11 I ended by remarking generally that the genius of the present age is wasted 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 ἀναλαμβάνειν.]
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.
[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 πολιτικοῖς 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, διεφώτισεν, though all editors seem to have adopted the correction διεφόρησεν, on account, I suppose, of σκηπτοῦ. 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. φορβειᾶς 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” (Ϲ the old form of Σ); sailors, “the ants of ocean”; the strap of a pedlar’s pack, “the girdle of his load”; pitch, “the ointment of doors,” and so on.