No More Learning

[482] Aristophanes represents everything belonging to Socrates as being
mean, even down to his dwelling.

[483] Crates ascribes the same doctrine in one of his plays to the
Pythagorean Hippo, of Samos.

[484] This is pure calumny. Socrates accepted no payment.

[485] Here the poet confounds Socrates' disciples with the Stoics.
Contrary to the text, Socrates held that a man should care for his bodily
health.

[486] One of Socrates' pupils.

[487] Female footwear. They were a sort of light slipper and white in
colour.

[488] He calls off their attention by pretending to show them a
geometrical problem and seizes the opportunity to steal something for
supper. The young men who gathered together in the palaestra, or
gymnastic school, were wont there to offer sacrifices to the gods before
beginning the exercises. The offerings consisted of smaller victims, such
as lambs, fowl, geese, etc. , and the flesh afterwards was used for their
meal (_vide_ Plato in the 'Lysias'). It is known that Socrates taught
wherever he might happen to be, in the palaestra as well as elsewhere.

[489] The first of the seven sages, born at Miletus.
[490] Because of their wretched appearance. The Laconians, blockaded in
Sphacteria, had suffered sorely from famine.

[491] In fact, this was one of the chief accusations brought against
Socrates by Miletus and Anytus; he was reproached for probing into the
mysteries of nature.

[492] When the Athenians captured a town, they divided its lands by lot
among the poorer Athenian citizens.

[493] An allusion to the Athenian love of law-suits and litigation.

[494] When originally conquered by Pericles, the island of Euboea, off
the coasts of Boeotia and Attica, had been treated with extreme
harshness.

[495] Is about to add, "you believe in them at all," but checks himself.

[496] This was the doctrine of Anaximenes.

[497] The scholiast explains that water-cress robs all plants that grow
in its vicinity of their moisture and that they consequently soon wither
and die.

[498] In the other Greek towns, the smaller coins were of copper.

[499] Athamas, King of Thebes. An allusion to a tragedy by Sophocles, in
which Athamas is dragged before the altar of Zeus with his head circled
with a chaplet, to be there sacrificed; he is, however, saved by
Heracles.

[500] No doubt Socrates sprinkled flour over the head of Strepsiades in
the same manner as was done with the sacrificial victims.

[501] The mysteries of Eleusis celebrated in the Temple of Demeter.

[502] A mountain of Attica, north of Athens.

[503] Sybaris, a town of Magna Graecia (Lucania), destroyed by the
Crotoniates in 709 B.