What are called polyptota — accumulations, variations, climaxes — are exceedingly forensic, as you know, and accomplices of every ornament, sublimity, and pathos. And the alterations of cases, tenses, persons, numbers, and genders — how do they not embellish and waken expression? §1
I say that, of those falling under number, not only are those a kind of ornament that have a singular form but a plural force on consideration: ‘at once,’ as he says, ‘a countless people, dispersing along the strands, made an outcry over the tunny.’ But this is more worthy of remark, that there are places where plurals fall in more grandly and play to the very crowd of the number. §2
Such are the lines in Sophocles on Oedipus: ‘O marriages, marriages, you bred us and, having bred, brought up the same seed again, and revealed fathers, brothers, sons, kindred blood, brides, wives, mothers, and all the foulest deeds done among men.’ All these are one name, Oedipus, and on the other side Iocasta; yet the number, poured out into plurals, has multiplied also the misfortunes; and as ‘there came forth Hectors and Sarpedons,’ as Plato has it of the Athenians, in a passage we have cited elsewhere: §3
‘For no Pelopses or Cadmuses, no Egyptians and Danauses, nor any other naturalised barbarians dwell with us, but we ourselves, Greeks, dwell here, no half-barbarians.’ And what follows. For things are by nature heard with more pomp when names are heaped up in herds. We must not, however, do this except where the matter admits amplification or fulness or hyperbole or pathos, one of these or several. To go about everywhere with bells on is altogether too sophistical. §4