[16] A parody on the touching farewell of Alcestis to her nuptial chamber, in the tragedy of Euripides:—
“Farewell! and she who takes my place—may she
Be happier!—truer wife she cannot be.”
[17] Preface to The Knights.
[18] Half the joke is irreparably lost in English. The Greek word for “treaty” or “truce” meant literally the “libation” of wine with which the terms were ratified.
[19] Which each soldier was required to take with him on the march.
[20] Telephus, Philoctetes, Bellerophon, and probably other tragedy heroes, were all represented by Euripides as lame. But no one could possibly have made greater capital out of the physical sufferings of Philoctetes from his lame foot than the author’s favourite Sophocles.
[21] Of course every Athenian would be amused by the parody of the well-remembered scene in the Iliad:—
“The babe clung crying to his nurse’s breast,
Scared at the dazzling helm and nodding crest.
With secret pleasure each fond parent smiled,
And Hector hastened to relieve his child;
The glittering terrors from his brow unbound,
And placed the beaming helmet on the ground.”
[22] Their reputation has continued down to modern days. “I was able to partake of some fine eels of an extraordinary size, which had been sent to us by the Greek primates of the city. They were caught in the Lake Copais, which, as in ancient times, still supplies the country round with game and wild-fowl.”—Hughes’s Travels in Greece, i. 33. (Note to Walsh’s Aristophanes.)
[23] The old commentators assign the story to Æsop. The eagle had eaten the beetle’s young ones; the beetle, in revenge, rolled the eagle’s eggs out of her nest: so often, that the latter made complaint to her patron Jupiter, who gave her leave to lay her eggs in his bosom. The beetle flew up to heaven, and buzzed about the god’s head, who jumped up in a hurry to catch his tormentor, quite forgetting his duty as nurse, and so the eggs fell out and were broken.