266 AI2I.S TO TL E ’S POLITICS
possible to interpret it with certainty : ‘For were they not friends
about whom thou wast plagued or grieved’? cp. again from
Psalm lv. 12 : ‘It is not an open enemy that hath done me this
dishonour, for then I could have borne it.’ A mal attributed to a
well-known statesman who had been anonymously attacked in
newspaper is to the point, ‘It must have been by a friend,’ he
said, ‘an enemy would not have been so bitter.’ The verse ij
very probably taken from the well-known poem of Archilochus in
Trochaic verse beginning Bupi 6%~’ ipvxydvoruc K<Scurv KUK+I(~<.
of which a fragment is preserved (Bergk 60) : the metre might be
restored either by omitting 86, which may have been added by
Aristotle, or by inserting ov’v before 84.
The translators n’illiam de nloerbek and Aretino render ddy~to
‘ a lanceis,’ as if they had read or imagined they read in’ iyx&~.
- oib’ cia‘rv oi pcyaXdJlvXor T+I +iuw Zyp~r, rrX+ npbs TO~S d8rKoivrac.
Yet the psydd+uXos described in Sic. Eth. iv. 3. is rather un-
approachable by his neighbours.
- ob ybp r$v a&+ rirpi;3orav 6ri &siv 6rci Tc riv Xdyov kai T~V yl~m-
pi‘uov 6rh rzjs aiuB{asos.
Aristotle is opposing political theories to
facts, as in the Ethics he contrasts the moral certainty of Ethics
(Nic. Eth. i. 3. $ 4) with the absolute certainty of mathemath,
though the <iKp$3cru in the two cases is different, meaning in tllc
one the necessity and ci priori truth of mathematics, in the other
exactness of detail.
Cp. below c. 12. § 9.
