Studies in Comedy, II. Toothless Wine Arnott, W Geoffrey Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Spring 1970; 11, 1; ProQuest pg. 43

Studies in Comedy, II: Toothless Wine 
W. Geoffrey Arnott 

In youth Carton is a savage wine, insolent, loud-voiced and blustering. But 
after seven years or so he has learnt manners, and can come into a room 
like an educated gentleman. J. B. MORTON ['Beachcomber'], A Bonfire of 
Weeds (London 1939) 

A N AMUSING but enigmatic fragment from a fourth-century 
Athenian comedy appears to give the lie to the idea that the 
precious, humanising metaphors of wine connoisseurs are a 

purely modern linguistic phenomenon. This fragment derives from 
Alexis' Orchestris, l and runs as follows: 

c' <;'" ~ I , , '1' ~ 
yvvaLs L 0 apKE L 7TaVT , Eav 0 LVOC 7Tap'[J 

I '=' I '\ \ , I , '(j' 7TLVELV otapKYJc, - aN\a f-LYJV, VYJ TW EW, 

" '" "Q \' (j' " " \ ECTaL Y OCOV av j-'0VI\Wf-LE ,ECTaL KaL f-Lal\a 
f ~ I , ,~, ,)/ ,,~ , 

YJOVC Y , OOOVTac OVK EXWV, YJOYJ ca7Tpoc, 

YEAWV, yEpWV yE OCXLf-Lovlwc. - &C7TI:f~Of-LaL 

ypavv c</>lyya. 

The source of the quotation is Athenaeus 1O.441c, and the text printed 
is basically that of the codex Marcianus with the exception of the first 
word in v.5. There the Marcianus has Mywv, but it is difficult to see 
how a wine can 'tell' or 'say', even in the imaginistic fantasies of the 
wine connoisseur who speaks vv.2-5 of the fragment, and so I have 
accepted with considerable hesitation the conjecture of Bergk2 in its 
place. The resultant metaphor would be no bolder than Aeschylus' 
7rOVTlwv TE KVf-LcXTWV I &V~PL(jf-L0V YEAacf-La (PV 89f) or the phrase TO: 

YEAWVTa 7TMoVTEC VOcXTYJ in an anonymous Hellenistic lyric (fr.32.4 
Powell, Coll.Alex. p.195). Does not the modern oenologist talk about 
his 'smiling little wines'?3 

1 Meineke, FCG III. 459f=Kock, CA.F II.358f=Edmonds, FAC II. 454 (fr.167 Kock and 
Edmonds). 

2 Zimmermann's Zeitschrift fur die Althertum 4 (1837) 48. The only other conjecture that 
deserves serious consideration is Meineke's own, y{pwv, y'£pwv yt: SatfLovlwc. 

3 In the same verse the Marcianus' SatfLovlwc is likely to be right. One can fairly certainly 
exclude here the possibility that a scribe failed to make a correct word-division, and that 

43 



44 STUDIES IN COMEDY, II: TOOTHLESS WINE 

The first speaker cannot safely be identified, but the wine enthusiast 
is a bibulous old crone of a type familiar enough from Graeco-Roman 
comedy.' It is her speech that gives to the fragment its prime interest, 
for it is couched in the language of a conundrum or Cl.iVLYJLCI., as the 
other character acknowledges when he (or she) calls the crone a c~tyg. 
It was already a commonplace of later Greek comedy to compare 
and contrast the properties of matured wine with the human charac­
ter.5 Alexis' crone here goes one better. She wittily selects for the 
description of her wine a series of ambiguous terms that can be 
applied both to wine and to aged human beings without excessive 
violence to contemporary idiom. The adjectives ~8vc and cCl.1Tp6c suit 
wine and wight with equal appropriateness, although CCl.1TpOC was 
doubtless a vulgarism when applied to people.6 The noun Y'pwvof 
course properly belongs to the human sphere, but from the time of 
Homer (Od. 22.184, Y'pov CtXKOC) poets employed and declined it adjec­
tivally, and applied it in the general sense of <old' to things as well as 
to people.7 The technique, which Aristotle in the Poetics (1457bI6) 
calls TO ava'\oyov, will clearly be most successful when every term in 
the conundrum fits with unforced ambiguity both the subject of the 
riddle (here, wine) and the object of comparison (here, an old person). 
Can this be said also of the one phrase in the conundrum that has not 
yet been discussed: &86vTCl.C OUK EXWV ? Toothless Methuselahs, yes; but 
toothless wine-is that merely verbal fantasy on Alexis' part, a gro­
tesquery created for the one comic moment, or does the phrase rather 
reflect contemporary Attic idiom? 

SCUILOVL', we aC1raColLaL 'Ypaw eq,t'Y'Ya should be assigned to one speaker. The addressee here 
is female, and although ScxLILovLoe is occasionally declined in Attic with two terminations 
(L5] s.v.), I know of no case where SaLILovL£ in the vocative is feminine. Cf. also E. Brunius­
Nilsson, .1AIMONIE (Diss. Uppsala 1955). In v.3, oeov av is the reading of the Epitome 
Mss; the Marcianus has 8e avo 

4 The passages have been collected by P. E. Legrand, The New Greek Comedy, transl. 
Loeb (London 1917) 103f, 470f; cf also T. B. L. Webster, Studies in Menander2 (Manchester 
1960) 165; H. G. Geri, Der Typ der komischen Alten in der griechischen Komi5die (Basel 1948) 
13ff,39ff. 

6 Wine similar to people: Alexis fr.45, Antiphanes fr.Z40, Plaut. Cure. 98; ef. Cic. Sen. 65. 
Wine not similar to people: Alexis fr.Z78. 

8 ecx'tJ"poe abusively of people: LS] S.V. II.Z cites Ar. Vesp. 1380, Pax 698, Bcd. 884, Hermip­
pus fr.l0, Eupolis fr.Z31, Philemon fr.170; add Ar. Lys. 378. ca'tJ"poc of wine: Ar. Pluto 1086, 
Eupolis fr.442, Philyllius fr.Z4 (LS] S.V. n.3). 

7 Cf LS] S.V. 'Ytpwv II. It is applied to wine in Eubulus fr.lZ4, Epinicus fr.1.6, Men. Dysk. 
946f (in his edition Handley argues that here 'Ytpona may be substantival), Longus 4.16. 



W. GEOFFREY ARNOTT 45 

In seeking to answer this question, we must always remember that 
competent comedians like Aristophanes, Alexis and Menander may 
be expected to talk good sense, rooted in sound comic logic. For that 
reason I am inclined to believe that the phrase d86vTac OVK EXWV in 
this fragment of Alexis was carefully chosen because of a double 
appropriateness-to the aged pantaloon who has lost his teeth, and to 
wine itself. If one could not legitimately talk of <toothless wine' in a 
non-comic context in fourth-century Athens, the present conceit of 
Alexis loses much of its wit and half its point. But what evidence is 
there that a phrase such as ooovTac OVK €XWV could be applied naturally 
to wine in Alexis' Athens? And what would such a phrase mean pre­
cisely, in an alcoholic context? 

Part of the answer to these questions may be provided somewhat 
paradoxically not by contemporary Greek authors, but by Latin, in 
two passages of plautus and Petronius respectively. First, a passage of 
Plautus' Poenulus (699-702), in which Lycus the pimp refers to uetustate 
uino edentulo ('wine toothless with age'): 

... ubi tu Leucadio, Lesbio, Thasio, Chio, 
uetustate uino edentulo aetatem inriges; 
ibi ego te repplebo usque unguentum geumatis, 
qUid multa uerba? 

The toothless wine is an old one both in Plautus (uetustate ... eden­
tulo) and in Alexis (ijoTJ ca7Tpoc ... ylpwv y€); that is one obvious link 
between the two passages. There is, however, a further possible link 
of even greater significance. In 1959 I attempted to substantiate the 
argument that Plautus' Poenulus was adapted from a Greek original by 
Alexis, and not from Menander's Karchedonios.8 The recently pub­
lished Oxyrhynchus fragments of Menander's play support rather 
than challenge this view.9 Is it then so outrageous to suggest that 
Plautus' phrase uetustate uino edentulo was translated from a similar 
phrase in Alexis' Karchedonios? In other words, that this phrase <tooth­
less wine' was current in the Athens of Alexis' time and used some­
times in a serious alcoholic or at least purely liquid context? 

8 "The Author of the Greek Original of the Poenulus," RhM 102 (1959) 252-62. 
• POxy. 2654, first published by E. G. Turner, Oxyrhynchus Papyri 33 (1968) 1-8. I reopened 

the question about the relationship of Alexis, Menander, and Plautus' Poenulus in the light 
of the new papyrus evidence in a paper read to the III Congresso Internazionale di Studi sui 
Dramma Antico, in Syracuse (Sicily), May 1%9, and to be published under the title of 
•• Attica ciuis in PlauIUs' Poenulus" in a forthcoming number of Dioniso. 



46 STUDIES IN COMEDY, II: TOOTHLESS WINE 

In Petronius' Cena Trimalchionis the startlingly parallel phrase aqua 
dentes habet occurs (Sat. 42.2): 

"ego," inquit, "non cotidie lauor; baliscus enim Jullo est, aqua 
dentes habet, et cor nostrum cotidie liquescit. sed cum mulsi 
pultarium obduxi, frigori laeeasin dieo. nee sane lauare potui; 
fui enim hodie in funus ... " 

The speaker of this rambling rigmarole is Seleucus, one of Trimal­
chio's boorish guests. HI don't have a bath every day," he says; "the 
bathman (if this is what baliseus means10) is a scrubber; the water's 
got teeth." Now it is true that this section of the Cena is heavily 
charged with those stylistic elements of 'personification' and conun­
drum-type 'identification' which Eduard Fraenkel has convincingly 
analysed and attributed to the native genius of the Latin language.ll 
Yet at the same time some other relevant facts here need to be borne 
in mind: that Seleucus' name implies Greek descent, that Petronius' 
novel teems with Greeks and half-Greeks, and lastly that a living 
language characteristically naturalizes phrases and idioms that 
originate in another language by translating them literally. This it 
does especially when large numbers of aliens speaking one language 
are absorbed into a community that speaks another. Just as American 
English has translated and thus adopted many German idioms as a 
result of the extensive immigration of German speakers in the nine­
teenth century,12 so also must Latin have absorbed a great number of 
Greek idioms in Petronius' Campania, although the ecological ex­
planation in this case is somewhat different.13 If aqua dentes habet is just 
such a Greek idiom transplanted into Latin, it provides a further 

10 The word has been suspected of corruption (cf, for instance, Muller's apparatus ad loc., 
and D. C. Swanson, A Formal Analysis of Petronius' Vocabulary [Minneapolis 1963] 126), but 
has been defended by A. Marbach, Wortbildung, Wortwahl und Wortbedeutung als Mittel 
der Charakterzeichnung bei Petron (Diss. Giessen 1931) 39£, and A. H. Salonius, Die Griechen 
und das Griechische in Petrons Cena Trimalchionis (Soc. Scient. Fennica, Comment.Hum.Litt. ILl, 
Helsinki and Leipzig 1927) 25. 

11 Plautinisches im Plautus (Berlin 1922) ch. 2, esp. p.47=Elementi Plautini in Plauto 
(Florence 1960), esp. 43f. 

U Cf H. L. Mencken, The American Language (1947) 153ff, 212ff; Supplements I (1948) 
313ff, II (1948) 201ff. 

13 Cf L. R. Palmer, The Latin Language (London 1954) 80ff, 100f, 183ff; Leumann-Hof­
mann-Szantyr, Lateinische Grammatik II (Munich 1965) 759ff (with a massive bibliography). 
The grecisms in Petronius are fully discussed by the works of Marbach and Salonius cited 
in n.10. 



W. GEOFFREY ARNOTT 47 

example of the relevant application of this dental metaphor to liquids: 
relevant, that is, to the interpretation of Alexis fr.167. 

Water, therefore, with teeth; and wine without teeth. The meaning 
is now as clear as a good wine. A liquid that had teeth was one marked 
by an astringent harshness, like water with a mineral content. But 
wine that has lost its original tartness and been mellowed by age-

h . 'e;, , ,., suc WIne OOOJlTaC OVK EXEL. 

UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS 

January, 1970