Now in good truth Melanthiusi shalt thou watch all night,
lying on, a soft bed as beseems thee.

For being in chains and hanging, he says he can rest on a soft bed.

Often, too, he makes use of Hyperbole, which, by exaggerating the truth,
indicates emphasis, as (I. x. 437):--

These surpass in brilliancy the snow, in speed the eagle.

Homer used Tropes and figures of this sort and handed them down to
posterity, and justly obtains glory beyond all others.

Since there are also Characters of speech called Forms, of which one is
Copiousness, the other Gracefulness, and the third Restraint, let us see
if Homer has all these separate classes, on which poets and orators
have worked after him. There are examples of these--copiousness in
Thucydides, gracefulness in Lysias, restraint in Demosthenes. That is
copious which by combination of words and sentences has great emphasis.
An example of this is (O. v. 291):--

With that he gathered the clouds and troubled the waters of
the deep, rasping his trident in his hands: and he roused all
storms of all manner of winds and shrouded in clouds the land
and sea: and down sped night from heaven.

The graceful is delicate by the character of the matter. It is drawn out
by the way it is expressed (I. vi. 466).--

Thus he spake, great Hector stretch'd his arms
To take the child: but back the infant shrank,
Crying, and sought his nurse's sheltering breast,
Scar'd by the brazen helm and horse-hair plume.

The restrained is between the two, the copious and the graceful, as (O.
xxii. 291):--

Then Odysseus, rich in counsel, stripped him of his rags and
leaped on the great threshold with his bow and quiver full of
arrows, and poured forth all the swift shafts there before his
feet, and spake among the wooers.

But the florid style of speech, which has beauty and capacity for
creating delight and pleasure, like a flower, is frequent in our poet;
his poetry is full of such examples. The kinds of phrasing have much
novelty in Homer, as we shall go on to show, by giving a few examples
from which the rest may be gathered.

Every type of style practised among men is either historical, theoretic,
or political. Let us examine whether the beginnings of these are to
be found in him. Historical style contains a narration of facts.
The elements of such a narration are character, cause, place, time,
instrument, action,