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LONGINUS ON THE SUBLIME
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it thus that you are going to tamper with the facts about Sparta and Athens? This flourish about the power of language is like a signal hung out to warn his audience not to believe him.3 We may repeat here what we said about figures, and say that the hyperbole is then most effective when it appears in disguise.[1] And this effect is produced when a writer, impelled by strong feeling, speaks in the accents of some tremendous crisis; as Thucydides does in describing the massacre in Sicily. "The Syracusans," he says, "went down after them, and slew those especially who were in the river, and the water was at once defiled, yet still they went on drinking it, though mingled with mud and gore, most of them even fighting for it."[2] The drinking of mud and gore, and even the fighting for it, is made credible by the awful horror of the scene described.4 Similarly Herodotus on those who fell at Thermopylae: "Here as they fought, those who still had them, with daggers, the rest with hands and teeth, the barbarians buried them under their javelins."[3] That they fought with the teeth against heavy-armed assailants, and that they were buried with javelins, are perhaps hard sayings, but not incredible, for the reasons already explained. "We can see that these circumstances have not been dragged in to produce a hyperbole, but that the hyperbole has grown naturally out of
