The bell, as is well known, plays in Hellenic life a very limited part. From prose authors, describing the actual facts of life, οἷς χρώμεθ', οἷς ξύνεσμεν—to use a phrase of Aristophanes closely connected with this topic—we hear of κώδωνες or bells, in two functionsonly, I think. They are the attribute of the crier, and of the sentinel on the wall. The first use of them was familiar enough to create a proverb διαπράσσεσθαί τι ὡς κώδωνα ἐξαψάμενος, ‘to do a thing like a crier with a bell tied to him,’ i.e. ostentatiously, a proverb roughly corresponding to our ‘be one's own trumpeter,’ which the lexicon cites with it. Of the second use, which, we may observe, was confined, for anything that appears to the contrary, to times of special apprehension, we have a well-known example in the last chapter of the fourth book of Thucydides. Brasidas, in the course of his brilliant campaign ἐπὶ Θρᾴκης, made a daring though unsuccessful attempt to convert the instrument of precaution into an occasion of surprise by scaling part of the wall of Potidaea at the very moment when a sentinel watching it had gone to the end of his beat ‘to pass the bell’ to the next man.