This text is part of:
‘Let us then describe it by a complete (thorough or detailed) enumeration, and let this be our starting-point. Learning namely with ease (without trouble or labour) is naturally agreeable to every one, and names (nouns) are significant; and therefore all nouns or words from which we learn anything are most agreeable’. On this see note on c. 9 § 8, add c. 11. 9, and I 11. 21, 23. ‘Now words strange, foreign, archaic, are not known at all (and can therefore convey no information), and the proper, ordinary, names of things, we know already. It is the metaphor (the only remaining kind of single word) that does this in the highest degree: for when (the poet, Homer Od. ξ [XIV] 214) calls old age a (dry, withered) stalk or stubble, he conveys learning and knowledge through the medium of the genus, because both are withered’, ‘are fallen into the sere and yellow leaf’. διὰ τοῦ γένους, because the metaphor brings remote members (species) of the same genus into a novel comparison, which teaches us something new of one or the other.
Commentary on the Rhetoric of Aristotle. Edward Meredith Cope. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1877.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This text was converted to electronic form by professional data entry and has been proofread to a medium level of accuracy.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.