The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

impelling him to speed of foot’; not ‘a school of
the Muses’, but ‘Nature’s school of the Muses had he inherited’;
and so ‘frowning care of heart’, and ‘achiever’ not of ‘popularity’
but of ‘universal popularity’, and ‘dispenser of pleasure to his
audience’, and ‘he concealed it’ not ‘with boughs’ but ‘with boughs
of the forest trees’, and ‘he clothed’ not ‘his body’ but ‘his
body’s nakedness’, and ‘his soul’s desire was counter imitative’
(this’s at one and the same time a compound and an epithet, so that
it seems a poet’s effort), and ‘so extravagant the excess of his
wickedness’. We thus see how the inappropriateness of such poetical
language imports absurdity and tastelessness into speeches, as well
as the obscurity that comes from all this verbosity-for when the
sense is plain, you only obscure and spoil its clearness by piling
up words.
    The ordinary use of compound words is where there is no term for
a thing and some compound can be easily formed, like ‘pastime’
(chronotribein); but if this is much done, the prose character
disappears entirely. We now see why the language of compounds is
just the thing for writers of dithyrambs, who love sonorous noises;
strange words for writers of epic poetry, which is a proud and
stately affair; and metaphor for iambic verse, the metre which (as
has been already’ said) is widely used to-day.
    (4) There remains the fourth region in which bad taste may be
shown, metaphor. Metaphors like other things may be inappropriate.
Some are so because they are ridiculous; they are indeed used by
comic as well as tragic poets. Others are too grand and theatrical;
and these, if they are far-fetched, may also be obscure. For
instance, Gorgias talks of ‘events that are green and full of sap’,
and says ‘foul was the deed you sowed and evil the harvest you
reaped’. That is too much like poetry. Alcidamas, again, called
philosophy ‘a fortress that threatens the power of law’, and the
Odyssey ‘a goodly looking-glass of human life’,’ talked about
‘offering no such toy to poetry’: all these expressions fail, for
the reasons given, to carry the hearer with them. The address of
Gorgias to the swallow, when she had let her droppings fall on him
as she flew overhead, is in the best tragic manner. He said, ‘Nay,
shame, O Philomela’. Considering her as a bird, you could not call
her act shameful; considering her as a girl, you could; and so it
was a good gibe to address her as what she was once and not as what
she is.
4
    The Simile also is a metaphor; the difference is but slight.
When the poet says of Achilles that he
Leapt on the foe as a lion,
    this is a simile; when he says of him ‘the lion leapt’, it is a
metaphor-here, since both are courageous, he has transferred to
Achilles the name of ‘lion’. Similes are useful in prose as well as
in verse; but not often, since they are of the nature of poetry.
They are to be employed just as metaphors are employed, since they
are really the same thing except for the difference mentioned.
    The following are examples of similes. Androtion said of Idrieus
that he was like a terrier let off the chain, that flies at you and
bites you-Idrieus too was savage now that he was let out of his
chains. Theodamas compared Archidamus to an Euxenus who could not
do geometry-a proportional simile, implying that Euxenus is an
Archidamus who can do geometry. In Plato’s Republic those who strip
the dead are compared to curs which bite the stones thrown at them
but do not touch the thrower, and there is the simile about the
Athenian people, who are compared to a ship’s captain who is strong
but a little deaf; and the one about poets’ verses, which are
likened to persons who lack beauty but possess youthful
freshness-when the freshness has faded the charm perishes, and so
with verses when broken up into prose. Pericles compared the
Samians to children who take their pap but go on crying; and the
Boeotians to holm-oaks, because they were ruining one another by
civil wars just as one oak causes another oak’s fall. Demosthenes
said that the Athenian people were like sea-sick men on board ship.
Again, Demosthenes compared the political orators to nurses who
swallow the bit of food themselves and then smear the children’s
lips with the spittle. Antisthenes compared the lean Cephisodotus
to frankincense, because it was his consumption that gave one
pleasure. All