Aristophanes,
Plutus [
Wealth] 1110 (web address 1 below), glossed by two phrases from a long scholion on it.
The headword phrase seems to be proverbial; indeed all the entry could have been taken from a proverb collection (in
Appendix Proverbiorum 3.1 the whole gloss occurs identically, while the original scholion is much larger). It is related to the cult of
Hermes where the tongue of the victims was dedicated to the god.
Eustathius, for instance, in
Commentarii ad Homeri Odysseam 1.131, reports as a proverbial expression “
τάμνετε γλώσσας , literally, “cut the tongues!”, meaning “make a sacrifice!”. But in the context of this comedy it is used in an ambiguous way, for comic effect, because it can mean something completely different: “we cut the tongue of the messenger [
Hermes] of these tidings”; that is what really Cario means, talking to
Hermes. The scholion mentioned above reports and analyses both senses, but the Suda’s compiler only reports one.
[1] Despite this gloss, reflected above in the translation of the headword phrase, the pronoun
τούτων is perhaps better related to the messenger: “the tongue is cut for the herald of these things”.
[2]
Callistratus was an Alexandrian grammarian who flourished at the beginning of the 2nd century B.C. He was one of the pupils of
Aristophanes of
Byzantium, and he chiefly devoted himself to the elucidation of the Greek poets; a few fragments of his commentaries have been preserved in the various collections of
scholia and in
Athenaeus.
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