This text is part of:
ἀστεῖος: lit. ‘belonging to the town’ (Latin urbanus), so ‘polite’ (cp. English ‘urbane’), as opposed to ἄγροικος ‘belonging to the country’, so ‘rude’, ‘boorish’. σεμνός: see note on E. 40. ταπεινούς, ‘too humble’, ‘abject’. ταπεινός is used generally in a bad sense in Classical Greek; contrast its use as ‘humble’ in a good sense in the New Testament. Humility was not a Greek virtue. δεῖ δὲ χρῆσθαι μὲν ἀμφοτέραις ταῖς ἰδέαις ταύταις κτἑ, ‘you must cultivate both these qualities, and avoid the disadvantage which attaches to each.’ ἰδέα, lit. ‘appearance’, ‘form’, so ‘kind’, ‘class’. Here ἰδέαι means ‘kinds (i.e. of behaviour)’, ‘qualities’; cp. § 48, and N. C. 30, 44 and E. 9, where εἶδος is used in the same way, πᾶσι τοῖς εἴδεσι (sc. κόσμων). In Plato ἰδέα means a ‘class’, ‘species’, under which individual examples are arranged, and in Aristotle the ‘general idea’ or ‘principle’ underlying such a classification. προσοῦσαν: a favourite word of Isocr. See note on E. 46.
Isocrates Cyprian Orations. Edward S. Forster.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
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.