thing uniformly referred to with horror in Greek literature.
P. 58, l. 756, Zeus of the Friendly Jailbirds.]—A deity invented to meet the occasion of their swearing friendship.
P. 61, l. 791, Clidemides informs us.]—The joke is now unintelligible. Even the Alexandrian scholars did not know who Clidemides was. He may, for instance, have been some fussy person who toadied Sophocles and liked to give news about him.
P. 61, ll. 799 ff., Straight-edges and cubit-rules, &c.]—The art of scientific criticism, as inaugurated by Gorgias, Prodicus, Thrasymachus, and afterwards developed by Isocrates and Aristotle, would seem absurd to Aristophanes; the beginnings of physics and astronomy and grammar are similarly—and less excusably—satirised in the Clouds.
P. 62, ll. 814–829.—The parody of Aeschylus is not so brilliant as that upon Euripides, whom Aristophanes knew to the tips of his fingers (pp. 94 seqq.). The "Thunderer" and "Thoughtbuilder" is Aeschylus; the "Man of the Mouth," Euripides.
P. 64, l. 837, Bard of the noble savage.]—Aeschylus drew largely from the more primitive and wild strata of Greek legend, as in the Prometheus and Suppliants. The titles and fragments of the lost plays show the same tendency even more strongly.
P. 64, l. 840, How sayst thou. Son of the Goddess of the Greens.]—A parody of a line of Euripides (possibly from the Telephus), where "Sea" stood in place of "Greens." Euripides' mother, Cleito, was of noble family (τῶν σφόδρα εὐγενῶν) and owned land. For some unknown reason it was a well-established
