Ossa they pressed down with Pelion's weight,
And on them both impos'd Olympus' hill.
Fitz-Geffrey: The Life and Death of Sir Francis Drake, stanza 99 (1596).
Ter sunt conati imponere Pelio Ossam.—Virgil: Georgics, i. 281.
[810:1] See Shakespeare, page [64].
[810:2] See Rabelais, page [771].
Æschines (Adv. Ctesiphon, c. 53) ascribes to Demosthenes the expression ὑποτέτμηται τὰ νεῦρα τῶν πραγμάτων, "The sinews of affairs are cut." Diogenes Laertius, in his Life of Bion (lib. iv. c. 7, sect. 3), represents that philosopher as saying, τὸν πλοῦτον εἶναι νεῦρα πραγμάτων,—"Riches were the sinews of business," or, as the phrase may mean, "of the state." Referring perhaps to this maxim of Bion, Plutarch says in his Life of Cleomenes (c. 27), "He who first called money the sinews of the state seems to have said this with special reference to war." Accordingly we find money called expressly τὰ νεῦρα τοῦ πολέμου, "the sinews of war," in Libanius, Orat. xlvi. (vol. ii. p. 477, ed. Reiske), and by the scholiast on Pindar, Olymp. i. 4 (compare Photius, Lex. s. v. Μεγάνορος πλούτον). So Cicero, Philipp. v. 2, "nervos belli, infinitam pecuniam."
[810:3] A placard of Aldus on the door of his printing-office.—Dibdin: Introduction, vol. i. p. 436.
[810:4] This saying occurs in Louis Napoleon's speech to the Chamber of Commerce in Bordeaux, Oct. 9, 1852.
[810:5] Words engraved upon the monument erected to Cambronne at Nantes.