No More Learning

[456] A mina was a little over ? 4; 60 minas made a talent.

[457] Carystus was a city of Euboea notorious for the dissoluteness of
its inhabitants; hence the inclusion of these Carystian youths in the
women's invitation.

[458] A [Greek: para prosdokian]; i. e. exactly the opposite of the word
expected is used to conclude the sentence--to move the sudden hilarity of
the audience as a finale to the scene.

[459] A wattled cage or pen for pigs.

[460] An effeminate, a pathic; failing women, they will have to resort to
pederasty.

[461] These _Hermae_ were half-length figures of the god Hermes, which
stood at the corners of streets and in public places at Athens. One
night, just before the sailing of the Sicilian Expedition, they were all
mutilated--to the consternation of the inhabitants. Alcibiades and his
wild companions were suspected of the outrage.

[462] They had repeatedly dismissed with scant courtesy successive
Lacedaemonian embassies coming to propose terms of peace after the
notable Athenian successes at Pylos, when the Island of Sphacteria was
captured and 600 Spartan citizens brought prisoners to Athens. This was
in 425 B. C. , the seventh year of the War.
[463] Chief of the Lacedaemonian embassy which came to Athens, after the
earthquake of 464 B. C. , which almost annihilated the town of Sparta, to
invoke the help of the Athenians against the revolted Messenians and
helots.

[464] Echinus was a town on the Thessalian coast, at the entrance to the
Maliac Gulf, near Thermopylae and opposite the northern end of the
Athenian island of Euboea. By the "legs of Megara" are meant the two
"long walls" or lines of fortification connecting the city of Megara with
its seaport Nisaea--in the same way as Piraeus was joined to Athens.

[465] Examples of [Greek: para prosdokian] again; see above.

[466] Clitagoras was a composer of drinking songs, Telamon of war songs.

[467] Here, off the north coast of Euboea, the Greeks defeated the
Persians in a naval battle, 480 B. C.

[468] The hero of Thermopylae, where the 300 Athenians arrested the
advance of the invading hosts of Xerxes in the same year.

[469] Amyclae, an ancient town on the Eurotas within two or three miles
of Sparta, the traditional birthplace of Castor and Pollux; here stood a
famous and magnificent Temple of Apollo.

"Of the Brazen House," a surname of Athene, from the Temple dedicated to
her worship at Chalcis in Euboea, the walls of which were covered with
plates of brass.

Sons of Tyndarus, that is, Castor and Pollux, "the great twin brethren,"
held in peculiar reverence at Sparta.






THE CLOUDS




INTRODUCTION

The satire in this, one of the best known of all Aristophanes' comedies,
is directed against the new schools of philosophy, or perhaps we should
rather say dialectic, which had lately been introduced, mostly from
abroad, at Athens. The doctrines held up to ridicule are those of the
'Sophists'--such men as Thrasymachus from Chalcedon in Bithynia, Gorgias
from Leontini in Sicily, Protagoras from Abdera in Thrace, and other
foreign scholars and rhetoricians who had flocked to Athens as the
intellectual centre of the Hellenic world. Strange to say, Socrates of
all people, the avowed enemy and merciless critic of these men and their
methods, is taken as their representative, and personally attacked with
pitiless raillery.