spoken or read aloud. The sentence or period was considered more
rhythmically than logically, and subdivided in speech into rhythmical
parts called commas and cola. The end of the sentence was to be marked not
by a printer's sign, but by the falling cadence of the rhythm itself.
Furthermore, great care should be taken to avoid hiatus between words, as
when the first word ends and the word following begins with a vowel. But
the glory of style to the classical rhetorician lay in its use of figures.
Here rhetoric vindicated its practicality by a preoccupation with the
impractical; and here, as in analysis, rhetoric bore the seeds of its own
decay. Although Aristotle devoted relatively little space to the
rhetorical figures, later treatises emphasized them more and more until in
post-classical and in mediaeval rhetoric little else is discussed. The
figures of course had to be classified. First there were the _figurae
verborum_, or figures of language, which sought agreeable sounds alone or
in combination, such as antitheses, rhymes, and assonances. Then the
_figurae sententiarum_, or figures of thought, such as rhetorical
questions, hints, and exclamations.[67] Quintilian classifies as tropes
words or phrases converted from their proper signification to another.
Among these are metaphor, irony, and allegory. In our day we consider as
figures of speech only the classical tropes, and indeed Aristotle pays
little attention to the others. He says that in prose one should use only
literal names of things, and metaphors, or tropes[68]--which therefore are
not literal names but substituted names. For instance in this metaphor,
which Aristotle quotes from Homer, "The arrow flew,"[69] "flew" is not the
literal word to express the idea. Only birds fly, reminds the practical
person. Max Eastman has pertinently called attention to the fact that it
is only to rhetoric, which is a practical activity, that these figures are
indirect expressions, or substituted names. Apostrophe is not a turning
away in poetic, because in poetic there is no argument to turn away from.
Rather in poetic it is a turning toward the essential images of