Institutio Oratoria

Be this as it may, two epithets directly attached to one noun are unbecoming even in verse. There are some writers who refuse to regard an epithet as a trope, on the ground that it involves no change. It

is not always a trope, but if separated from the word to which it belongs, it has a significance of its own and forms an antonomasia. For if you say,

The man who destroyed Numantia and Carthage,

it will be an antonomasia, whereas, if you add the word

Scipio,

the phrase will be an epithet. An epithet therefore cannot stand by itself.

Allegory, which is translated in Latin by inversio, either presents one thing in words and another in meaning, or else something absolutely opposed to the meaning of the words. The first type is generally produced by a series of metaphors. Take as an example:

1. O ship, new waves will bear thee back to sea.
2. What dost thou? Make the haven, come what may,

Hor. Od. i. xiv. 1.

and the rest of the ode, in which Horace represents the state under the semblance of a ship, the civil wars as tempests, and peace and good-will as the haven.

Such, again, is the claim of Lucretius: [*](Lucr. IV. 1. )

1. Pierian fields I range untrod by man,

and such again the passage where Virgil says,

1. But now
2. A mighty length of plain we have travelled o'er;
3. 'Tis time to loose our horses' steaming necks.

Georg. II. 541.

On the other hand, in the Bucolics [*](Buc. IX. 7. ) he introduces an allegory without any metaphor:

1. Truth, I had heard
2. Your loved Menalcas by his songs had saved
3. All those fair acres, where the hills begin
4. To sink and droop their ridge with easy slope
5. Down to the waterside and that old beech
6. With splintered crest.