Smallness of words, too, is a powerful disgrace upon greatness. In Herodotus the storm is divinely set forth, on the side of the matter; but some of the substance, by Zeus, is more inglorious. This perhaps is one such: ‘with the sea seething,’ where the word ‘seething’ pulls down the sublimity by its ill-sounding mouth. ‘But the wind,’ he says, ‘grew weary,’ and to those clinging about the wreck a ‘thankless end’ befell. For ‘to grow weary’ is unsolemn and colloquial, and ‘thankless’ is unfitted to so great a sufferings. §1
Likewise Theopompus, having marvellously dressed up the descent of the Persian into Egypt, brought the whole down by some little words. ‘What city, what nation in Asia,’ he says, ‘did not send embassies to the king? What of the things produced from the earth or finished by craft, beautiful or precious, was not brought as a gift to him? Were there not many costly couches and mantles, some purple, others embroidered, others white; many tents fitted up with gold and all useful things; many costly long robes and couches? And besides, hollow-wrought silver and gold, drinking-cups and mixing-bowls, some set with gems, others worked precisely and lavishly. And besides these, countless myriads of arms, both Greek and barbarian, and beasts of burden in surpassing number, and fattened victims for slaughter; and many bushels of seasonings, many bags and sacks and rolls of paper and of all useful things; and so much salted flesh of every kind of victim that there were heaps of it so great that those who came near from afar took them to be hills and ridges thrust up against one another.’ §2
He runs from the higher to the lower, where he should have done the opposite by amplification. By mingling the bags and the seasonings and the little sacks with the wonderful announcement of the whole equipment, he made it like the imagery of a kitchen. As if, among the very ornaments — between the gold and the gem-encrusted bowls and hollow silver, the all-gold tents, and the drinking-cups — one were to bring and place little bags and sacks in the middle, the work would have been unfitting in its appearance. So in expression too such words become disgraces and, as it were, brand-marks when fitted in out of season. §3
It lay open to him to go on broadly, and to say, as he does, that the heaps were ‘like hills cast up,’ and to speak of the rest of the equipment, of waggons and camels, and a multitude of pack-animals carrying everything for luxury and the supplies of the table; or to name heaps of all kinds of seeds and of the things that excel for cookery and dainty living; or, if at all costs he wished to put it just so, even to mention all that the table-furnishers and cooks call seasonings. §4
For we ought not, in passages of sublimity, to come down to the squalid and outraged, unless under some grievous compulsion; rather, the words should be worthy of the matter, and we should imitate that nature which fashioned man, and put the unmentionable parts not in the face, nor the secretions of the whole bulk, but hid them as best she could and, as Xenophon says, turned aside the conduits of these as far as possible, in no way disgracing the beauty of the whole creature. §5
But there is no need to enumerate by species the things that diminish; for, since what makes language noble and sublime has been already exhibited, plainly the contraries of these will, for the most part, make it humble and unseemly. §6