Pheidippides: Philon, you are cheating! Keep to your own lane. Strepsiades: This is it, the very thing that has ruined me. Even asleep he dreams of horses. Pheidippides: How many laps will the war-chariots run? Strepsiades: You run me, your father, round plenty of laps. But what debt came upon me after Pasias? Three minas to Amynias, for a little chariot and a pair of wheels.

Pheidippides is still asleep, driving a race in a dream and shouting at another driver for cutting into his lane. His father answers the sleeping boy as if he were awake, and every word of the race turns into money. The war-chariots run their laps, and so does Strepsiades, round and round his debts. When he goes back to the ledger he borrows a line from tragedy. "What doom came upon me next?" is how a hero in Euripides might ask it, and the word for "doom", chreos, also means "debt". The tragic question gets a bookkeeper's answer: three minas, to Amynias, for a little chariot and two wheels.