Part 17

PISTHETAERUS 'Tis your bits of wings. D'you know what you look like? Like a goose painted by some dauber-fellow.

EUELPIDES And you look like a close-shaven blackbird.

PISTHETAERUS 'Tis ourselves asked for this transformation, and, as Aeschylus has it, "These are no borrowed feathers, but truly our own."(1)

f(1) Meaning, 'tis we who wanted to have these wings.--The verse from Aeschylus, quoted here, is taken from 'The Myrmidons,' a tragedy of which only a few fragments remain.

EPOPS Come now, what must be done?

PISTHETAERUS First give our city a great and famous name, then sacrifice to the gods.

EUELPIDES I think so too.

EPOPS Let's see. What shall our city be called?

PISTHETAERUS Will you have a high-sounding Laconian name? Shall we call it Sparta?

EUELPIDES What! call my town Sparta? Why, I would not use esparto for my bed,(1) even though I had nothing but bands of rushes.

f(1) The Greek word signified the city of Sparta, and also a kind of broom used for weaving rough matting, which served for the beds of the very poor.

PISTHETAERUS Well then, what name can you suggest?

EUELPIDES Some name borrowed from the clouds, from these lofty regions in which we dwell--in short, some well-known name.

PISTHETAERUS Do you like Nephelococcygia?(1)

f(1) A fanciful name constructed from (the word for) a cloud, and (the word for) a cuckoo; thus a city of clouds and cuckoos.--'Wolkenkukelheim' is a clever approximation in German. Cloud-cuckoo-town, perhaps, is the best English equivalent.

EPOPS Oh! capital! truly 'tis a brilliant thought!

EUELPIDES Is it in Nephelococcygia that all the wealth of Theovenes(1) and most of Aeschines'(2) is?

f(1) He was a boaster nicknamed 'smoke,' because he promised a great deal and never kept his word.

f(2) Also mentioned in 'The Wasps.'

PISTHETAERUS No, 'tis rather the plain of Phlegra,(1) where the gods withered the pride of the sons of the Earth with their shafts.

f(1) Because the war of the Titans against the gods was only a fiction of the poets.

EUELPIDES Oh! what a splendid city! But what god shall be its patron? for whom shall we weave the peplus?(1)

f(1) A sacred cloth, with which the statue of Athene in the Acropolis was draped.

PISTHETAERUS Why not choose Athene Polias?(1)

f(1) Meaning, to be patron-goddess of the city. Athene had a temple of this name.

EUELPIDES Oh! what a well-ordered town 'twould be to have a female deity armed from head to foot, while Clisthenes(1) was spinning!

f(1) An Athenian effeminate, frequently ridiculed by Aristophanes.

PISTHETAERUS Who then shall guard the Pelargicon?(1)