[92]
Akin to this are those figures of
which the Greeks are so fond, by means of which
they give gentle expression to unpleasing facts.
Themistocles, for example, is believed to have urged
the Athenians to commit their city to the protection
of heaven, because to urge them to abandon it would
have been too brutal an expression. Again the
statesman1 who advised that certain golden images
of Victory should be melted down as a contribution
to the war funds, modified his words by saying that
they should make a proper use of their victories.
But all such devices which consist in saying one
thing, while intending something else to be understood, have a strong resemblance to allegory.
1 Unknown.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
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.