Note 398 — ESSAYS. (continued 3)

“Aristophanes, in his Comedy of the Knights, satirizes Cleon, the Athenian demagogue. He introduces a declaration of the oracle, that the Eagle of hides (by whom Cleon was meant, his father having been a tanner), should be conquered by a serpent, which Demosthenes, one of the characters in the play, expounds as meaning a maker of sausages. How Lord Bacon could for a moment doubt that this was a mere jest, it is difficult to conjecture. The following is a literal translation of a portion of the passage from The Knights (l. 197): “But when a leather eagle with crooked talons shall have seized with its jaws a serpent, a stupid creature, a drinker of blood, then the tan-pickle of the Paphlagonians is destroyed; but upon the sellers of sausages the deity bestows great glory, unless they choose rather to sell sausages.”