Institutio Oratoria

On the other hand, when the transposition makes no alteration in the sense, and merely produces a variation in the structure, it is rather to be called a verbal figure, as indeed many authorities have held. Of the faults resulting from long or confused hyperbata have spoken in the appropriate place. [*](VIII. ii. 14.) I have kept hyperbole to the last, on the ground of its boldness. It means an elegant straining of the truth, and may be employed indifferently for exaggeration or attenuation. It can be used in various ways.

We may say more than the actual facts, as when Cicero says, [*](Phil. II. xxv. 63. ) "He vomited and filled his lap and the whole tribunal with fragments of food, or when Virgil speaks of

1. win rocks that threaten heaven.

Aen. i. 162.

1. Thou wouldst have deemed
2. That Cyclad isles uprooted swam the deep.

Aen. viii. 691.

Or we may produce the same result by introducing a comparison, as in the phrase:

1. Swifter than the levin's wings;

Aen. v. 319.

1. She would fly
2. Even o'er the tops of the unsickled corn,
3. Nor as she ran would bruise the tender ears.

Aen. vii. 808.

Sometimes, again, one hyperbole may be heightened by the addition of another, as when Cicero in denouncing Antony says: [*]( Phil. II. xxvii. 67. )

What Charybdis was ever so voracious? Charybdis, do I say? Nay, if Charybdis ever existed, she was but a single monster. By heaven, even Ocean's self, methinks, could scarce have engulfed so many things, so widely scattered in such distant places, in such a twinkling of the eye.

I think, too, that I am right in saying that I noted a brilliant example of the same kind in the Hymns [*](A lost work.) of Pindar, the prince of lyric poets. For when he describes the onslaught made by Hercules upon the Meropes, the legendary inhabitants of the island of Cos, he speaks of the hero as like not to fire, winds or sea, but to the thunderbolt, making the latter the only true equivalent of his speed and power, the former being treated as quite inadequate.

Cicero has imitated his method in the following

After long lapse of years the Sicilians saw dwelling in their midst, not a second Dionysius or Phalaris (for that island has produced many a cruel tyrant in years gone by), but a new monster with all the old ferocity once familiar to those regions. For, to my thinking, neither Scylla nor Charybdis were ever such foes as he to the ships that sailed those same narrow seas.

The methods of hyperbole by attenuation are the same in number. Compare the Virgilian [*](Ecl. iii. 103. Describing a flock of starved sheep. )

1. Scarce cling they to their bones,

1. Fundum Vetto vocat quem possit mittere funda;
2. Ni tamen exciderit, qua cava funda patet.

Vetto gives the name of farm to an estate which might easily be hurled from a sling, though it might well fall through the hole in the hollow sling, so small is it.

I shrink from recording the faults to which the lack of this sense of proportion has given rise, more especially as they are so well known and obvious. It is enough to say that hyperbole lies, though without any intention to deceive. We must therefore be all the more careful to consider how far we may go in exaggerating facts which our audience may refuse to believe. Again, hyperbole will often cause a laugh. If that was what the orator desired,

Hyperbole is employed even by peasants and uneducated persons, for the good reason that everybody has an innate passion for exaggeration or attenuation of actual facts, and no one is ever contented with the simple truth. But such disregard of truth is pardonable, for it does not involve the definite assertion of the thing that is not. Hyperbole is, moreover, a virtue,