On the number of metaphors Caecilius seems to fall in with those who lay it down that two or at most three may stand together in one passage. Demosthenes is the boundary in such matters too. The proper occasion arises where the passions are driven on like a torrent, and naturally draws on a multitude of metaphors as something necessary. §1
‘Polluted men,’ he says, ‘and flatterers, who have mutilated each his own native land, who have drunk away their freedom, first to Philip, then to Alexander, who measure happiness by the belly and the foulest things, and who have overturned freedom and freedom from a master, which to the earlier Greeks were the boundaries and standards of the good.’ Here the orator's wrath against the traitors masks the multitude of his tropes. §2
Aristotle and Theophrastus accordingly say that there are softeners of these bold metaphors, the use of ‘as it were,’ ‘like,’ ‘if I may so put it,’ ‘if one must speak with some risk.’ For qualification, they say, heals daring. §3
I, however, while accepting these aids, none the less affirm, as I said in the case of figures, that timely and vehement passion and a noble sublimity are themselves the proper antidotes to a multitude and audacity of metaphors: for by the rush of their motion they sweep all else along, and even drive the daring forward as necessary, leaving the hearer no leisure to scrutinise the multitude, by his sharing in the speaker's enthusiasm. §4
Yet certainly in commonplaces and graphic descriptions there is nothing so expressive as continuous, succeeding tropes. By these, in Xenophon, the anatomy of the human frame is paraded with pomp; and even more divinely so in Plato. The head he calls an acropolis; the neck he says is built up as an isthmus between the head and the breast; the vertebrae are set under as pivots; pleasure is a bait of evil for men, the tongue a touchstone of taste; the heart is a knot of veins and a fountain of the blood that races vehemently around, set in the guard-room post; he names the channels of the passages ‘alleys.’ ‘And to relieve the leaping of the heart in expectation of dangers and the rousing of anger, since it was on fire, they planted in it,’ he says, ‘the form of the lung, soft and bloodless and inwardly cavernous, like a cushion, that wrath, when it boils within it, leaping into something yielding, may not do harm.’ The dwelling of the appetites he called the women's quarters; that of the spirit, as it were the men's; the spleen, the kitchen of the inner parts, where, filled with what is washed off, it grows great and corrupt. ‘Then they overshadowed all,’ he says, ‘with flesh, putting the flesh as defence against external things, like a felting,’ and called blood the pasture of the flesh; and for the sake of nourishment, he says, ‘they channelled the body, cutting passages as in gardens, that, as from a flowing stream and through the porous conduit of the body, the streams of the veins might run.’ When the end stands by, he says, the cables of the soul, like those of a ship, are loosed, and she is let free. §5
Such things and others like them are countless that follow. What has been shown is enough — that figurative language is by nature great, that metaphors make for sublimity, and that passages of passion and of description rejoice in them above all. §6
Yet that the use of tropes, like every other beauty in writing, is always an inducement to immoderation, is plain even without my saying so. On this score above all they tear at Plato, who, often as if in some bacchic frenzy of speech, is carried away into harsh and unmixed metaphors and into allegorical bombast. ‘For it is not easy to grasp,’ he says, ‘that a city ought to be like a mixing-bowl mingled, in which mad wine, having been poured in, boils, but, chastened by another sober god, taking up a fair partnership, brings forth a good and moderate drink.’ For to call water a ‘sober god’ and the mixing of wine ‘chastisement’ is, they say, the work of one who is no sober writer. §7
Attacking such failings, Caecilius even ventured, in his books on Lysias, to declare Lysias on the whole better than Plato, gripped by two unjudged passions: he loved Lysias as he never loved himself, but he hated Plato more than he loved Lysias. Out of contentiousness even his premises are not, as he supposed, agreed. He sets forth Lysias as faultless and unsullied, where Plato has often gone wrong. The fact, however, was nothing of the kind, no, not by far. §8