 Once we come to view the sentence as the fundamental unit of metaphorical action, Quintilian’s remark suggests something to us that it couldn’t suggest to Quintilian himself: what a simple sentence metaphor (Juliet is the sun, History is a nightmare) really says is that Juliet is like the sun, history like a nightmare—where the extent and nature of the alleged likeness are things listeners must infer from the concrete conversational setting in which the metaphor is employed. It suggests that a sentence metaphor is an elliptical simile, a figurative comparison whose key comparative construction is understood to be present but remains unpronounced. Some such comparativist account of metaphor has been proposed from time to time by modern critics (Nowottny, 1962) and by modern linguists (Ortony, 1979).