Whirl/Vortex/Pot-bellied Stove

Yesterday I wrote:

Whirl is king,
Zeus being dead.

...quoting (rather grandly) Aristophanes, and remarking that when you went looking for it on Google, the first reference you found was me.

Buce's friend Bruce comes up with a perfectly good reason why I am the only one who quotes it that way: it's wrong. A much more conventional version reads "... having driven out Zeus." That's WikiQuotes, with a reference to--get ready for it--Walter Lippmann, in the epigraph to his Preface to Morals. That may be an implausible source, but--also implausibly?--I think it is the first place I saw it, going through my Lippmann phase about 50 years ago. So I must have misremembered it from the start.

It seems that Bruce and Lippmann are onto something. Per Perseus, we have Aristphanes' Clouds, line 1473:

Δῖνος βασιλεύει τὸν Δἴ ἐξεληλακώς.

[and cf. also l.831.]

That is:

Dinos basileuei ton Di'exelelakos

That is, um, "whirl is king, having driven out Zeus." Turns out there is a pun here. "Dinos"= "whirl," but "dinos" is also a piece of pottery-"a round goblet," in the notes to Bruce's translation. So a moment later Strepsiades is saying:

What a fool I was! A piece of pottery, and I thought it was a god!

[That's the Bantam Classic translation by Moses Hadas.]

Actually, a pun plus a play on words. "Dinos" (whirl/pot) has driven out "Di'," "Dios," a form of "Zeus." Get it? Oh yuk yuk.

"Whirl" isn't enough for some people. The on-line translation of Ian Johnston has "vortex." The much-admired William Arrowsmith translation offers "convection-principle," and laments that

...they told me that the whole universe was a kind of potbellied stove like that model here, an enormous cosmical barbecue, and the gods were nothing but a lot of hot air and gas swirling around in the flue.

So, God as something you buy down at the appliance warehouse.