Marathon, occupied by the Alcmaeonidae--the noble family or clan at
Athens banished from the city in 595 B.C., restored 560, but again
expelled by Pisistratus--in the course of their contest with that
Tyrant. Returning to Athens on the death of Hippias (510 B.C.), they
united with the democracy, and the then head of the family, Cleisthenes,
gave a new constitution to the city.
[PG51] Queen of Halicarnassus, in Caria; an ally of the Persian King
Xerxes in his invasion of Greece; she fought gallantly at the battle of
Salamis.
[PG52] A _double entendre_--with allusion to the posture in sexual
intercourse known among the Greeks as ἵππος, in Latin 'equus,'
the horse, where the woman mounts the man in reversal of the ordinary
position.
[PG53] Micon, a famous Athenian painter, decorated the walls of the
Poecilé Stoa, or Painted Porch, at Athens with a series of frescoes
representing the battles of the Amazons with Theseus and the Athenians.
[PG54] To avenge itself on the eagle, the beetle threw the former's eggs
out of the nest and broke them. See the Fables of Aesop.
[PG55] Keeper of a house of ill fame apparently.
[PG56] "As chaste as Melanion" was a Greek proverb. Who Melanion was is
unknown.
[PG57] Myronides and Phormio were famous Athenian generals. The former
was celebrated for his conquest of all Boeotia, except Thebes, in
458 B.C.; the latter, with a fleet of twenty triremes, equipped at his
own cost, defeated a Lacedaemonian fleet of forty-seven sail, in 429.
[PG58] Timon, the misanthrope; he was an Athenian and a contemporary of
Aristophanes. Disgusted by the ingratitude of his fellow-citizens and
sickened with repeated disappointments, he retired altogether from
society, admitting no one, it is said, to his intimacy except the
brilliant young statesman Alcibiades.
[PG59] A spring so named within the precincts of the Acropolis.
[PG60] The comic poets delighted in introducing Heracles (Hercules) on
the stage as an insatiable glutton, whom the other characters were for
ever tantalizing by promising toothsome dishes and then making him wait
indefinitely for their arrival.
[PG61] The Rhodian perfumes and unguents were less esteemed than the
Syrian.
[PG62] 'Dog-fox,' nickname of a certain notorious Philostratus, keeper
of an Athenian brothel of note in Aristophanes' day.
[PG63] The god of gardens--and of lubricity; represented by a grotesque
figure with an enormous penis.
[PG64] A staff in use among the Lacedaemonians for writing cipher
despatches. A strip of leather or paper was wound round the 'skytalé,'
on which the required message was written lengthwise, so that when
unrolled it became unintelligible; the recipient abroad had a staff of
the same thickness and pattern, and so was enabled by rewinding the
document to decipher the words.
[PG65] A city of Achaia, the acquisition of which had long been an
object of Lacedaemonian ambition. To make the joke intelligible here, we
must suppose Pellené was also the name of some notorious courtesan of
the day.
[PG66] A deme of Attica, abounding in woods and marshes, where the gnats
were particularly troublesome. There is very likely also an allusion to
the spiteful, teasing character of its inhabitants.
[PG67]] A mina was a little over £4; 60 minas made a talent.
[PG68] 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.
[PG69] A παρὰ προσδοκίαν; 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.
[PG70] A wattled cage or pen for pigs.
[PG71] An effeminate, a pathic; failing women, they will have to resort
to pederasty.
[PG72] 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.
[PG73] 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.
[PG74] 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.
[PG75] 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.
[PG76] Example of παρὰ προσδοκίαν again; see above.
[PG77] Example of παρὰ προσδοκίαν again; see above.
[PG78] Clitagoras was a composer of drinking songs, Telamon of war
songs.
[PG79] Here, off the north coast of Euboea, the Greeks defeated the
Persians in a naval battle, 480 B.C.
[PG80] The hero of Thermopylae, where the 300 Athenians arrested the
advance of the invading hosts of Xerxes in the same year.
[PG81] 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 Athené, 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.