Kitap 3
11.15
Approved hyperboles are also metaphors. For instance, one may say of a man whose eye is all black and blue, you would have thought he was a basket of mulberries, because the black eye is something purple, but the great quantity constitutes the hyperbole. Again, when one says like this or that there is a hyperbole differing only in the wording: Like Philammon punching the leather sack, or, you would have thought that he was Philammon fighting the sack; Carrying his legs twisted like parsley, or, you would have thought that he had no legs, but parsley, they being so twisted. There is something youthful about hyperboles;
11.16
for they show vehemence. Wherefore those who are in a passion most frequently make use of them: Not even were he to offer me gifts as many in number as the sand and dust. . . but a daughter of Agamemnon, son of Atreus, I will not wed, not even if she rivalled golden Aphrodite in beauty, or Athene in accomplishments.Hom. Il. 9.385. (Attic orators are especially fond of hyperbole.This must be taken as a parenthetical remark, if it is Aristotle's at all.) WhereforeBecause they are boyish. it is unbecoming for elderly people to make use of them.
12.1
But we must not lose sight of the fact that a different style is suitable to each kind of Rhetoric. That of written compositions is not the same as that of debate; nor, in the latter, is that of public speaking the same as that of the law courts. But it is necessary to be acquainted with both; for the one requires a knowledge of good Greek, while the other prevents the necessity of keeping silent when we wish to communicate something to others, which happens to those who do not know how to write.
