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‘The offences they commit incline to insolence or wanton outrage, not to mean or petty crimes and mischief’. Their crimes, when they commit them, are rather those of open violence, outrage of personal dignity, wanton aggression and the like, than of that mean and low form of wrong-doing manifesting itself in all underhand dealings, as fraud, cheating, calumny, and other similar offences, which work their mischief secretly and insidiously, as it were underground, or in the dark: the former being directed more especially against the person, ὕβρεως ἀτιμία, II 2. 6: the latter against a man's property, fortune, character. Compare II 2. 6, which gives the reason for this distinction, διὸ οἱ νέοι καὶ οἱ πλούσιοι ὑβρισταί: ὑπερέχειν γὰρ οἴονται (they think to shew their superiority) ὑβρίζοντες. Of ὕβρις, αἰκία is given as an instance II 16. 4, where this kind of offence is again attributed to the πλούσιοι: as it is also in Polit. VI (IV) 11, 1295 b 9. Excess in personal beauty, or strength, or birth, or wealth, and their opposites, weakness and poverty and meanness of condition, give rise severally to two different orders of offences: γίνονται γὰρ οἱ μὲν ὑβρισταὶ καὶ μεγαλοπόνηροι μᾶλλον, οἱ δὲ κακοῦργοι καὶ μικροπόνηροι λίαν: τῶν δ᾽ ἀδικημάτων τὰ μὲν γίνεται δἰ ὕβριν τὰ δὲ διὰ κακουργίαν. Compare Plat. Legg. V 728 E, ὡς δ᾽ αὕτως ἡ τῶν χρημάτων καὶ κτημάτων κτῆσις κατὰ τὸν αὐτὸν ῥυθμὸν ἔχει: τὰ μὲν ὑπέρογκα γὰρ ἑκάστων τούτων ἔχθρας καὶ στάσεις ἀπεργάζεται ταῖς πόλεσι καὶ ἰδίᾳ, τὰ δ̓ ἐλλείποντα δουλείας ὡς τὸ πολύ. ‘And disposed to compassion, because they suppose every one to be good (absolutely) or better (comparatively, than they really are; so Victorius); for they measure their neighbours by their own harmlessness (or freedom from malice and the love of mischief), and therefore assume that their sufferings are unmerited’: which is the occasion of ἔλεος, II 8. 1.
Commentary on the Rhetoric of Aristotle. Edward Meredith Cope. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1877.
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