In addition, I wish you would carefully observe something that few do—namely, when you temper your diction to the subject, to regard it not only as it is in itself or in the mind of the writer, but also as it has been formed by your speech in the minds of your audience. Thus, the reader is assumed to be unacquainted with what you have to say at the beginning of a work, and hence you must use simple language to initiate him into your lines of thought. Afterwards you may build upon this foundation what you can. It follows that if you are to speak of some outrageous crime, you should not inveigh against it with a comparable violence of diction until your audience has achieved such a notion of the crime as will not be at odds with such force and violence.
Thus Vergil begins in the best way with simple diction:
Arms and the man I sing who first from Troy
Banished by fate came to the Italian shore.
And Homer, too, who was praised for this by Horace:
Speak to me, Muse, of him, when Troy had fallen,
Who saw the ways of many and their cities.
But Statius begins badly, and sweeps the reader away too suddenly in these verses:
Fraternal arms, and alternate rule by hate
Profane contested, and the guilt of Thebes
I sing, moved by the fiery Muse.
Claudian is even more at fault, and thrusts these bombastic lines on our unprepared attention:
The horses of Hell's rapist, the stars blown
By the Taenarian chariot, chambers dark
Of lower Juno ...
But this rule should particularly be observed in the use of adjectives, which are always ill-joined with their noun when they disaccord with the impression the reader has in his mind. I have seen the opening of Lucan censured on this point: