[3] ᾠήθησαν αὐτὸν παιδίον τετοκέναι, ἀλλ᾽ αὐτοῦ αἴτιον γεγονέναι they thought that he was the father of a child, but that he was the cause of it In Latin rhetoric and poetry homeoteleuton was a frequently used device.
We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.
He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence.
(Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven) Today, homeoteleuton denotes more than Aristotle's original definition.
[4] However, use of this device still ties words together in a sort of rhyme or echo relationship, even in prose passages: It is important to use all knowledge ethically, humanely, and lovingly.
(Caspar Gutman to Sam Spade, Chapter XI (The Fat Man) in Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1930) "The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter."
(Sam Spade to Wilmer, Chapter XII (Merry-Go-Round) in Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1930) In the field of palaeography and textual criticism, homeoteleuton has also come to mean a form of copyist error present in ancient texts.