NOTES ON LONGINUS
I. 2. 10. There seems to be an antithesis implied in πολιτικοῑς 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, διεφόρησεν, though all editors seem to have adopted the correction διεφόρησεν, on account, I suppose, of σκηπτού. To illumine a large subject, a? 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]
III. 2. 17. φορβειάς 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" (C the old form of Σ);
