Charles William Peppler

“ Then it appears that Aeschylus has 12 forms in -ευμα, Sophocles 9, and Euripides 38, while on the other hand Herodotus has no example, Thucydides uses only ἱκέτευμα, νεῦμα, and σκύλευμα, and of the orators only three have examples: Isocrates and the pseudo-Demosthenes use παίδευμα, Aeschines ἀλαζόνευμα, and Demosthenes πονήρευμα. Formations of this kind that had such a large and varied use in tragedy, [17] Aristophanes felt free to take up and employ for his own purposes. He has 16 forms in -ευμα, some of them drawn from Euripides. ”

“ In comedy, when these nouns in -μα are used of persons by metonymy, abstracts taking the place of the related concretes, it is natural that they should have a reproachful or contemptuous force, [8] and the neuter gender contributes something to the depreciatory tone. ”

“ Aeschylus had a great fondness for derivatives in -μα from verbs in -όω, [14] perhaps because besides having greater length they produced a grandiose effect. Euripides used nearly the same number of forms in -ωμα, [15] and some of them frequently. πέπλωμα, a more pretentious word than πέπλος, occurs in all three tragic poets, and is put in the mouth of Euripides by Aristophanes in a parody in Ach. ”

“ On the other hand, χορεία occurs only once in Euripides, namely Phoen. 1265—the only place in tragedy, according to the Thesaurus—and here it is in iambic trimeter. Aristophanes' word is χορεία, even in choral passages, cf. Th. 956, 968, 980, 982, Ran. 336, 398, 1303. That there is parody in Av. 746 is most likely, since parodies both precede and follow, cf. Rossbach u. ”