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 sacrificial victims was dedicated to the god.
Eustathius, for instance, in
Commentaries on Homer's Odyssey 1.131, reports as a proverbial expression
ta/mnete glw/ssas, 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.
1Despite this gloss, reflected above in the translation of the headword phrase, the pronoun tou/twn is perhaps better related to the messenger: 'the tongue is cut for the herald of these things'. ↩2Callistratus was an Alexandrian grammarian who flourished in the early C2 BCE. A pupil of Aristophanes of Byzantium↗, 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).