ἔστω] See note on c. 5. 3, 6. 2, 10. 3. ὑπερέχον—ὑπερεχόμενον] ‘Hae definitiones possunt declarari duabus lineis parallelis, quarum una ultra alteram protenditur: item numeris, e. g. 6 et 9. Maior enim sive linea sive numerus et aequat minorem et excurrit: minor vero inest in maiori.’ Schrader. On the passive form ὑπερέχεσθαι, see Appendix (B) On the irregular passive (at the end of the notes to this Book). τοσοῦτον καὶ ἔτι] ‘so much and something over’. τὸ ἐνυπάρχον] ‘that which is contained or included in the other’. καὶ μεῖζον μὲν ἀεὶ κ.τ.λ.] That all ‘quantity’, and all terms that express it, μέγα μικρόν, πολὺ ὀλίγον, are relative, πρός τι, we learn from the Categories, c. 6, 5 b 15—29, of which this passage is a summary repetition. The same thing, as a mountain or a grain of millet, when compared with two different things, is called great or little, greater or less—and so of ‘many’ and ‘few’. None of them is absolute αὐτὸ καθ᾽ αὑτό: all of them are relative to something else, with which they are compared, πρός τι, πρὸς ἕτερον. “And ‘greater’ and ‘more’ have always reference to a ‘less’, and ‘much’ and ‘little1’ to the average, magnitude (τὸ τῶν πολλῶν μέγεθος, the object to which the term is applied being thereby compared with its congeners, as a mountain or man with the average, τοῖς πολλοῖς, of mountains and men, in order to estimate its size): and that which is called ‘great’ exceeds (this average ordinary size), whilst that which falls short of it is called ‘small’, and ‘much’ and ‘little’ in like manner2’.
1 If πολὺ καὶ ὀλίγον are here intended to include ‘many’ and ‘few’, πολλοὶ καὶ ὀλίγοι, as they most probably are, since they occur in the Categories and are wanted to complete the list, we must extend the τῶν πολλῶν μέγεθος to number, πλῆθος, as well as magnitude.
2 Gaisford refers to Harris, Philosophical Arrangements (‘arrangements’ mean collections of notions under general heads; and the ‘arrangements’ that he treats of are Aristotle's summa genera, or Categories), ch. 9 p. 191. Harris merely repeats what Aristotle had already said in his Categories to which Gaisford does not refer.
Commentary on the Rhetoric of Aristotle. Edward Meredith Cope. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1877.
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