[26] Stimulus, or correction,--one hardly knows which to ask for first, as more salutary for our own slumbersome, yet so self-willed, northern temperaments. Perhaps all genuine fire, even the Heraclitean fire, has a power for both. "Athens," says Dante, --Athens, aye and Sparta's state That were in policy so great, And framed the laws of old, How small a place they hold, How poor their art of noble living Shews by thy delicate contriving, Where what October spun November sees outrun! Think in the time thou canst recall, Laws, coinage, customs, places all, How thou hast rearranged, How oft thy members changed! Couldst thou but see thyself aright, And turn thy vision to the light, Thy likeness thou would'st find In some sick man reclined; On couch of down though he be pressed, He seeks and finds not any rest, But turns and turns again, To ease him of his pain. Purgatory: Canto VI: Shadwell's Translation. Now what Dante says to Florence, contrasting it with Athens and Sparta as he conceives them, Plato might have said to Athens, in contrast with Sparta, with Lacedaemon, at least as he conceived it. NOTES 6. +Transliteration: Panta rhei. Translation: "All things give way [or flow]." Plato, Cratylus 402 A, cites Heraclitus' fragment more fully-- Legei pou Hêrakleitos hoti panta chôrei kai ouden menei, or "Heracleitus says somewhere that all things give way, and nothing remains." Pater cites the same fragment in The Renaissance, Conclusion. The verb rheô means "flow," while the verb choreô means "give way." 14. +Transliteration: Panta chôrei kai ouden menei. Pater's translation: "All things give way: nothing remaineth." Plato, Cratylus 402A. 14. +Transliteration: neotês. Liddell and Scott definition: "youth: also ... youthful spirit, rashness." 15. +Transliteration: Legei pou Hêrakleitos hoti panta chôrei kai ouden menei. Pater's translation in The Renaissance, Conclusion: "[Herakleitos says somewhere that] All things give way; nothing remains." Plato, Cratylus 402a. 16. +Transliteration: eimen te kai ouk eimen. E-text editor's translation: "We are and are not." Heraclitus, Fragments. Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 1, 326. Ed. F.W.A. Mullach. Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1967 (reprint of the Paris, 1860 edition). In the same fragment, Heraclitus is described as having said, Potamois tois autois embainomen te kai ouk embainomen, which translates as "we go into the same river, and [yet] we do not go into the same river." Plato cites that thought in the passage alluded to above, Cratylus 402a. 16. +Transliteration: ta onta. Definition: "the things that are." 17. +Rather than retain the original's very small print for such quotations, I have indented them throughout Plato and Platonism. As Pater indicates, the source of his quotation is the Cratylus, 439.