Clouds longs to be εὑρησιεπής (447), that the ἄδικος λόγος says that he will shoot the δίκαιος λόγος dead with ῥηματίοισιν καινοῖς (943, cf. Plat. Theaet. 180 A), and that Cratinus (fr. 226) jokes about the ἀργυροκοπιστῆρας λόγων in his Trophonius.
Another factor enters into Aristophanes' caricature (Eq. 1378–81) of the philosophers and sophists and their imitators for their excessive use of the termination -κός. It is that he applies most of these adjectives to persons, whereas they are restricted almost entirely to inanimate objects in the previous literature that has survived, and used but rarely, if at all, of persons, before the incoming of the new teachers.[1] The Homeric use of παρθενική and ὀρφανικός differs in meaning from the later usage (cf. Monro, Hom. Gram., p. 110), and cannot be counted. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Herodotus have no example,[2] while Euripides and Thucydides, who through the influence of the philosophers and sophists employed a comparatively large number of -κός words, show the same influence in that they have some instances of this personal use. Barring πᾶσαι παρθενικαί Electr. 174, a Homeric reminiscence, and ξενικοὺς ἱκτῆρας Cycl. 370 (cf. ξενικῶν 366) where the text has been variously emended, the only examples in Euripides occur in the case of the word μουσικός, viz. μουσικώτεροι λέγειν Hipp. 989 and τὸν μουσικώτατον Ἀμφίονα fr. 224. Thucydides has two examples in speeches, πολεμικοί I, 84, 3, and θεῶν τῶν ξυμμαχικῶν III, 58, 1, and two other words, πατρικὸς ξένος VIII, 6, 3, and ναυτικοί I, 18, 2; 93, 3; VII, 21, 3. Over against these exceptions, the two authors combined furnish more than 300 examples of the non-personal use of -κός derivatives from appellatives. Thucydides, however, wrote his history after the appearance of the Knights (424 B. C.), and the Antiope to which Nauck assigns Eur. fr. 224 came out probably ten or fifteen years later than this date (cf. schol. Ar. Ran. 53), and so there remains but one case, the Hippolytus passage of 428 B. C., which antedates the Knights. In striking contrast to this paucity of examples of the personal use in the previous literature stands the fact that in those passages in which there is the most conscious use of -κός forms in imitation of the new teachers, that is to say, those passages above quoted and referred to where these words
