… and others such as: ‘unless you carry your brains trodden down in your heels.’ Hence we must know how far each thing is to be pressed: to overshoot at times destroys the hyperbole, and such over-extensions slacken, sometimes even turning into the opposite. §1
Isocrates somehow had a boyish lapse through his ambition to say everything by amplification. The hypothesis of his Panegyric is that the Athenian city surpasses the Lacedaemonian in benefits to the Greeks. But at the very outset he sets down: ‘Speech has so great a power that it is possible to make great things humble and to throw greatness around the small, and to say old things newly and to discourse on recent events as ancient.’ ‘Then, Isocrates,’ someone may say, ‘are you going to deal so with the matters of Spartans and Athenians?’ The eulogy on speech he has, as it were, set forth as a preface and notice of unbelievability against himself. §2
The best hyperboles, then, as we said also of figures, are those which conceal the very fact that they are hyperboles. Such results occur when, under the stress of an extreme passion, they are uttered with a certain magnitude of circumstance, as Thucydides does of those perishing in Sicily: ‘The Syracusans, coming down upon them, butchered most of all those in the river, and the water was at once corrupted; but it was none the less drunk, mingled with mud and blood, and the most still fought for it.’ The thought that mud and blood should still be ‘fought for’ when drunk is made credible by the surpassing of the passion and the circumstance. §3
And the Herodotean is similar, on those at Thermopylae: ‘In this place,’ he says, ‘defending themselves with daggers, those of them whom they had still about them, and with hands and mouths, the barbarians overwhelmed them.’ What it is to fight against armed men with mouths, and what to be overwhelmed with missiles, you will say; yet it has nonetheless its credibility; for the matter does not seem to be brought in for the sake of the hyperbole, but the hyperbole is reasonably engendered by the matter. §4
It is, as I never weary of repeating, a release for every daring of speech, and a sovereign remedy, what is brought near to ecstasy in deeds and feelings; whence even comic hyperboles, however incredible, become persuasive through the ridiculous: ‘He had a field smaller than a Spartan letter.’ For laughter too is a passion mingled with pleasure. §5
Hyperboles work as much for diminution as for amplification, since intensification is common to both; and disparagement is, as it were, an amplification of meanness. §6