A priamel is a literary and rhetorical device found throughout Western literature and consisting of a series of listed alternatives that serve as foils

Foil (literature)

In fiction, a foil is a character who contrasts with another character in order to highlight particular qualities of another character....

 to the true subject of the poem, which is revealed in a climax. For example, Fragment 16 by the Greek poet Sappho

Sappho

Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...

 (translated by Mary Barnard) begins with a priamel:

Οἰ μὲν ἰππήων στρότον οἰ δὲ πέσδων

οἰ δὲ νάων φαῖσ᾽ ἐπὶ γᾶν μέλαιναν

ἔμμεναι κάλλιστον ἔγω δὲ κῆν᾽

ὄττω τὶσ ἔπαται.

Some say a cavalry corps,

some infantry, some, again,

will maintain that the swift oars

of our fleet are the finest

sight on dark earth; but I say

that whatever one loves, is.

Other examples are found in Pindar's First Olympian, Horace

Horace

Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...

, Villon

Villon

Villon may refer to:* 10140 Villon, a main belt asteroid* Villon, Yonne, Burgundy, France* Villon , a French surname* François Villon, the 15th-century poet...

, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire, as well as in the Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

:

And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head. (AV)

William H. Race, in his book on the subject, writes:

As for the term itself, "priamel" was unknown to ancient writers. There is no word in Greek or Latin which describes it, and no discussion in the voluminous writings on rhetoric which indicates any theoretical knowledge of it. It is, in short, an invention of the twentieth century and applied anachronistically to classical poetry and prose.

The German term Priamel (from Latin praeambulum) was introduced to classical studies by the German philologist Franz Dornseiff in his Pindars Stil (1921); it originally referred to "a minor poetic genre composed primarily in Germany from the 12th to the 16th centuries. Such priameln are, on the whole, short poems consisting of a series of seemingly unrelated, often paradoxical statements which are cleverly brought together at the end, usually in the final verse." Compare the anonymous Priamel "Ich leb und weiss nit, wie lang ..." that was attributed to Martinus von Biberach

Martinus von Biberach

Magister Martinus von Biberach was a theologian from Heilbronn, Germany. He is mostly remembered because of a priamel that has allegedly been his epitaph.-Epitaph:...

.

While the name "priamel" is modern, the form itself may be ancient. Martin L. West's Indo-European Poetry and Myth collects examples from a wide ranging set of rhetorical figures in Indo-European languages, from Sanskrit

Sanskrit

Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

 to Old Irish, as well as Latin and Greek. West relates the priamel to the augmented triad

Augmented triad

In music, an augmented triad is a triad, or chord, consisting of two major thirds . The term augmented triad arises from an augmented triad being a three note chord, or triad, whose top note is raised, or augmented...

s found in other ancient Indo-European literatures, a form in which three items are listed, and the third item on the list is described by an adjective to give it extra weight:

ἢ Αἴας ἢ Ἰδομενεὺς ἢ δῖος Ὀδυσσεὺς

Whether Ajax, or Idomeneus, or godlike Odysseus

West also relates the priamel to Behaghel's law

Behaghel's laws

Behaghel’s Laws describe the basic principles of the position of words and phrases in a sentence. They were formulated by the Linguist Otto Behaghel in the last volume of his four volume work Deutsche Syntax: Eine geschichtliche Darstellung .They include the following cross-language principles:#...

of increasing terms, which states that the longest and most important of a series of listed phrases tends to appear at the end.