The form of gambling from which the phrase is taken, had clearly become common in Attica among the class to which the watchman was supposed to belong, and had given rise to proverbial phrases like that in the text. The Greeks themselves supposed it to have been invented by the Lydians (Herod. i. 94), or Palamedes, one of the heroes of the tale of Troïa, but it enters also into Egyptian legends (Herod. ii. 122), and its prevalence from remote antiquity in the farther East, as in the Indian story of Nala and Damayanti, makes it probable that it originated there. The game was commonly played, as the phrase shows, with three dice, the highest throw being that which gave three sixes. Æschylos, it may be noted, appears in a lost drama, which bore the title of _Palamedes_, to have brought the game itself into his plot. It is referred to, as invented by that hero, in a fragment of Sophocles (_Fr._ 380), and again in the proverb,— “The dice of Zeus have ever lucky throws.”—(_Fr._ 763.) Footnote 272: Here, also, the watchman takes up another common proverbial phrase, belonging to the same group as that of “kicking against the pricks” in v. 1624. He has his reasons for silence, weighty as would be the tread of an ox to close his lips. Footnote 273: The vultures stand, _i.e._, to the rulers of Heaven, in the same relation as the foreign sojourners in Athens, the _Metoics_, did to the citizens under whose protection they placed themselves. Footnote 274: Alexandros, the other name of Paris, the seducer of Helen. Footnote 275: The words, perhaps, refer to the grief of Menelaos, as leading him to neglect the wonted sacrifices to Zeus, but it seems better to see in them a reference to the sin of Paris. He, at least, who had carried off his host's wife, had not offered acceptable sacrifices, had neglected all sacrifices to Zeus Xenios, the God of host and guest. The allusion to the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, which some (Donaldson and Paley) have found here, and the wrath of Clytæmnestra, which Agamemnon will fail to soothe, seems more far-fetched. Footnote 276: An allusion, such as the audience would catch and delight in, to the well-known enigma of the Sphinx. See Sophocles (_Trans._), p. 1. Footnote 277: