1 Plato as elsewhere asks whether it is true of all, some, or none. So of the commingling of ideas in Sophist 251 D. Aristotle (Politics 1260 b 38) employs the same would-be exhaustive method.
2 ἀρχόμενος . . . τελευτήσειν: an overlooked reference to a proverb also overlooked by commentators on Pindar, Pyth. i. 35. Cf. Pindar, fr. 108 A Loeb, Laws 775 E, Sophocles, fr. 831 (Pearson), Antiphon the Sophist, fr. 60 (Diels).
3 This pleading the opponent's case for him is common in Plato. Cf. especially the plea for Protagoras in Theaetetus 166-167.
4 Apparently a mixture of military and legal phraseology. Cf.ἐκπέρσῃ in Protagoras 340 A, Iliad v. 140τὰ δ᾽ ἐρῆμα φοβεῖται, and the legal phrase ἐρήμην καταδιαιτᾶν or οφλεῖν.
5 ὡμολογεῖτε: cf. 369 E f. For κατὰ φύσιν cf. 370 C and 456 C. The apparent emphasis of φύσις in this book is of little significance. Cf. Laws, passsim.
6 Cf. the πέλαγος τῶν λόγωνProtagoras 338 A. Similarly Sidney Smith: “cut his cable, and spread his enormous canvas, and launch into the wide sea of reasoning eloquence.”
7 An allusion to the story of Arion and the dolphin in Herodotus i. 24, as ὑπολαβεῖν perhaps proves. For ἄπορον cf. 378 A.
8 γενναία: often as here ironical in Plato. Cf. Sophist 231 B, where interpreters misunderstand it. But the new L. and S. is correct.
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