‘Further’ (returning to the last term of the definition, καὶ τοῦτο ὅταν πλήσιον φαίνηται) ‘men are pitied when danger or suffering is impending and close at hand’. (δεινόν is any object of δέος or dread; derived from δέος as ἐλεεινός from ἔλεος, κλεινός from κλέος.) ‘We pity also those who are like us, in age, or character, or habits of mind (moods, states of mind, moral and intellectual, virtuous and vicious), in reputation (of various kinds, expressed by the plural), or in blood (race and family): for in all these cases there seems to be a greater likelihood of the same misfortune occurring to oneself as well as the others (καὶ αὐτῷ): for here again’ (ἐνταῦθα, καί as well as in the case of fear, referring to II 5. 12, “the same things that we dread for ourselves, we pity in others”) ‘in a general way we must suppose’ (λαβεῖν ‘to take up, receive’, an opinion; to assume or believe; or perhaps ‘to gather’ as the result of observation, and so form an opinion of conclusion) ‘that all things that we dread in our own case, the same we pity when they happen to others’.
Commentary on the Rhetoric of Aristotle. Edward Meredith Cope. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1877.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This text was converted to electronic form by professional data entry and has been proofread to a medium level of accuracy.
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.