The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

it away again’; ‘of them perished
in misery, others were saved in disgrace’; ‘Athenian citizens keep
foreigners in their houses as servants, while the city of Athens
allows her allies by thousands to live as the foreigner’s slaves’;
and ‘to possess in life or to bequeath at death’. There is also
what some one said about Peitholaus and Lycophron in a law-court,
‘These men used to sell you when they were at home, and now they
have come to you here and bought you’. All these passages have the
structure described above. Such a form of speech is satisfying,
because the significance of contrasted ideas is easily felt,
especially when they are thus put side by side, and also because it
has the effect of a logical argument; it is by putting two opposing
conclusions side by side that you prove one of them false.
    Such, then, is the nature of antithesis. Parisosis is making the
two members of a period equal in length. Paromoeosis is making the
extreme words of both members like each other. This must happen
either at the beginning or at the end of each member. If at the
beginning, the resemblance must always be between whole words; at
the end, between final syllables or inflexions of the same word or
the same word repeated. Thus, at the beginning
agron gar elaben arlon par’ autou
    and
dorhetoi t epelonto pararretoi t epeessin
    At the end
ouk wethesan auton paidion tetokenai,
all autou aitlon lelonenai,
    and
en pleiotals de opontisi kai en elachistais elpisin
    An example of inflexions of the same word is
axios de staoenai chalkous ouk axios on chalkou;
    Of the same word repeated,
su d’ auton kai zonta eleges kakos kai nun grafeis kakos.
    Of one syllable,
ti d’ an epaoes deinon, ei andrh’ eides arhgon;
    It is possible for the same sentence to have all these features
together-antithesis, parison, and homoeoteleuton. (The possible
beginnings of periods have been pretty fully enumerated in the
Theodectea.) There are also spurious antitheses, like that of
Epicharmus—
There one time I as their guest did stay,
And they were my hosts on another day.
10
    We may now consider the above points settled, and pass on to say
something about the way to devise lively and taking sayings. Their
actual invention can only come through natural talent or long
practice; but this treatise may indicate the way it is done. We may
deal with them by enumerating the different kinds of them. We will
begin by remarking that we all naturally find it agreeable to get
hold of new ideas easily: words express ideas, and therefore those
words are the most agreeable that enable us to get hold of new
ideas. Now strange words simply puzzle us; ordinary words convey
only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get
hold of something fresh. When the poet calls ‘old age a withered
stalk’, he conveys a new idea, a new fact, to us by means of the
general notion of bloom, which is common to both things. The
similes of the poets do the same, and therefore, if they are good
similes, give an effect of brilliance. The simile, as has been said
before, is a metaphor, differing from it only in the way it is put;
and just because it is longer it is less attractive. Besides, it
does not say outright that ‘this’ is ‘that’, and therefore the
hearer is less interested in the idea. We see, then, that both
speech and reasoning are lively in proportion as they make us seize
a new idea promptly. For this reason people are not much taken
either by obvious arguments (using the word ‘obvious’ to mean what
is plain to everybody and needs no investigation), nor by those
which puzzle us when we hear them stated, but only by those which
convey their information to us as soon as we hear them, provided we
had not the information already; or which the mind only just fails
to keep up with. These two kinds do convey to us a sort of
information: but the obvious and the obscure kinds convey nothing,
either at once or later on. It is these qualities, then, that, so
far as the meaning of what is said is concerned, make an argument
acceptable. So far as the style is concerned, it is the
antithetical form that appeals to us, e.g. ‘judging that the peace
common to all the rest was a war upon their own private interests’,
where there is an antithesis between war and peace. It is also good
to use metaphorical words; but the metaphors must not be
far-fetched, or they will be difficult to grasp, nor obvious, or
they will have no effect. The words,