are crowded together in a small compass, viz. Xen. Mem. I, 1, 7; 2, 5; III, 1, 6; IV, 3, 1; Oec. XII, 19; etc., it is the personal use that is found almost without exception, as if this too were a part of the innovation of the philosophers and sophists. And this is a part of Aristophanes' caricature in Eq. 1378–81. Besides, the Knights, Clouds, and Wasps, comedies which more than any of the others attack the sophists and the new fashions of the day, together have 19 instances of the personal use of -κός words out of the 28 in the eleven plays, and the ratio of the number of instances of this personal use in any play to the total number of occurrences of -κός forms in that play is higher for these three comedies than for the others.[1] About one-half of the comic words in -κός that are mentioned in this paper are applied to persons.
We pass now to the Clouds, the play which attacks the sophists in the person of Socrates whom Aristophanes took as the representative of the class. When at the suggestion of the chorus (476) Socrates proceeds to give Strepsiades his first lessons and asks him whether he has a good memory (ἦ μνημονικὸς εἶ;), the comic poet makes Socrates employ a form in -κός in conformity with his character as a sophist;[2] but the rustic in reply uses μνήμων (484). In 414 the chorus too had encouraged him to be μνήμων. Strepsiades is soon admitted to the thinking-shop. After some efforts to teach him meters, rhythms, and genders, Socrates bids him lie down, wrap himself up, and discover some device for cheating, νοῦς ἀποστερητικός (728), the -κός form being appropriate to the sophist. But when in reply Strepsiades longs to find such a device, he calls it γνώμη ἀποστερητρίς 'a robber notion', not daring as yet in his uneducated condition to use the -κός form that his master had employed, but going to the extreme of personifying γνώμη by the use of the feminine suffix of agency in order to avoid the -κός form that belongs to the learned. Later, however, when he has thought out a means of cheating, he calls it in delight γνώμην ἀποστερητικήν (747): the budding sophist ventures to employ a -κός form. But in a short time he proves to be a hopeless case and is dismissed by Socrates. He has, nevertheless, learned to swear 'by Mist' (814) and 'by Air'
