Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria, Volume 1-4. Butler, Harold Edgeworth, translator. Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd., 1920-1922.

Emphasis may be numbered among figures also, when some hidden meaning is extracted from some phrase, as in the following passage from Virgil:

  1. Might I not have lived,
  2. From wedlock free, a life without a stain,
  3. Happy as beasts are happy?
Aen. iv. 550.
For although Dido complains of marriage, yet her
v7-9 p.415
passionate outburst shows that she regards life without wedlock as no life for man, but for the beasts of the field. A different kind of emphasis is found in Ovid, where Zmyrna confesses to her nurse her passion for her father in the following words:
  1. O mother, happy in thy spouse!
Met. x. 422.

Similar, if not identical with this figure is another, which is much in vogue at the present time. For I must now proceed to the discussion of a class of figure which is of the commonest occurrence and on which I think I shall be expected to make some comment. It is one whereby we excite some suspicion to indicate that our meaning is other than our words would seem to imply; but our meaning is not in this case contrary to that which we express, as is the case in ironq, but rather a hidden meaning which is left to the hearer to discover. As I have already pointed out, [*](IX. i. 14.) modern rhetoricians practically restrict the name of figure to this device, from the use of which figured controversial themes derive their name.