[538] In Greek, the vocative of Amynias is Amynia; thus it has a feminine termination.
[539] The Corinthians, the allies of Sparta, ravaged Attica. [Greek: Kor], the first portion of the Greek word, is the root of the word which means a bug in the same language.
[540] Mirrors, or burning glasses, are meant, such as those used by Archimedes two centuries later at the siege of Syracuse, when he set the Roman fleet on fire from the walls of the city.
[541] That is, the family of the Alcmaeonidae; Coesyra was wife of Alcmaeon.
[542] Socrates was an Athenian; but the atheist Diagoras, known as 'the enemy of the gods' hailed from the island of Melos. Strepsiades, crediting Socrates with the same incredulity, assigns him the same birthplace.
[543] i.e. the enemies of the gods. An allusion to the giants, the sons of Earth, who had endeavoured to scale heaven.
[544] Pericles had squandered all the wealth accumulated in the Acropolis upon the War. When he handed in his accounts, he refused to explain the use of a certain twenty talents and simply said, "I spent them on what was necessary." Upon hearing of this reply, the Lacedaemonians, who were already discontented with their kings, Cleandrides and Plistoanax, whom they accused of carrying on the war in Attica with laxness, exiled the first-named and condemned the second to payment of a fine of fifteen talents for treachery. In fact, the Spartans were convinced that Pericles had kept silent as to what he had done with the twenty talents, because he did not want to say openly, "I gave this sum to the Kings of Lacedaemon."
[545] The basket in which Aristophanes shows us Socrates suspended to bring his mind nearer to the subtle regions of air.
[546] The scholiast tells us that Just Discourse and Unjust Discourse were brought upon the stage in cages, like cocks that are going to fight. Perhaps they were even dressed up as cocks, or at all events wore cocks' heads as their masks.
[547] In the language of the schools of philosophy just reasoning was called 'the stronger'—[Greek: ho kreitt_on logos], unjust reasoning, 'the weaker'—[Greek: ho h_ett_on logos].