An awareness of mystical experiences, in fact, can lead us to a more nuanced view of language, realizing, for instance, that just as the rhetoric of Climax is integrated by the rhetoric of Anti-Climax, so the figure of Hypobole complements in its modesty the figure of Hyperbole; all this is clearly relevant to the analysis of poetry.

Following Boeckh, Dittenberger in his commentary relates this description of events to the inscription from Teos (CIG 3088 = SIG 960nl), which li sts many of the same competitive events but also mentions an event called hypoboles antapodoseos for the older age-set of boys (helikia).

He [ = Solon] wrote a law that the poetry of Homer was to be performed rhapsodically [rhapsoideo] by cue [ex hypoboles , from hypoballo], so that where the first person left off, from that point the next one would begin.

What ex hypoboles ("by cue") means exactly is not as clear as scholars have suggested.