[105.] Comp. Thuc. vi. 26. 2, for this sense of ἀναλαμβάνειν.
[106.] iii. 5.
[NOTES ON LONGINUS]
The last number of each note does not refer to line number in the printed text. It may refer to lines or clauses in the original Greek.
[I. 2. 10.] There seems to be an antithesis implied in πολιτικοῖς τεθεωρηκέναι, referring to the well-known distinction between the πρακτικὸς βίος and the θεωρητικὸς βίος.
[4. 27.] I have ventured to return to the original reading, διεφώτισεν, though all editors seem to have adopted the correction διεφόρησεν, on account, I suppose, of σκηπτοῦ. To illumine a large subject, as a landscape is lighted up at night by a flash of lightning, is surely a far more vivid and intelligible expression than to sweep away a subject.[N.1]
[III. 2. 17.] φορβειᾶς δ᾽ ἄτερ, lit. “without a cheek-strap,” which was worn by trumpeters to assist them in regulating their breath. The line is contracted from two of Sophocles’s, and Longinus’s point is that the extravagance of Cleitarchus is not that of a strong but ill-regulated nature, but the ludicrous straining after grandeur of a writer at once feeble and pretentious.
Ruhnken gives an extract from some inedited “versus politici” of Tzetzes, in which are some amusing specimens of those felicities of language Longinus is here laughing at. Stones are the “bones,” rivers the “veins,” of the earth; the moon is “the sigma of the sky” (Ϲ the old form of Σ); sailors, “the ants of ocean”; the strap of a pedlar’s pack, “the girdle of his load”; pitch, “the ointment of doors,” and so on.
[IV. 4. 4.] The play upon the double meaning of κόρα, (1) maiden, (2) pupil of the eye, can hardly be kept in English. It is worthy of remark that our text of Xenophon has ἐν τοῖς θαλάμοις, a perfectly natural expression. Such a variation would seem to point to a very early corruption of ancient manuscripts, or to extraordinary inaccuracy on the part of Longinus, who, indeed, elsewhere displays great looseness of citation, confusing together totally different passages.