects a crime at another's behest comes coldly to the deed, a fact that convicts him of a far greater depravity. One could allege these and similar lines of argument against Martial's position, and could reverse the sense of his distich so that it read no less irrationally:
Yet Antony's case was better than Photinus':
One for his master moved, one for himself.
Hence this whole category of controvertible ideas lacks literary merit and should be studiously avoided by those who aim at beauty, which in the last analysis is to be found in truth alone, and in truth of such a sort that as soon as it is proposed the reader recognises as true and accepts it.