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Wellsprings
rhetoric

Metaphor

μεταφορά

To call evening the "old age of the day" is to see one thing clearly inside another — the genius no rule can teach.

Metaphor is the art of carrying a name from where it belongs to where it does not, letting us see one thing through another — old age as "life's evening," a fleet "ploughing" the sea. For Aristotle it is the crown of style: it brings ideas vividly "before the eyes," gives ordinary speech distinction without obscurity, and rests on perceiving genuine likeness between unlike things. Alone among the resources of language, he held, metaphor cannot be borrowed from anyone else; mastering it is the mark of natural genius.

Where this idea shows up

5 Greek sources·3 Jewish-canon citations

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