[485] A verse from the 'Myrmidons' of Aeschylus; here Achilles is Aeschylus himself.
[486] The 'Persae' of Aeschylus (produced 472 B.C.) was received with transports of enthusiasm, reviving as it did memories of the glorious defeat of Xerxes at Salamis, where the poet had fought, only a few years before, 480 B.C.
[487] Nothing is known of this Pantacles, whom Eupolis, in his 'Golden Age,' also describes as awkward ([Greek: skaios]).
[488] Aristophanes had by this time modified his opinion of this general, whom he had so flouted in 'The Acharnians.'
[489] Son of Telamon, the King of Salamis and brother of Ajax.
[490] The wife of Proetus, King of Argos. Bellerophon, who had sought refuge at the court of this king after the accidental murder of his brother Bellerus, had disdained her amorous overtures. Therefore she denounced him to her husband as having wanted to attempt her virtue and urged him to cause his death. She killed herself immediately after the departure of the young hero.
[491] Cephisophon, Euripides' friend, is said to have seduced his wife.
[492] Meaning, they have imitated Sthenoboea in everything; like her, they have conceived adulterous passions and, again like her, they have poisoned themselves.
[493] Lycabettus, a mountain of Attica, just outside the walls of Athens, the "Arthur's Seat" of the city. Parnassus, the famous mountain of Phocis, the seat of the temple and oracle of Delphi and the home of the Muses. The whole passage is, of course, in parody of the grandiloquent style of Aeschylus.
[494] An allusion to Oeneus, King of Aetolia, and to Telephus, King of Mysia; characters put upon the stage by Euripides.