Come now, let us examine whether there is anything else that can make discourse sublime. Since by nature certain features always belong as constituents to every subject, with its very matter, a sure cause of sublimity for us must be the constant power to choose, from the things present in a subject, the most telling, and to make them, by their assembly, like a single body. The writer wins the listener through the choice of his materials, and again through the close packing of what he has chosen. Sappho, for instance, in every case takes the symptoms attendant on amorous madness from its real concomitants and from the truth of the experience itself. Where does she show her excellence? In her power to seize the topmost and most outstretched of these symptoms and to bind them together. §1
‘He seems to me equal to the gods, that man, who sits opposite you and listens up close to your sweet speech and lovely laughter; that, in truth, makes the heart in my breast take wing. For when I look at you for an instant, no power of speech is left me; my tongue lies broken, a subtle fire has run beneath my skin, my eyes see nothing, my ears ring; sweat pours down me, a trembling seizes me, I am paler than grass, and I seem little short of dying. But all must be borne, since even a beggar…’ §2
Do you not wonder how, all at once, she searches out as if scattered things her soul, her body, her hearing, her tongue, her eyes, her colour, and combines opposites, freezing and burning together, raving and right-minded, terrified or all but dead, so that no single passion may appear about her, but a confluence of passions? All such things, of course, occur to lovers; but, as I said, the seizing of the topmost symptoms and the gathering of them into one have wrought the masterpiece. So too, I think, in storms the poet picks the most terrible of the accompanying details. §3
The author of the Arimaspea takes the following lines for terrifying: ‘This too is a great wonder to our minds: men dwell on water far from land, in the deeps; wretched fellows, for they have grievous toil; they have eyes among the stars, but their souls are upon the sea. Often, no doubt, holding up loving hands to the gods, they pray, with their innards heaving wretchedly.’ It is plain to anyone, I think, that this has more bloom than terror. §4
And how does Homer? Take one example out of many: ‘He fell upon her, as when a great wave falls upon a swift ship, fierce, fed by winds beneath the clouds, and the whole ship is hidden in foam, and the dread blast of the wind roars upon the sail, and the sailors tremble in their hearts in fear, for by a hair's breadth they are carried out from under death.’ §5
Aratus undertook to transfer this same image: ‘a little plank wards off Hades.’ But he made it neat and trifling instead of fearful, and even fenced off the danger by saying ‘a plank keeps out Hades.’ Well then, it does keep it out. The poet, on the contrary, does not put the danger off once and for all, but pictures men perpetually, almost at every wave, on the point of perishing. Indeed, by forcing together two prepositions which have no compound in nature, ‘from under death,’ he wrenched the verse into the very condition of the experience, and by the compression of the verse moulded the danger to perfection, and almost imprinted on the diction the very image of peril, ‘they are carried from under death.’ §6
So too Archilochus on a shipwreck; and Demosthenes on the announcement: ‘It was evening,’ he says. They have, as it were, drained off and joined together only the most outstanding details, putting nothing weak or unseemly or pedantic between them. For such intervening matter ruins the whole, leaving cold spots and gaps in greatness, when greatness must be all one walled fabric, knit together by the relation of its parts. §7