[24] Her name, like most of those used in these comedies, is significant. It means, “Dissolver of the Army.”
[25] Hom. Iliad, vi. 490. Hector to Andromache:—
“No more—but hasten to thy tasks at home;
There guide the spindle and direct the loom.”
—Pope.
[26] Susarion. So also the Roman censor, Metellus Numidicus: “It is not possible to live with them in any comfort—or to live without them at all.”—Aul. Gellius, i. 6.
[27] Lucian, Dial. ‘Piscator.’
[28] For fear lest they should desert at once to the enemy.
[29] Names thus compounded with ‘ippos’ (‘horse’) were much affected by the Athenian aristocracy. ‘Pheidōn,’ on the other hand, in the proposed name Pheidōnides, means ‘economical.’
[30] A caricature of the doctrine of Heraclitus, that Heat was the great principle of all things.
[31] Eubœa had revolted from its allegiance to Athens some years before this war. Pericles had swept the island with an overwhelming force, banished the chiefs of the oligarchical party, and distributed their lands amongst colonists from Athens.
[32] The Greek commentators inform us very particularly by what appliances thunder was imitated on the Athenian stage; either “by rolling leather bags full of pebbles down sheets of brass,” or by “pouring them into a huge brazen caldron.” (See note to Walsh’s Aristoph., p. 302.) But Greek commentators are not to be depended upon in such matters.