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so long, and so glaring are they. For instance, he does not say “sweat” but “damp sweat”; not “to the Isthmian games” but “to the solemn assembly of the Isthmian games”; not “laws”, but “the laws, the rulers of states”; not “running”, but “with a race-like impulse of the soul”; not “museum”, but “having taken up the museum of nature”1; and “the scowling anxiety of the soul”; “creator”, not “of favor”, but “all-popular favor”; and “dispenser of the pleasure of the hearers”; “he hid,” not “with branches,” but “with the branches of the forest”; “he covered,” not “his body,” but “the nakedness of his body.” He also calls desire “counter-initiative of the soul”—an expression which is at once compound and an epithet, so that it becomes poetry—and “the excess of his depravity so beyond all bounds.” Hence those who employ poetic language by their lack of taste make the style ridiculous and frigid, and such idle chatter produces obscurity; for when words are piled upon one who already knows, it destroys perspicuity by a cloud of verbiage. People use compound words, when a thing has no name and the word is easy to combine, as χρονοτριβεῖν, to pass time; but if the practice is abused, the style becomes entirely poetical.
This is why compound words are especially employed by dithyrambic poets, who are full of noise; strange words by epic poets, for they imply dignity and self-assertion; metaphor to writers of iambics, who now employ them, as we have stated.
1 The meaning of παραλαβών is quite obscure: various renderings are “having taken to himself,” “received,” “grasped,” “inherited.” The word μουσεῖον, originally a haunt of the Muses, came to mean a school of art or literature. The fault appears to consist in the addition of τῆς φύσεως, but it is difficult to see why. Cope confesses his inability to understand the passage. Jebb translates: “he does not say, ‘having taken to himself a school of the Muses,’ but ‘to Nature's school of the Muses.’”
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