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

---

---

‘And (in estimating the value of the feeling or act of benevolence) we must examine it under all the Categories; for χάρις may be referred to that of substance (the fact) or quantity, or quality, or time, or place’. Schrader has illustrated the first three of these, but examples are hardly necessary where they so readily suggest themselves. Brandis, in the tract so often cited [Philologus IV i], p. 26, observes on this passage, that though there can be no doubt that when Aristotle wrote this he had the list of categories lying before him, whether or no the book was then written cannot be decided.

‘And it is a sign (of the ἀχαριστία, the absence of benevolent feeling, that there was no intention of obliging us, and that we therefore owe them no thanks), if people have previously refused a smaller service¹’, because it is clear that they must have had some interested motive in conferring the greater, which destroys the favour: ‘or if they have done the same or equal or greater to our enemies; for it is plain that here again the service was not disinterested’, was not done for our sake. ‘Or if the service was worthless, and the doer of it knew it to be so’;—(like the ‘Calabrian host’ and his pears, porcis comedenda, which he tries to force upon his unwilling guest; Hor. Epist. I 7. 14 seq. Prodigus et stultus donat quae spernit et odit）—‘for no one will admit that he wants things worthless’.

‘Having thus dispatched the subject of favours bestowed from feelings of benevolence and the reverse, let us now pass on to things pitiable, the objects of pity, and the states of mind or dispositions in which it resides’.