Page:The Termination -κός, as used by Aristophanes for Comic Effect.djvu/6

432

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See also I, 2, 5; IV, 3, 1; Oec. XII, 19; Hipparch. IV, 12; V, 2, 5, 12–15; and Isocr. II, 24; IX, 46 (paromoiosis).

This influence of the philosophers and sophists in fostering a wide use of forms in, which is so strikingly shown in Xenophon's writings, manifested itself much earlier among the rich Athenian youths of the last quarter of the fifth century who followed and imitated the new teachers. Like words in -ist in English, the formations had a learned sound, and, moreover, gave the young men an opportunity to display their newly acquired culture. Hence these forms came to be very much in vogue in fashionable society, and were then affected by a wider circle of people. Aristophanes ridiculed the practice by crowding eight remarkable adjectives in into four consecutive verses in the Knights (1378–81):

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These sentences were written nearly half a century earlier than the passages from the Memorabilia quoted above, at a time when Sophocles was writing his greatest plays, Herodotus had probably just passed away, and Plato was only three years old, and consequently the effect of piling up so many forms in at this early date was much more telling. Previously in the Banqueters, which contained a criticism of the new kind of education furnished by the sophists and hence was similar in this respect to the Clouds, Aristophanes (fr. 198) had held up to ridicule other newly coined words used by a follower of the new teachers, and had assigned each of the innovations to its proper source, viz. to Lysistratus, to the orators,  (conj.) to Alcibiades, and  to Thrasymachus or one of his sort. Note further that Strepsiades in conversation with the