more modest than the very maidens in their eyes.[1] To speak of the pupils of the eye as "modest maidens" was a piece of absurdity becoming Amphicrates[2] rather than Xenophon. And then what a strange delusion to suppose that modesty is always without exception expressed in the eye! whereas it is commonly said that there is nothing by which an impudent fellow betrays his character so much as by the expression of his eyes. Thus Achilles addresses Agamemnon in the Iliad as "drunkard, with eye of dog." [3] 5 Timaeus, however, with that want of judgment which characterises plagiarists, could not leave to Xenophon the possession of even his piece of frigidity. In relating how Agathocles carried off his cousin, who was wedded to another man, from the festival of the unveiling, he asks, "Who could have done such a deed, unless he had harlots instead of maidens in his eyes?" 6 And Plato himself, elsewhere so supreme a master of style, meaning to describe certain recording tablets, says, "They shall write, and deposit in the temples memorials of cypress wood";[4] and again, "Then concerning walls, Megillus, I give my vote with Sparta that we should let them lie asleep within the ground, and not awaken them."[5] 7And Herodotus falls pretty much under the same censure,
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Longinus on the Sublime
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