1pFFjZK

6O
THEORIES OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
becoming to an old man; for the same dress is not appropriate
to both. Again, if it is your wish to adorn a subject,
Propnet in tne P r P er means is to borrow your metaphor
the use of frOm things superior to it which fall under the
same genus;
if to disparage it, from such things
as are inferior. An instance of this, as contraries fall under
the same genus,
is to describe one who begs as a suppliant
and to describe one who prays as a beggar, praying and
begging being both forms of request. It was thus that
Iphicrates called Callias a * mendicant priest instead of a
torchbearer in the Mysteries, and Callias replied that he
could never have been initiated or he would not have made
such a mistake. The fact is that both are offices of divine
worship, but the one is an honorable office and the other
an ignoble one. Again, while somebody calls actors mere
f parasites of Dionysus, they call themselves artists; both
these terms are metaphorical, but one is
defamatory and the
other the contrary. Again, pirates nowadays style themselves
purveyors; and by the same rule one may describe
crime as error, error as crime, and stealing as either taking or
plundering.
Such a phrase as that of Telephus in Euripides
" Lord of the oar and setting forth to Mysia "
is a breach of propriety, as the word " lording " is too pom-
* The dq.Sovxio. was a high hereditary office in the ritual of the Eleusinian
Demeter. A /uTjrcrytfpTTjs, on the other hand, was no better than
a begging friar who collected alms at the festival of Cybele or some other
deity. See Lobeck, Aglaophamus, p. 629.
t "Parasites of Dionysus," i.e. hangers-on of the god who was the pre-
of the drama. It is to be noticed that the Aristotelian use of
siding deity
fjiTa(f>opd is considerably wider than that of "metaphor" in English.
Any transference of a word from its proper or ordinary application to
another would be a /xcra^opd, whether it involved a comparison or not.
See the definition given in Poetic, ch. 21, p. 172, 11. 22-25, and the illustrations
of it which follow; also Mr. Cope's Introduction, Appendix B to Book iii.