Re-reading Robert Stillman's book Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism and noticed that we forgot his explanation for the meaning of the name Cecropia, the villainous character found only in the comlete 1593 Arcadia, who debates Pamela on the existence of God (3.10). This explanation should be added to "Pronunciation Guide to Proper Names" (p. 601).
Renaissance dictionaries say Cecropia means "the Athenian woman," from a word for the Acropolis (Cēcrŏpia, ae, the citadel of Athens). It occurs in Sanazzaro's Arcadia as a synonym for Procne, the elder daughter of a king of Athens named Pandion. Her husband King Tereus of Thrace raped her sister Philomela.
But "Cecropia" is not just a woman who watches the torture of another woman, as she does in the Arcadia, where she uses all means to persuade Pamela and Philoclea (either will do) to marry her son.
According to Stillman, "Cecropian" was a term used by Reformation theologians to refer to an atheists and epicureans, found in the poems of George Buchanan and the epigrams of Philip Melanchthon, but possibly familiar to Sidney from more general usage.
Here's the overlooked footnote: "Epigrammatum Reverendi Viri Philippi Melanthonis Libri Sex, ed. Johannis Cratonis (Witenberg, 1579). For an attack upon Cecropians, see p. 08 (verso), Epigrammata trium statuarum ad Strymonem fluvium positarum civibus Atticis, qui Medos represserant ex Aeschinis oratione. See too George Buchanan: Tragedies, ed. P. Sharratt and P. G. Walsh (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983), Medea, l. 872, p. 193. What matters here is less the allusion itself, than the fact that Sidney's choice of allusions is so offten determined by his intellectual kinship with Languet's extensive, international network of associates" (p. xi n.8).