This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
appear the same as before. Pericles said that the Samians were like children who cry while they accept the scraps.7 He also compared the Boeotians to holm-oaks; for just as these are beaten down by knocking against each other,8 so are the Boeotians by their civil strife. Demosthenes compared the people to passengers who are seasick.9 Democrates said that orators resembled nurses who gulp down the morsel and rub the babies' lips with the spittle.10 Antisthenes likened the skinny Cephisodotus to incense, for he also gives pleasure by wasting away. All such expressions may be used as similes or metaphors, so that all that are approved as metaphors will obviously also serve as similes which are metaphors without the details.
1 Pupil of Isocrates and historical writer. Idrieus was a prince of Caria, who had been imprisoned.
2 Meaning that there was no difference between Euxenus without a knowledge of geometry and Archidamus with a knowledge of geometry. The proportion of geometrical knowledge will remain the same, so that Archidamus can be called an ungeometrical Euxenus, and Euxenus a geometrical Archidamus (see 4.4, note for “by proportion”).
6 If metrical restrictions have been removed and they are read as prose.
7 Meaning that they did not appreciate the benefits received from the Athenians, who conquered the islands (440 B.C.).
8 Or, “are cut down by axes, the handles of which are made of their own wood.”
9 It is disputed whether Demosthenes is the orator or the Athenian general in the Peloponnesian War. The point of the comparison is that in a democracy the general instability of political conditions makes the people sick of the existing state of things and eager for a change.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.