'So the Sibyl was noted by Heraclitus as μαινομένῳ στόματι γελαστὰ καὶ ἀκαλλώπιστα φθεγγομένη, as one speaking ridiculous and unseemly speeches with her furious mouth.' The fragment is misquoted and misunderstood: for γελαστά, etc. should be ἀμύριστα unperfumed, inornate lays, not redolent of art.—Render it thus:
Not her's, etc.
Στόματι μαινομένῳ is 'with ecstatic mouth'.
J. D. Campbell in a note to this Fragment (P. W., 1893, pp. 464-5) quotes the 'following prose translation of the same passage', from Coleridge's Statesman's Manual (1816, p. 132); 'Multiscience (or a variety and quantity of acquired knowledge) does not test intelligence. But the Sibyll with wild enthusiastic mirth shrilling forth unmirthful, inornate and unperfumed truths, reaches to a thousand years with her voice through the power of God.'
The prose translation is an amalgam of two fragments. The first sentence is quoted by Diogenes Laertius, ix. 1: the second by Plutarch, de Pyth. orac. 6, p. 377.
[1009:1] These rhymes were addressed to a Miss Eliza Nixon, who supplied S. T. C. with books from a lending library.
