E. M. Cope, Commentary on the Rhetoric of Aristotle

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τὰ γὰρ αἰσχρά κ.τ.λ.] ‘for shameful things we are all ashamed of, when we say, do, or are intending to do them’. Sappho's verses, for instance, in answer to Alcaeus,—‘something I would say, but shame prevents me’—she infers from this that it was something to be ashamed of, αἰσχρόν, and replies, ‘Hadst thou yearned after things good or fair, and had not thy tongue stirred up mischief to utter it, shame had not possessed thine eyes, but thou wouldst have spoken of the thing that is right’. The third line in particular of this Alcaic stanza requires correction, and there is not much help to be derived from the Aristotelian MSS. In the first, Blomfield, Mus. Crit. I p. 17, reads ἶκέ τ᾽ ἐσλῶν: and Hermann (much better), El. Metr. Gr. III 16, de stroph. min. ἷκέ ς᾿ (‘reached thee’, the Homeric ἵκειν), from the reading ἵκες of one MS. Bergk, Fragm. Lyr. Gr. p. 607, follows MS A^{c} in reading ἦχε and the Aeolic ἐσλῶν. The third line, which in the MSS appears as αἰδώς κέν σε οὐκ εἶχεν ὄμματ̓, without varia lectio, is written by Blomfield, u. s., αἰδώς κεν οὐχί τ᾽ ὄππατ̓ εἶχεν: by Hermann, αἰδώς κέ τευς οἰκ εἶχεν ὄππατ̓: and by Bergk, αἰδῴς κε σ᾽ οὐκ ἄν ἦχεν ὄππατ̓ (surely κε and ἄν thus repeated in different forms and almost immediate juxtaposition is indefensible): none of these seems to be satisfactory, but I have nothing better to suggest. [In Bergk's 2nd ed. p. 674 the fragment is printed as follows: αἰ δ᾽ ἦχες ἔσλων ἴμερον ἢ κάλων, | καὶ μή τι Ϝείπην γλῶσσ᾽ ἐκύκα κάκον, | αἴδως κέ σ᾽ οὐ κίχανεν ὄμματ̓, | ἀλλ᾽ ἔλεγες περὶ τῶ δικαίως. S.]

The fact that the eye is the principal organ of the manifestation of some of the feelings or emotions, as love, shame, fear, is here, as often elsewhere, expressed poetically by the phrase that ‘shame has its seat in the eye’. Compare the proverb in II 6. 18, τὸ ἐν ὀφθαλμοῖς εἶναι αἰδῶ, where see note.