Demetrius and the Greek Guide to Style

One pervasive problem with the way that literature is taught today, perhaps the pervasive problem, is the lack of any framework for understanding and evaluating it. Typically, a class at the high school or college level is assigned some reading, perhaps with some background about the book or author, but then the lecture period is little more than a book club facilitated by the instructor. Students are asked for their opinions about this or that aspect of the novel (or poem, play, whatever), but no definitive interpretation or means of assessing the quality of the work is given. In my time as a Literature major at college, there was really only one professor who did otherwise, and it was in his course on Shakespeare that I first encountered Aristotle’s Poetics (which we’ve discussed previously) and today’s author, Demetrius.

Who was Demetrius? Well, we don’t really know. A Greek literary theorist who wrote this book, On Style, very roughly in the Third Century B.C. (or perhaps later, but we won’t get into the weeds on this point). He was part of a long tradition of Classical criticism and theory, but interesting for a few reasons. Most of Classical theory focused on either the techniques on one genre or another, most often rhetoric, but Demetrius’ styles apply to rhetoric, prose, or poetry. For that matter, he also has a brief discussion of letter-writing, the earliest example of that genre after Aristotle. Demetrius also uniquely divides the various styles of writing into four, the elegant, grand, plain, and forceful. Certainly, there are multiple ways one can categorise different writing styles, and most other Classical authors use a two- or three-style taxonomy. Each style can also be combined with most of the others (except the grand and plain), and all have an adjacent faulty version as well, giving us a robust taxonomy for analysing literature and, of course, for improving our own writing.

We’ll get into the specifics of each style shortly, but first I’d like to return to that old professor of mine to make explicit why Demetrius is worth studying. For a student to understand literature, he must be provided with some framework for analysing it. In my class, one of our assignments was to briefly define each of Demetrius’ styles and to illustrate them with examples from Shakespeare. As a result, I was forced to be attentive to Shakespeare’s use of language, how he had different characters speak in different contexts, giving me a much greater appreciation of his mastery of English than if I had simply read or watched the plays casually. I was able to do this, constructively, because I had that framework set out for me - I didn’t have to rely on guesswork or intuition to see what kinds of styles Shakespeare used, I had something set out for me.

Some today may object that using a framework is too constraining of the student. Should students really be forced to conform their analyses into the model of a man who lived over two thousand years ago?

Yes, in fact.

Certainly, at least, at first. Perhaps after studying Demetrius, after studying his models and successors, after as spending much time as he did analysing and thinking deeply about literature, perhaps then we can discard him and build something new. More likely than discarding, we can refine the tools he has given us. In the beginning, though, the students needs scaffolding to work his way up to a more fully independent method of analysis.

Now, let’s set that aside, and look at On Style. We’ll go through each style individually, but will skip over the faulty ones - these tend to be things like an author overdoing the main points of each style, or applying a style to an inappropriate subject, like using the grand style to describe something trivial, or vice-versa, using the plain style to describe something great.

Demetrius begins with a discussion of clauses and sentence structure. It does set a foundation for the rest of the work, but it’s also the section I find least interesting and for this post I’m most interested in highlighting the styles themselves.

He begins with the grand style. What produces grandeur? Among his first observations is long clauses, and his examples come from the beginnings of Thucydides and Herodotus: “Thucydides the Athenian wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians,” and “The History of Herodotus of Halicarnassus is here set out.” Also important is word order; one should place the most vivid verbs of a sentence at the end. So, from Plato, “when a man lets music play over him and flood through his ears,” and “but when the flood fails to stop and enchants him, at that point he melts and liquefies.” Notice that the most striking verbs, “flood” and “liquefy,” close the sentence and, as Demetrius says, come closer to poetry than the more mundane “play” and “melts.”

A good example of Demetrius’ attention to detail is that he even addresses how to use connectives:

An unbroken chain of connectives can often make even small things great, like the names of the Boeotian towns in Homer: they are ordinary and small, but they acquire a certain dignity and greatness from the long chain of connectives, for example, “and Schoenus and Scolus and mountainous Eteonnus.”

Another point is the use of repetition. Nireus is very much a minor character in the Illiad, but Homer makes him and his contingent appear more impressive by opening three successive lines with his name: “Nireus brought three ships, Nireus, son of Aglaia, Nireus the most handsome man.” Demetrius points out that if Homer had just said, “Nireus, the son of Aglaia, brought three ships from Syme,” then “he may just as well have passed over Nireus in silence. Speech is like a banquet: a few dishes may be arranged to seem many.”

The last point I’ll cover for this style (though Demetrius has several more that I’ll pass over) is the choice of subject, which will be a critical decision for using every style. His examples for grandeur are “a great and famous battle on land or sea, or when earth or heaven are the theme.”

Up next is the elegant style, “which is speech with charm and a graceful lightness.” Oddly, Demetrius seems to class almost any witticism under this style, like Lysias’ description of an old woman, “whose teeth could be counted sooner than her fingers.” I don’t think that this is a matter of the Greek word for “elegant” having a broader meaning, since one of translator G. M. A. Grube’s few criticisms of Demetrius is on this same point. Demetrius’ example from Homer’s description of Artemis in the Odyssey is much better, “At her side the nymphs play, and Leto rejoices in her heart,” and “she easily outshone them all, yet all were beautiful.”

In any case, charm may come from the subject matter, “such as gardens of the nymphs, marriage songs, loves, or the poetry of Sappho generally.” One can still add to the charm of a subject with diction, as in Homer’s lines from the Odyssey, “Just as Pandareus’ daughter, the pale nightingale, sings beautifully at the beginning of spring.” He explains:

This passage refers to the nightingale, which is a delightful little bird, and to spring, which is of its nature a delightful season of the year, but the style has made it much more beautiful, and the whole has added charm from “pale” and the personification of the bird as Pandareus’ daughter. Both these touches are the poet’s own.

How do we produce charm, aside from the subject matter? One source Demetrius identifies is brevity, such as the end of this line from Xenophon’s Anabasis: “This man has really nothing Greek about him, for he has (and I saw it myself) both his ears pierced like a Lydian; and so he had.” If he had expanded “so he had” to something like “what he said was true, since he had evidently had them pierced,” then “it would have become a bald piece of narrative instead of a flash of charm.”

Word order is again important. As with grandeur, the most vivid or wittiest part of a sentence should come at the end. Repetition is another technique elegance shares with grandeur, as in “you bring” in these lines he cites from Sappho:

Evening star, you bring everything home,
You bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring the child to its mother.”

He also cites Sappho for the next technique, a change in direction: “Raise high the roof of the hall, builders, for the bridegroom is coming, the equal of Ares, much taller than a tall man.” Demetrius explains, “She seems to check herself, feeling that she has used an impossible hyperbole, since no one is the equal of Ares.” Now, he does say later that hyperbole can be used in the elegant style, but with a caveat that if one’s hyperbole becomes too over-the-top, it ruins the charm and veers into comedy.

Interestingly, Demetrius also recommends the use of poetic techniques for the elegant style, such as assonance and careful attention to the sounds of words generally. Not only that, but he even suggests using metre in prose. This must be done subtly, of course, and needn’t be as strict as in poetry, but he points out that the Peripatetics, Plato, Xenophon, and Herodotus all use this device.

This point surprised me because I typically think of metre as the primary distinction between poetry and prose. That said, after further thought, I can see how this works. It’s been said that iambic pentameter is such a natural metre in English that writers can sometimes write in it almost by accident; indeed, Shakespeare’s plays are mostly in that metre but the speech flows quite naturally, if elevated (or deliberately undignified, depending on the effect Shakespeare wants in a given scene). Looking abroad, Classical Chinese authors mostly wrote in prose, but to emphasise a point they would often write a few lines in, say, a four-foot quantitative metre, often alongside another typical poetic technique, parallelism.

Demetrius’ third style is the plain, to be used for simple subjects. As such, though all the other styles can be mixed, this one is incompatible with the grand. “The diction throughout,” he advises, “should be normal and familiar, since the more familiar is always simpler, while the unfamiliar and metaphorical have grandeur.” Use common, everyday words, avoid neologisms, and avoid compounds. Your goal here is clarity.

A good word Demetrius introduced me to in this section is “epanalepsis,” which is:

The resumptive repetition of the same particle in the course of a long sentence, for example “On the one hand, all Philip’s activities - how he conquered Thrace, seized the Chersonese, besieged Byzantium, and refused to return Amphipolis - all these, on the one hand, I shall pass over.” The repetition of the particle “on the one hand” [in Greek, “men”] virtually reminded us of the opening and put us right back to the beginning again.

Brevity is a virtue, but in the above example, where length is unavoidable, the repetition helps the reader avoid getting lost. He writes a little later that sentences are like roads, which have signs and resting places.

I won’t dwell on it, but it’s in the section on the plain style that Demetrius addresses letter-writing, which is largely in this style, albeit slightly more elevated because a letter is “like a gift.” I do love his characterisation of letter-writing: “Everyone writes a letter in the virtual image of his own soul. In every other form of speech it is possible to see the writer’s character, but in none so clearly as in the letter.”

Finally, we come to the forceful style. Here, what I expected was a recommendation for brevity, and indeed, Demetrius looks to the Spartans for examples, e.g., “The Spartans to Philip: Dionysius in Corinth.” As he said in an earlier discussion of the same example, if they’d expanded it to something like, “Although once a mighty tyrant like yourself, Dionysius now lives in Corinth as an ordinary citizen,” it would have lost all its force and become merely narrative. Forceful writing should avoid certain techniques like assonance, or figures like antithesis, which are too elegant and become frigid rather than forceful.

However, there is a place for some elaboration and artifice, if used carefully. Detailed comparisons should be avoided, but a well-placed metaphor can be effective, like this example from Demosthenes, “Python grew bold and was a rushing torrent in full spate against you.” Demetrius also discusses rhetorical questions under this heading. Citing Demosthenes again, “No, he was annexing Euboea and establishing a base against Attica - and in doing this was he wronging us and breaking the peace, or was he not?” The question puts the listener “into a corner,” as Demetrius puts it, and if he had simply said that “he was wronging us and breaking the peace,” it would be simply an opening statement.

Interestingly, silence can be effective for the forceful style. Demetrius cites Demosthenes, “I certainly could - but I do not wish to say anything offensive, and the prosecutor has the advantage in accusing me.” He explains, “His silence here is almost more effective than anything anyone could have said.”

This brings us to the end of Demetrius’ discussion of the styles, but there’s one last point to address: Which translation should one read? I’m familiar with two. First, Doreen C. Innes’s, which is based on an older translation by W. Rhys Roberts. This is included in the Loeb Classical Library’s edition, alongside Aristotle’s Poetics and Longinus’ On the Sublime. Like all Loeb editions, it has parallel text, and Innes’s introduction and footnotes are all helpful. There’s also Grube’s translation, which I mentioned above. His introduction is quite long and offers more detail about the context of the work, as well as a lengthy discussion of when it may have been written. I slightly prefer his introduction, but find Innes’s translation a little more readable and I prefer how she handles Demetrius’ Greek examples. In most cases they follow a similar approach, but in a few places where Grube decided that an example can’t be meaningfully conveyed in English, he simply omits it with an asterisk indicating that he has done so.

Here we leave Demetrius, but let’s take one final lesson from him: “language is like a lump of wax, from which one man will mould a dog, another an ox, another a horse.” What we mould is up to us, but before we can mould anything at all, we must learn how to shape language into the form we want. As Grube put it in his introduction to Demetrius:

[S]ince the Greeks discovered literature and developed it almost to perfection in nearly all its genres, it is not surprising that all these works are, or should be, of considerable interest to literary students, as to all would-be writers, and that they can still illuminate our own literary taste in an age that is much less concerned with language as an art—a τέχνη.