The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

was arche in another sense. In all
these jokes, whether a word is used in a second sense or
metaphorically, the joke is good if it fits the facts. For
instance, Anaschetos (proper name) ouk anaschetos: where you say
that what is so-and-so in one sense is not so-and-so in another;
well, if the man is unpleasant, the joke fits the facts. Again,
take—
Thou must not be a stranger stranger than Thou should’st.
    Do not the words ‘thou must not be’, &c., amount to saying
that the stranger must not always be strange? Here again is the use
of one word in different senses. Of the same kind also is the
much-praised verse of Anaxandrides:
Death is most fit before you do
Deeds that would make death fit for you.
    This amounts to saying ‘it is a fit thing to die when you are
not fit to die’, or ‘it is a fit thing to die when death is not fit
for you’, i.e. when death is not the fit return for what you are
doing. The type of language employed-is the same in all these
examples; but the more briefly and antithetically such sayings can
be expressed, the more taking they are, for antithesis impresses
the new idea more firmly and brevity more quickly. They should
always have either some personal application or some merit of
expression, if they are to be true without being commonplace-two
requirements not always satisfied simultaneously. Thus ‘a man
should die having done no wrong’ is true but dull: ‘the right man
should marry the right woman’ is also true but dull. No, there must
be both good qualities together, as in ‘it is fitting to die when
you are not fit for death’. The more a saying has these qualitis,
the livelier it appears: if, for instance, its wording is
metaphorical, metaphorical in the right way, antithetical, and
balanced, and at the same time it gives an idea of activity.
    Successful similes also, as has been said above, are in a sense
metaphors, since they always involve two relations like the
proportional metaphor. Thus: a shield, we say, is the
‘drinking-bowl of Ares’, and a bow is the ‘chordless lyre’. This
way of putting a metaphor is not ‘simple’, as it would be if we
called the bow a lyre or the shield a drinking-bowl. There are
‘simple’ similes also: we may say that a flute-player is like a
monkey, or that a short-sighted man’s eyes are like a lamp-flame
with water dropping on it, since both eyes and flame keep winking.
A simile succeeds best when it is a converted metaphor, for it is
possible to say that a shield is like the drinking-bowl of Ares, or
that a ruin is like a house in rags, and to say that Niceratus is
like a Philoctetes stung by Pratys-the simile made by Thrasyniachus
when he saw Niceratus, who had been beaten by Pratys in a
recitation competition, still going about unkempt and unwashed. It
is in these respects that poets fail worst when they fail, and
succeed best when they succeed, i.e. when they give the resemblance
pat, as in
Those legs of his curl just like parsley leaves;
    and
Just like Philammon struggling with his punchball.
    These are all similes; and that similes are metaphors has been
stated often already.
    Proverbs, again, are metaphors from one species to another.
Suppose, for instance, a man to start some undertaking in hope of
gain and then to lose by it later on, ‘Here we have once more the
man of Carpathus and his hare’, says he. For both alike went
through the said experience.
    It has now been explained fairly completely how liveliness is
secured and why it has the effect it has. Successful hyperboles are
also metaphors, e.g. the one about the man with a black eye, ‘you
would have thought he was a basket of mulberries’; here the ‘black
eye’ is compared to a mulberry because of its colour, the
exaggeration lying in the quantity of mulberries suggested. The
phrase ‘like so-and-so’ may introduce a hyperbole under the form of
a simile. Thus
Just like Philammon struggling with his punchball
    is equivalent to ‘you would have thought he was Philammon
struggling with his punchball’; and
Those legs of his curl just like parsley leaves
    is equivalent to ‘his legs are so curly that you would have
thought they were not legs but parsley leaves’. Hyperboles are for
young men to use; they show vehemence of character; and this is why
angry people use them more than other people.
Not though he gave me as much as the dust
or the sands of the sea…
But her, the daughter of Atreus’ son, I never will marry,
Nay, not though she