What are you laughing at?
Peis. At your pen feathers:
I'll tell ye exactly now, the thing you're like;
You're just the perfect image of a Goose,
Drawn with a pen in a writing master's flourish.805
Eu. And you're like a plucked Blackbird to a tittle.
Peis. Well then, according to the line in Æschylus,
"It's our own fault, the feathers are our own."[1]
Eu. Come, what's to be done.
Hoo. First, we must choose a name,
Some grand sonorous name, for our new city:810
Then we must sacrifice.
Eu. I think so too,
Peis. Let's see—let's think of a name—what shall it be?
What say ye, to the Lacedæmonian name?
Sparta sounds well—suppose we call it Sparta.
Eu. Sparta! What Sparto?[2] Rushes!—no, not I,
I'd not put up with Sparto for a mattress,
Much less for a city—we're not come to that.815
Peis. Come then, what name shall it be?
Eu. Something appropriate,
Something that sounds majestic, striking and grand,
Alluding to the clouds and the upper regions.
Peis. What think ye of Clouds and Cuckoos? Cuckoo-cloudlands
Or Nephelococcugia?
Hoo. That will do;
A truly noble and sonorous name!820
Eu. I wonder, if that Nephelococcugia,
Is the same place I've heard of: people tell me,
That all Theagenes's rich possessions
Lie there; and Æschines's whole estate.
- ↑ Æschylus alludes to a fable in which an eagle complains of being wounded by an arrow feathered from his own wings.
- ↑ Sparto still retains its name, and is still used for mattresses and occasionally for cordage.
- ↑ Many Athenians (as Miltiades, Alcibiades, and Thucydides the historian) were proprietors of large estates in the Chersonese and along the coasts of Thrace: Theagenes, it seems, and Æschines, boasting of wealth which they did not possess, chose to talk of their estates in Thrace. In the last century the West Indies was the usual locality assigned to fabulous estates. Thrace was also mythologically fabulous as the field of battle between Jupiter and the Titans.
