[Footnote 6: _Timaeus_, 69, D; 74, A; 65, C; 72, G; 74, B, D; 80, E; 77, G; 78, E; 85, E.]
6 These, and a hundred similar fancies, follow one another in quick succession. But those which I have pointed out are sufficient to demonstrate how great is the natural power of figurative language, and how largely metaphors conduce to sublimity, and to illustrate the important part which they play in all impassioned and descriptive passages.
7 That the use of figurative language, as of all other beauties of style, has a constant tendency towards excess, is an obvious truth which I need not dwell upon. It is chiefly on this account that even Plato comes in for a large share of disparagement, because he is often carried away by a sort of frenzy of language into an intemperate use of violent metaphors and inflated allegory. “It is not easy to remark” (he says in one place) “that a city ought to be blended like a bowl, in which the mad wine boils when it is poured out, but being disciplined by another and a sober god in that fair society produces a good and temperate drink.”[7] Really, it is said, to speak of water as a “sober god,” and of the process of mixing as a “discipline,” is to talk like a poet, and no very _sober_ one either.
8 It was such defects as these that the hostile critic[8] Caecilius made his ground of attack, when he had the boldness in his essay “On the Beauties of Lysias” to pronounce that writer superior in every respect to Plato. Now Caecilius was doubly unqualified for a judge: he loved Lysias better even than himself, and at the same time his hatred of Plato and all his works is greater even than his love for Lysias. Moreover, he is so blind a partisan that his very premises are open to dispute. He vaunts Lysias as a faultless and immaculate writer, while Plato is, according to him, full of blemishes. Now this is not the case: far from it.
[Footnote 8: Reading ὁ μισῶν αὐτόν, by a conjecture of the translator.]
But supposing now that we assume the existence of a really unblemished and irreproachable writer. Is it not worth while to raise the whole question whether in poetry and prose we should prefer sublimity accompanied by some faults, or a style which never rising above moderate excellence never stumbles and never requires correction? and again, whether the first place in literature is justly to be assigned to the more numerous, or the loftier excellences? For these are questions proper to an inquiry on the Sublime, and urgently asking for settlement.