Visualisations, my young friend, are great helpers besides toward weight, grandeur and forensic vigour; some, indeed, call them imagings (εἰδωλοποιΐαι). Generally, every conception that gives birth to language is called a phantasia; but the term has come to be applied especially when, what you say, by enthusiasm and passion you seem to see and place before the eyes of your hearers. §1
That oratorical phantasia is one thing and poetic another, you cannot fail to perceive, nor that the aim of the poetic kind is amazement (ἔκπληξις) and that of the rhetorical kind vividness (ἐνάργεια); yet both alike seek what is passionate and stirred. ‘Mother, I beseech thee, do not set on me those blood-eyed serpent-haired maidens; they leap, they leap upon me from close by! Ah me! she will slay me. Whither shall I flee?’ The poet himself there saw the Furies; what he visualised he forced his hearers, well-nigh, to see also. §2
Euripides, then, takes the greatest pains to set in tragedy these two passions, madness and love; in them, more perhaps than in any other thing, he succeeds. Yet he is not without daring in attempting other phantasiai. Endowed with no large genius, he yet often forced his nature to become tragic; and at every turn in handling great themes, like the lion in the poet, ‘with his tail he lashes flank and haunch on either side, and rouses himself to fight.’ §3
When Helios hands the reins to Phaethon, he says: ‘Drive, but do not drive into the Libyan air; not having moisture mixed in it, it will let your wheel sink down.’ And then: ‘And drive on, holding your course toward the seven Pleiades.’ Hearing all this, the boy then snatched the reins; striking the flanks of the winged car, he let them fly, and they flew up the folds of the air. The father behind him, riding the back of Sirius, came on, instructing the boy: ‘Drive there, turn the chariot this way, this way.’ Would you not say that the soul of the writer mounts the chariot, shares the danger of the horses and is borne with them on wings? It would never have visualised such things if it were not running with those celestial doings. Like, too, are his lines on Cassandra: ‘But, O ye horse-loving Trojans!’ §4
Aeschylus dares the most heroic of phantasiai, as in his Seven Against Thebes: ‘Seven impetuous captains,’ he says, ‘slaughtering a bull over a black-bound shield, and touching the bull's gore with their hands, swore by Ares and Enyo and the blood-loving Phobos that, without pity, they would deal to one another their own death.’ Sometimes he carries his conceits raw and shaggy and unworked; yet through ambition Euripides will press himself onto these dangers also. §5
In Aeschylus the palace of Lycurgus is, on the epiphany of Dionysus, divinely possessed: ‘the house is in frenzy, the roof is bacchant.’ Euripides has lit the same idea with another sweetness: ‘And the whole mountain bacchanted with them.’ §6
Sophocles is at his height in the visualisation of the dying Oedipus burying himself amid divine portents, and again in the appearance of Achilles to the departing Greeks above his tomb, an apparition more vividly imaged, perhaps, than any save Simonides could have wrought. But it is impossible to set down all the examples. §7
But the phantasiai of the poets, as I said, have a more fabulous transport, overshooting belief in every direction, while the most beautiful phantasia in oratory is always the practical and the truthful. Excursions are dreadful and grotesque when the figment is poetical and fabulous in oratory and falls into pure impossibility, as our showy speakers, by Zeus, like the tragedians, see Furies, and cannot even learn this much, that when Orestes says, ‘Let go, thou one of my own Furies, thou pinnest me at the waist to throw me into Tartarus,’ he is visualising thus because he is mad. §8
What, then, can rhetorical phantasia do? Many things, no doubt: to bring into language the contentious and impassioned. But mingled with the matter-of-fact lines of argument, it not only persuades the hearer but enslaves him. ‘And indeed,’ says the orator, ‘if any man should suddenly hear an outcry before the courts, and someone should say that the prison has been opened and the prisoners are escaping, no one is so old or so young or so careless that he will not run to the rescue, so far as he can. And if any one should come up and say that this man here is the one who let them out, he would perish without even getting a hearing.’ §9
So too Hyperides, when he was put on trial for proposing the freedom of the slaves after the defeat, said: ‘This decree was written, not by the orator, but by the battle at Chaeronea.’ Even as he handles the matter of fact the orator visualises, and so by the very assertion overshoots the boundary of mere persuasion. §10
By nature in all such things we always listen to the more powerful element; we are drawn from the demonstrative to the astonishing imaging, in whose shining the practical is hidden. And it is no wonder we are so affected: when two things are joined into one, the stronger always draws into itself the force of the other. §11
So much, then, may suffice on those sublimities that lie in conception and that are born from greatness of mind, from imitation, or from phantasia. §12