CHAPTER XXII. AUSTERE COMPOSITION
CHAPTER XXIII. SMOOTH COMPOSITION
CHAPTER XXIV. HARMONIOUSLY-BLENDED, OR INTERMEDIATE, COMPOSITION
CHAPTER XXV. HOW PROSE CAN RESEMBLE VERSE
CHAPTER XXVI. HOW VERSE CAN RESEMBLE PROSE
GLOSSARY
APPENDIX A/ OBSCURITY IN GREEK
APPENDIX B. ILLUSTRATIONS OF WORD-ORDER IN GREEK AND MODERN LANGUAGES
APPENDIX C. GREEK PRONUNCIATION: SCHEME OF THE CLASSICAL ASSOCIATION
Tantum series iuncturaque pollet,
Tantum de medio sumptis accedit honoris.
Horace Ars Poetica 242, 243.
See Dionysius Homer’s thoughts refine,
And call new beauties forth from every line.
Pope Essay on Criticism 665, 666.
PREFACE
It is a happy instinct that leads Pope to find in Dionysius a gifted interpreter of Homer’s poetry, who can ‘call new beauties forth from every line.’ In his entire attitude, not only towards Homer but towards Sappho and Simonides, Herodotus and Demosthenes, Dionysius has proved that he can rise above the debased standards of the ages immediately preceding his own, and can discern and proclaim a classic excellence. He has thus contributed not a little to confirm our belief in the essential continuity of critical principles — in the existence of a firm and permanent basis for the judgments of taste.
The breadth of interest and the discriminating enthusiasm with which in the present treatise Dionysius of Halicarnassus (or ‘Denis of Halicarnasse’, as we might prefer to call him) approaches his special subject of literary composition, or word-order, may be inferred from the table of contents, the detailed summary, and the brief statement on page 10 of the Introduction. It is an interest which impels him to touch, incidentally but most suggestively, on such topics as Greek Pronunciation, Accent, Music. It is an enthusiasm which prompts him to speak of ‘words soft as a maiden’s cheek’ (ὀνόματα μαλακὰ καὶ παρθενωπά), to describe Homer as ‘of all poets the most many-voiced’ (πολυφωνότατος ἁπάντων τῶν ποιητῶν), and to attribute to Thucydides ‘an old-world and masterful nobility of style’ (ἀρχαϊκόν τι καὶ αὔθαδες κάλλος). Expressions so apt and vivid as these, together with the easy flow and natural arrangement of the whole treatise, tend to prove that Dionysius is not laboriously compiling his matter as he goes along, but is writing out of a full mind, is dealing with a subject which has long occupied his thoughts, and is imparting one section only of a large and well-ordered body of critical doctrine in the command of which he feels secure.
That to the Greeks literature was an art — that with them, the sound was echo to the sense — that they were keenly alive to all the magic and music of beautiful speech: where shall we find these truths more vividly brought out than in the present treatise? And if we are still to teach the great Greek authors in the original language and not in translations, surely it is of supreme importance to lay stress on points of artistic form, most especially in a literature where form and substance are so indissolubly allied as in that of Greece and when we are fortunate enough to have the aid of a writer who knows so well as does Dionysius (see page 41) that noble style is but the reflection of those noble thoughts and feelings which should inspire a nation’s life. Nevertheless, the de Compositione lies almost dead and forgotten, seldom mentioned and still more seldom read; and one is sometimes tempted to think of the eager curiosity with which it would most certainly be welcomed had it lately been discovered in the sands of Egypt or in some buried house at Herculaneum. A new ode of Sappho, and a ‘precious tender-hearted scroll of pure Simonides,’ would rejoice the man of letters, while the philologist would revel in the stray hints upon Greek pronunciation. So striking an addition to the Greek criticism of Greek literature would be hailed with acclamation, and it would be gladly acknowledged that its skilful author had known how to enliven a difficult subject by means of eloquence, enthusiasm, humour, variety in vocabulary and in method of presentation generally, and had made his readers realize that the beauty of a verse or of a prose period largely depends upon the harmonious collocation of those sounds of which human speech primarily consists.
A word may be said upon some of the modern bearings of the treatise. Dionysius is undoubtedly right in holding that consummate poets are consummate craftsmen — that even so early a poet as Homer φιλοτεχνεῖ. Our British habit of thought leads us to dwell on the spontaneity of literary achievement rather than on its artistic finish. We are apt to sneer, as some degenerate Greeks did in Dionysius’ time (pages 262-270), at the contention that even genius cannot dispense with literary pains, and to insist in a one-sided way on the axiom that where genius begins rules end. But a reference to the greatest names in our own literature will confirm the view that the highest excellence must be preceded by study and practice, however eminent the natural gifts of an author may be. Would any one hesitate to say whether Paradise Lost or Lycidas is the more mature example of Miltonic poetry? Shakespeare, with his creative genius and all-embracing humanity, may seem to soar far above these so-called artificial trammels. But, here again, could any one doubt, on grounds of style alone, whether Hamlet or The Two Gentlemen of Verona was the earlier play? To be able fully to appreciate such differences is no small result of a literary education; and though the rhetoric of each language is in a large degree special to that language, it is notwithstanding true that our western literatures are closely interrelated — that they should continually be compared and contrasted — and that modern literary theory can gain much in stimulus and suggestion from that ancient literary theory which had its origin in Greece, and which by way of Rome (where Dionysius taught Greek literature in the age of Horace) was transmitted to the modern world.
In the present edition an endeavour has been made to suggest some of the many points at which Dionysius’ principles and precepts are applicable to the modern languages and literatures. Efforts, too, have been made to smooth away, by means of the Glossary and the English Translation, those technical difficulties which might easily deter even the advanced Greek student (not to mention the wider of cultivated readers generally) from seeking in the de Compositione that literary help which it is so well able to give. The edition has been many years in preparation; and special pains have been taken with the English Translation, as it is the first to be published and as its execution presents great and obvious difficulties. The Glossary will show how rich and varied is Dionysius’ rhetorical terminology, and it may also serve as a contribution towards that new Lexicon of Greek and Roman Rhetoric which is a pressing need. It seems not unnatural to treat thus fully a work of which no annotated edition in any language has appeared for a hundred years. For the constitution of the Greek text, on the other hand, the recent critical edition of Dionysius’ literary essays by Usener and Radermacher is of the highest importance. The present editor desires here to acknowledge the debt he owes to their admirable apparatus criticus, the exhaustiveness of which he has not attempted to equal, though he has thought it desirable to report (with their aid) a good many seemingly insignificant errors or variants which may serve to throw some light on the comparative value of the chief documentary authorities. He may add that he has himself collated, for the purposes of the present recension, the best Paris manuscript (P 1741, which contains Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics, Demetrius de Elocutione, Dionysius de Compositione Verborum and Ep. ii. ad Amm., etc.), and that he has explained on pages 56-60 his views with regard to some of the textual problems presented by the treatise.
It is a pleasure further to acknowledge the ever ready aid he has received from his personal friends — from Dr. A. S. Way, who has not only contributed the verse-translations throughout the treatise but has given help of unusual range and worth in other directions also, and from Mr. L. H. G. Greenwood, Mr. G. B. Mathews, Mr. P. N. Ure, and Professor T. Hudson Williams, who have read the proofs and made most valuable suggestions. N
or should the great care shown in the printing of the book by Messrs. R. & R. Clark’s able staff of compositors and readers be passed over without a word of grateful mention.
It may perhaps not be out of place to state in conclusion that the editor hopes next to publish, in continuation of this series of contributions to the study of the Greek literary critics, a number of essays and dissertations grouped round the Rhetoric of Aristotle. The Rhetoric is a remarkable product of its great author’s maturity, in reading which constant reference should be made to Aristotle’s other works, to the writings of his predecessors, and to those later Greek and Roman critics who illustrate it in so many ways. Studies of the kind indicated ought to contain much of modern and permanent interest. Not long ago a distinguished man of science wrote, ‘one literary art, the art of rhetoric, may be weakened and lost when the scientific spirit becomes predominant — that sort of rhetoric, I mean, which may be fitly described as insincere eloquence. Rhetoric seeks above all to persuade, and in a completely scientific age men will only allow themselves to be persuaded by force of reason.’ The writer seems to recognize that there may be a good as well as a bad rhetoric, but perhaps it hardly falls within his scope to make it clear that the Greeks, from whom the art and the term come, were themselves well aware of this fact, even though the age in which they lived might not be completely scientific. The vicious type of rhetoric which he justly censures is exemplified in the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum. In this book — for whose date the antiquity of a recently-discovered manuscript (published in the Hibeh Papyri i. 114 ff.) suggests the age of Aristotle, though Aristotle himself is certainly not the author — the aim of rhetoric is assumed to be persuasion at any price. But how different is the spirit of Plato in the Phaedrus and the Gorgias, and of Aristotle in the Rhetoric. To take Aristotle only. He looks at rhetoric with the sincerity of a lover of truth and with the breadth of a lover of wisdom. He recognizes that the art may be abused; but ‘so may all good things except virtue itself, and particularly the most useful things, such as strength, health, wealth, generalship.’ Its function is ‘not to persuade, but to ascertain in any given case the available means of persuasion.’ Mental self-defence is a duty no less than physical self-defence; but though it is necessary to know bad arguments in order to be ready to parry them, we must not use them ourselves (for ‘one must not be the advocate of evil’), nor must we try to warp the feelings of the judge (for this would be like ‘making crooked a carpenter’s rule which you are about to use’). Season must be our weapon, and we must have confidence that the truth will prevail (for ‘truth and justice are by nature stronger than their opposites’ and ‘what is true and better is by nature the easier to prove and the more convincing’). The whole work is conceived in the same spirit — that of attention to truth rather than to mere persuasion, to matter rather than to manner, to the solid facts of human nature rather than to the shallow blandishments of style. The author of the most scientific treatise that has yet been written on rhetoric manifestly held a lofty view of his subject; and so far from commending an insincere eloquence, he says less than we could wish about literary beauties and the arts of style. Here Dionysius, in his various critical works, happily serves to supplement him. Though he has the art of speaking specially in view, Dionysius draws his literary illustrations from so wide a field that the art of literature may be regarded as his theme. The method he inculcates is that which every literary aspirant follows, consciously or unconsciously, in regard to his own language — the reading and imitation of the great writers by whom its capacities have been enlarged. To us, no less than to his Roman pupil Rufus, the practice and the precepts of those Greeks who attained an unsurpassed excellence in the art of literature have an enduring interest. For they help the fruitful study of our own literature; and that literature, we all rejoice to think, has not only a great past behind it but a great future in store for it.
The University, Leeds,
December 6, 1909.
INTRODUCTION
I
Summary of the de Compositione
A general account of the life and literary activities of Dionysius will be found in the volume entitled Dionysius of Halicarnassus: the Three Literary Letters, where the de Compositione Verborum is briefly described in connexion with the other critical essays of its author. Here a fuller summary of the treatise seems necessary before an attempt is made to estimate its value and to follow up some of the highly interesting questions which it raises.
The date of the de Compositione is not known, but may be conjectured to lie between the years 20 and 10 B.C. The book is a birthday offering from Dionysius, as a teacher of rhetoric in Rome, to his pupil Rufus Metilius.
c. 1. This book is a birthday present which deals with the art of speech, and so will be found particularly useful to youths who look forward to a public career. Oratorical excellence depends on skill exercised in two directions — in the sphere of subject matter and in the sphere of expression (πραγματικὸς τόπος and λεκτικὸς τόπος). In the former sphere, maturity of judgment and experience is required: in the latter the young are more at home, but they need careful guidance at the start. The λεκτικὸς τόπος has two subdivisions, ἐκλογὴ ὀνομάτων and σύνθεσις ὀνομάτων. The composition of words is to be treated now: the choice of words is to be treated next year, if Heaven keeps the author “safe and sound.” The chief headings in the present treatise are to be the following: —
(1) The nature of composition, and its effect;
(2) Its aims, and how it attains them;
(3) Its varieties, with their characteristic features and the author’s preferences among them;
(4) The poetical element in prose and the prose element in verse, and the means of cultivating both — of imparting the flavour of poetry to prose and the ease of prose to poetry.
c. 2. “Composition is, as the very name indicates, a certain mutual arrangement of the parts of speech, or elements of diction, as some prefer to call them.” The parts of speech recognized by Theodectes and Aristotle and their contemporaries were three in number, viz. nouns, verbs, and connectives. The number was raised, by the Stoics and others, to four through the separation of the article from the connectives. Later were added the adjective, the pronoun, the adverb, the preposition, the participle, and certain other subdivisions. These principal parts of speech form, when joined and set side by side, the cola (‘members,’ ‘clauses’). The union of cola completes the “periods,” and these make up the entire discourse. The functions of composition are to arrange the words fittingly, to assign the proper structure to the cola, and to divide the discourse carefully into periods.
In its effects, though not in order of time, the composition of words comes before the choice of words.
c. 3. Our thoughts are uttered either in verse or in prose. In both alike, composition can invest the lowliest words with charm and distinction. By way of foretaste, two passages (one of poetry, the other of prose) may be quoted in illustration. The first is from the opening of the 16th Odyssey, where the lines allure not by elaborate language or lofty theme, but by the sheer beauty with which the words are grouped. The prose example is furnished by that passage of Herodotus (i. 8-10) which describes the unworthy behaviour of Candaules towards his wife. Here, too, the charm resides not in the incident nor in the words which describe it, but in the deft arrangement of the language.
c. 4. The powerful effect of composition will be still further realized if some choice passages of verse and prose be taken and the order of the words disturbed. Homer and Herodotus once more provide examples. Certain lines in the twelfth and thirteenth books of the Iliad are chosen, and transformed, with disastrous effects, from hexameters into two varieties of tetrameters. A short passage of Herodotus is turned about in a similar way, one of the two versions being in the style of Thucydides, the other in the odious manner of Hegesias. Composition may in fact be likened to the Homeric Athena, who with a touch
of her magic wand could make the same Odysseus resemble either a beggar or a gallant prince. The neglect of composition has lamentable results in writers like Duris, Polybius, Chrysippus, and others. Failing to find the subject satisfactorily treated by previous authors, Dionysius has himself endeavoured to discover some natural principle to form a starting-point (φυσικὴ ἀφορμή). He has not succeeded, but he will describe his attempt.
c. 5. It had occurred to him that, in a natural order, verbs would follow nouns and precede adverbs, while things which happened first in time would come first in narration. But these (and other) rules were seen to be untrustworthy, when tested by the actual practice of the great authors.
c. 6. As far as words (or elements of discourse) are concerned, the art of composition operates in three ways — through (1) the choice of elements likely to combine effectively; (2) the discernment of the particular shapes or constructions (i.e. singular or plural number, nominative or oblique case, active or passive voice, etc.) to be given to each element in order that the structure may be improved; (3) the perception of the modification which these shapes need in view of the materials. Each of the processes can be illustrated from the arts of house-building and ship-building — of civil and marine architecture. This analogy is developed at some length.
c. 7. In the case of the cola, the processes are two. (1) The cola must be rightly arranged. For instance, in a passage of Thucydides (iii. 57) the order in which they come makes all the difference. So, too, in Demosthenes de Corona § 119.
c. 8. (2) The right “turn,” or “shaping,” must be given to the cola, so that they may faithfully reflect the various aims and moods of the speaker or writer. A good example will be found in Demosthenes de Corona § 179.
c. 9. Under (2) it is to be noted that the cola may be lengthened or shortened for the sake of literary effect. Examples are given from Demosthenes, Plato, Sophocles, and again Demosthenes. — The same remarks will apply to periods as to cola. Further, the art of composition must determine when it is fitting to employ periods and when not.
Delphi Complete Works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Illustrated) (Delphi Ancient Classics Book 79) Page 117
