Page:The Termination -κός, as used by Aristophanes for Comic Effect.djvu/10

436 Posidip. 1, Strato 1, 30 (l. Dobr.).

Aristophanes, to whom the innovations of his time seem to forbode danger for the state, employs the forms, among other means, to poke fun at the advocates of the new order of things. Just as it is the sophists in the Clouds, so it is fashionable society in the Wasps, that he ridicules in this way. The scene of 143 lines (1122–1264) in which Bdelycleon prepares his father for the dinner-party contains about one-third of all the words in in the play, and the Wasps has a larger number of these words than any other play of Aristophanes, both absolutely and in comparison with the number of lines in the play. The 400 lines following the parabasis, which deal with the conversion of the old dicast into a man of fashion, contain just twice as many forms in as the 1000 lines preceding it, which satirize the mania of the Athenians, especially the older citizens, for attending the law-courts.

The scene in the Wasps in which Bdelycleon, the type of the fashionable young Athenian of the day, gets his old-fashioned father ready for the banquet, is the counterpart of the situation in the Clouds wherein Strepsiades forces his son to attend the school of the sophist, and one is not surprised therefore to find that in this scene of preparation Bdelycleon uses all of the words in that occur, with one inconsiderable exception. This exception is in 1205, where the poet purposely makes Philocleon repeat Bdelycleon's word  (1204), because he is to employ it in a different sense ('youngest') from that in which his son first used it ('most daring'). On the other hand, just a few lines before this, a striking contrast is made between Bdelycleon's and Philocleon's  in two successive lines (1199, 1200), the one word taking up and repeating the thought of the other. Turning to the other words in in this scene, one notes first the comic adverb  (1132) from  'skilled' (cf. 1429, Nub. 869, 870), with a further reference to  'an old cloak'. Later on, Bdelycleon urges his father to be (1209) at the dinner-party, the very kind of new-fangled talk that his father is likely to hear in the fashionable company into which he is going. He instructs him further (1212) to throw himself down carelessly on the dinner-couch in an easy posture as an athlete would (