Note 33 — INTRODUCTION

A modern reader might be disposed to see an example of emphasis in the illustrative passage which “Longinus” here quotes from Herodotus vi. 11. In hyperbata the Treatise on the Sublime itself greatly abounds, being much influenced (in this as in other ways) by Plato. For examples of hyperbaton in Plato see Riddell’s edition of the Apology, pp. 228 ff. Among modern English writers, Matthew Arnold had a curious and perhaps half-humorous trick of securing emphasis by a “bold and hazardous” hyperbaton (cp. de Sublim. xxii. 4), which keeps back the verb till the end of the sentence: e.g. “And a good deal of ignorance about these there certainly, among English public men, is”; “the grand thing in teaching is to have faith that some aptitudes for this every one has”; “one thing that Protestants have, and that the Catholics think they have a right, where they are in great numbers, to have too, this thing to the Prussian Catholics Prussia has given.” Such oddities are, in English, usually of a playful and undress character: e.g. “it was really a party that one might feel proud of having been asked to; at least I might, and did, very” (Life and Letters of Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb p. 93; cp. J. D. Duff’s remarks, on the same page, with regard to the literary adequacy of the following English translation of a pathetic sentence in one of Demosthenes’ greatest speeches: “this woman in the first instance merely quietly to drink and eat dessert they tried to force, I should suppose”).