Platonicae quaestiones

Now neither an animal nor an instrument nor arms nor any thing else is more fine, efficacious, or graceful, for the loss of a part. Yet speech, by taking away conjunctions, often becomes more persuasive, as here:

One rear’d a dagger at a captive’s breast;

One held a living foe, that freshly bled

With new-made wounds; another dragg’d a dead.

[*](Il. XVIII. 536.)

A bully in an assault may do much which his victim cannot even describe to another person,—by his mien, his look, his voice,—when he stings by insult, when he attacks as an avowed enemy, when he smites with his fist, when he gives a blow on the face. These rouse a man; these make a man beside himself who is unused to such foul abuse.

And again:

Not so with Midias; but from the very day, he talks, he abuses, he shouts. Is there an election of magistrates?

Therefore the figure asyndeton, whereby conjunctions are omitted, is highly commended by writers of rhetoric. But such as keep overstrict to the law, and (according to custom) omit not a conjunction, rhetoricians blame for using a dull, flat, tedious style, without any variety in it. And inasmuch as logicians mightily want conjunctions for the joining together their axioms, as much as charioteers want yokes, and Ulysses wanted withs to tie Cyclop’s sheep; this shows they are not parts of speech, but a conjunctive instrument thereof, as the word conjunction imports. Nor do conjunctions join all, but only such as are not spoken simply; unless you will make a cord part of the burthen, glue a part of a book, or distribution of money part of the government. For Demades says, that money which is given to the people out of the exchequer for public shows is the glue of a democracy. Now what conjunction does so of several propositions make one, by knitting and joining them together, as marble joins iron that is melted with it in the fire Yet the marble neither is nor is said to be part of the iron; although in this case the substances enter into the mixture and are melted together, so as to form a common substance from many and to be mutually affected. But there be some who think that conjunctions do not make any thing one, but that this kind of discourse is merely an enumeration, as when magistrates or days are reckoned in order.

Moreover, as to the other parts of speech, a pronoun is manifestly a sort of noun; not only because it has cases like the noun, but because some pronouns, when they are applied to objects heretofore defined, by their mere utterance give the most distinct and proper designation of them.

The thing we call a participle, being a mixture of a verb and noun, is nothing of itself, as are not the common names of male and female qualities (i.e. adjectives), but in construction it is put with others, in regard of tenses belonging to verbs, in regard of cases to nouns. Logicians call them ἀνάκλαστοι,(i.e. reflected),—as φρονῶν comes from φρόνιμος and σωφονῶν from σώφρονος,—having the force both of nouns and appellatives.

And prepositions are like to the crests of a helmet, or footstools and pedestals, which (one may rather say) do belong to words than are words themselves. See whether they rather be not pieces and scraps of words, as they that are in haste write but dashes and pricks for letters. For it is plain that ἐμβῆναι and ἐκβῆναι are abbreviations of the whole words ἐντὸς βῆναι and ἐκτὸς βῆναι, προγενέσθαι for πρότερον γενέσθαι, and καθίζειν for κάτω ἵζειν. As undoubtedly for haste and brevity’s sake, instead of λίθους βάλλειν and τοίχους ὀρύττειν men first said λιθοβολεῖν and τοιχωρυζεῖν.

Therefore every one of these is of some use in speech; but nothing is a part or element of speech (as has been said) except a noun and a verb, which make the first juncture admitting of truth or falsehood, which some call a proposition or protasis, others an axiom, and which Plato called speech.