by that indifference which with a few exceptions runs through the
whole of life. If we ever shake off our apathy[7] and apply ourselves to
work, it is always with a view to pleasure or applause, not for that
solid advantage which is worthy to be striven for and held in honour.

[Footnote 7: Comp. Thuc. vi. 26. 2, for this sense of
+analambanein+.]

12
We had better then leave this generation to its fate, and turn to what
follows, which is the subject of the passions, to which we promised
early in this treatise to devote a separate work.[8] They play an
important part in literature generally, and especially in relation to
the Sublime.

[Footnote 8: iii. 5.]

NOTES ON LONGINUS

[Transcriber's Note:
Citation format is as in the printed text. The last number in each
group appears to refer to clauses in the original Greek; there is no
correspondence with line numbers in the printed book.]

I. 2. 10. There seems to be an antithesis implied in +politikois
tetheorekenai+, referring to the well-known distinction between the
+praktikos bios+ and the +theoretikos bios+.

4. 27. I have ventured to return to the original reading, +diephotisen+,
though all editors seem to have adopted the correction +diephoresen+, on
account, I suppose, of +skeptou+. 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.[1]

[Footnote 1: Comp. for the metaphor Goethe, _Dichtung und Wahrheit_,
B 8. "Wie vor einem Blitz erleuchteten sich uns alle Folgen dieses
herrlichen Gedankens."]

III. 2. 17. +phorbeias d' ater+, 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" (+(lunate
Sigma)+ the old form of +(Sigma)+); sailors, "the ants of ocean"; the
strap of a pedlar's pack, "the girdle of his load"; pitch, "the ointment
of doors,"