of the language favoured such finesses, e.g. in the case of compound adjectives. See a phrase like πρᾶγος ἄσκοπον : 1 it might mean “a dark business -hard to understand,” an "unwatched business," an "unwatchful business." Compare here πρόσχημ ̓ ἀγῶνος of El. 682; his juggling with the equivoques in ἄπιστος, ἀπειθής, ἀπιστεῖν, ἀπιθεῖν : 2 άσETTOS, Fr. 48 (cf. Edipus Coloneus, 1022, ἐγκρατεῖς). The Scholiast's phrase ἰδίως ἐσχημάτισε τον λόγον 4 is true many times over. The passage is not a bad instance of his technique :ὦ ξεῖνε μὴ θαυμαζε πρὸς τὸ λιπαρὲς 3 τέκν ̓ εἰ φανέντ ̓ ἄελπτα μηκύνω λόγον. See how he has quickened an everyday phrase so as to enforce attention, and contrived to indicate in a dozen words all that, expressed fully, would have been said in μὴ θαυμαζε πρὸς τὸ λιπαρὲς εἰ λιπαρῶς And, above all, notice how the full effect depends upon the order in which the words strike the ear; the interlinking of members in the phrase, the art of making a word or a member do double duty, consists chiefly in the order of words. I have not time to develop the 7 1 Ajax, 21. 2 Ant., 656. ▲ Schol. on O. C., 1119. 3 0. T. examples in detail: it must suffice to note that the figure government άπò κowoû is a favourite resource of his, and leave the student to work out the instances. Here are some references: Ajax, 330, 763, 792. No writer cuts his language more exactly to fit his thought, is more free from that degradation of style to which the newspapers have brought us-I mean the state where we clothe our thought in reach-me-downs, where a single word is never used but it draws after it by association some dead phrase: such a lingo as "constitutes a leading feature in the situation" -four dead metaphors bundled together into a phrase which, to any one who is sensitive to the significances of words, is more ludicrous than all the Irish bulls; a phrase πρόσθε λέων ὄπιθεν δὲ δράκων, μέσση δὲ χίμαιρα! Of course the danger of an over-acute sensitiveness to the rights of each word is that it may run into pedantry, which refuses any compromise with usage. Sophocles saves himself from that excess by his steady approximation to the ease but not the laxity of colloquial speech. Natural stylists of the first water are invariably voluminous-Plato, Swift, Newman: Sophocles' total of composition must have been fully 100,000 lines. We cannot believe, then, that his subtlety and pregnancy of diction are the f fruits of intense revision and concentration. His ease must have horrified the ancient pedant as much as he has provoked the modern "scientific" critic. For instances of a phrase clear in meaning, but almost baffling analysis, take Electra, 466; Ajax, 176, 475; dipus Coloneus, 1019-1020, 967. Words must be forced to yield their maximum of significance: that is the principle by which he makes a seemingly plain and transparent style equal to the interpretation of the subtlest thought. Thought must be working in every corner of the phrase. Good writing, of course, postulates a good reader: the telegram style of composition is worthy of the reader who runs his eye down the page collecting keywords, and only stopping where it meets an obstacle. One of the greatest resources for coercing language into expressing an uncommon thought is the figure called oxymoron-a form contrary to the axioms of verbal logic, but a form alone able to express some of the deepest intuitions of the mind. For one instance of this trick of forcing language to say two things and two contradictory things, both true, at once, take Edipus Coloneus, 131; or the anguished repose in the passage (Aj. 195) quoted on p. lxxvii. One of his favourite manoeuvres for quickening those parts of a sentence which would otherwise be mere grammatical fillings (cases where thought dispenses with what grammar requires to express) is his treatment of the substantive verb. Greek grammar employs the present participle v in a number of usages where the thought would be content with its ellipse; so that v tends to become a dead word in the sentence. Sophocles reinforces its significance by compounding it with σὺν, ἀπὸ, ἐπὶ, Tapà, so that it helps out the general sense of the passage. Instances are many: Ajax, 267, 338 (cf. also 491), 610, 855; Edipus Rex, 457, 863; Philoctetes, 161; Edipus Coloneus, 7, 772, 946, 498. His employment of personification is remarkably restrained in comparison with Aeschylus. To take only the examples in Edipus Coloneus,1 you will see that in each case the personification serves to make an otherwise trite sentence. vivid, but without being fantastic. But in this particular, as also in the choice of metaphor,2 he is specially admirable in suiting the phrase and the colouring of the phrase, its more or less of poetical and imaged quality, to the character. This is best seen by collecting the figures and metaphors in a Messenger's speech 1 O. C., 240, 267, 612, 658, 855, 1281. 2 Ajax, 348. the watchman in Antigone is a good example — and contrasting them with those used by, say, Creon in the same play. Evaluation of words, to judge just how a particular phrase struck the contemporary ear, whether this metaphor was felt as a figure or as a dead cipher, what were the associations of this word, what did this particular collocation of words say to the emotions or the intelligence of the Periclean audience: such questions are the highest problems of philology. Our Scholia, silly as they sometimes are, and shirking cruces to expatiate on the obvious as they do, are still the best guide to a solution: they are the comments of men who thought in Greek, however debased a Greek. That blood is thicker than water for these purposes, that a living tradition is worth all the industry of a studious barbarian, is sufficiently proved to anybody who observes the essentially different sympathy and finesse with which an Italian or a Frenchman handles a classical matterFraccaroli or Croiset compared even with a Wilamowitz v. Moellendorff. It is a profitable exercise to go through any 1 In this character we seem to hear the very voice of the people: mother wit, garrulity, poetical quality in imagery, homely directness, and a slightly ludicrous echo of the cleverness, psychological or verbal, of the exquisites of Athens-like the crumbs of learning or science which fall into our modern popular newspapers. |
