In Aristophanes’ Clouds, Socrates invokes the eponymous chorus, and is distressed when his new pupil Strepsiades only barely sees them, even once told to look at the εἴσοδος. The latter has just been initiated into the school by a liberal sprinkling of barley in the manner of a sacrifice (οὐλοχύται); as he says, καταπαττόμενος γὰρ παιπάλη γενήσομαι ‘for being sprinkled, I'll turn into fine flour’ (262) and, later, ὑπ᾽ ἀλφιταμοιβοῦ παρεκόπην διχοινίκῳ ‘I have been cheated of two quarts by a dealer in barley᾽ (640).Footnote ¹ He is not yet versed in the ways of Socrates’ world, and might be forgiven for looking for the Clouds in the sky. Even so, the philosopher vents his frustration with an anapaestic tetrameter catalectic line (327): νῦν γέ τοι ἤδη καθορᾷς αὐτάς, εἰ μὴ λημᾷς κολοκύνταις. The older scholia ad loc. (Holwerda 3.1: 81), followed by Van Daele and Taillardat,Footnote ² remark: (a) νῦν αὐτὰς ὁρᾷς, εἰ μὴ λήμας ἔχεις ἐν τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς μεγάλας ὡς κολοκύντας. λήμη δέ ἐστι τὸ πεπηγὸς δάκρυον. (b) παροιμία ἐπὶ τῶν τὰ μεγάλα παρορώντων. (‘You would see them unless you have drops of rheum in your eyes as big as gourds.Footnote ³ Rheum is a hardened tear. A proverb about those who overlook big things.’) This may reflect actual knowledge, since a very similar phrase right down to the conjunction is attested some five centuries later in Lucian: οὐκ, εἴ γε μὴ χύτραις λημῶντες τυγχάνοιεν ‘not unless they happened to be blear-eyed with pipkins’ (Aduersum Indoctum 23). Still, Lucian may simply be misremembering Aristophanes, since κολοκύνθαι were often used as storage-vessels.Footnote ⁴ If so, the scholiast's explanation is more likely mere inference from context than a record of an actual proverb. LSJ s.v. λημάω translate ‘to have one's eyes running pumpkins’, as though κολοκύνταις were accusative rather than dative, which is indeed the reading of one manuscript, Neapolitanus 184. Rogers translates ‘There, now you must see how resplendent they be, or your eyes must be pumpkins, I vow’,Footnote ⁵ gourds being proverbially dim(-witted), in Latin at least (Petron. Sat. 39.12, Apul. Met. 1.15.2).Footnote ⁶ In their commentaries on the play Dover and Sommerstein pass over the line entirely.Footnote ⁷

Conjunctivitis or pink-eye (ὀφθαλμία) afflicts sufferers with rheum (λήμη, Ar. Plut. 581), making them γλάμων, as happened to certain minor politicians, Archedemus (Ar. Ran. 588; Lys. 14.25) and Neocleides (Ar. Eccl. 254, 398, Plut. 716–25), and was sometimes severe enough to exempt one from military service.Footnote ⁸ (Greeks were aware of various other eye-afflictions, such as styes [σῦκα] on the eyelids [Ar. Ran. 1247] or redness and inflammation [ἐρυθήματα καὶ φλόγωσις, Thuc. 2.49.2] associated with plague.) The problem in Aristophanes’ line, with which scholars grapple in different ways or judiciously ignore, is that gourds relate to pink-eye in no obvious way. This being so, might Aristophanes have ended his line with words grounded in the dramatic context, ‘or you're blear-eyed with barley-groats (ἢ λημᾷς οὐλοχύταισι)’, in the same metre as the manuscripts’ εἰ μὴ λημᾷς κολοκύνταις.

Perhaps so, but how would ‘barley-groats’ have turned into ‘gourds’ in the paradosis? I suggest because some reader has recalled that onions adversely affect one's sight. The cliché of the tearful onion (lacrimosa … cepa, Columella, Rust. 10.123) is well attested: flebile cepe simul lacrimosaeque ordine tallae ‘at once the weeping onion and in layers the tearful onion-skins’ (Lucil. fr. 194 Marx = 216 Warmington), lippus edenda acri assiduo ceparius cepa ‘the trader in onions is blear-eyed from constantly eating pungent onion’ (Lucil. fr. 195 Marx = 217 Warmington) and neque <ille> triste queritat sinapi | neque cepe maestum ‘he seeks neither grim mustard nor the mournful onion’ (Enn. Sat. frr. 12–13 Vahlen = 14 Courtney = 8 Goldberg and Manuwald).Footnote ⁹ Such a reader may have added κρομ(μ)ύοις ‘with onions’ to explain the force of λημᾷς. It is true that onions dim one's sight with tears, not rheum, but their relevance here would have been comforted by what we know already from line 188, namely that, like purse-tassel bulbs (βολβοί), they are just the farmer Strepsiades’ humble sort of fare.

Our hypothetical gloss would have cast any later scribe who viewed the note as a correction of οὐλοχύταισι into a quandary, for not only is κρομύοις unmetrical (with or without double mu), but the words are not much alike. It does, however, turn the mind to vegetables. Our scribe might have hit on a palaeographically easier one. I suppose that he saw in his copy:

and ‘corrected’ this to:

This involves changing the six letters printed in bold type, plus omitting the final iota of the original. I assume that our copyist represented nu by a high stroke over the preceding letter (in this case, upsilon), a convention used by some.Footnote ¹⁰ This need not have happened, but would have slightly facilitated the change.

The resulting line is errant nonsense, but generations of readers have taken comfort in the scholiast's thought that it is a proverb, and so indeed once meant something to someone. Among their number will have been Lucian, who gave the phrase his personal twist, though he seems to have thought not of a gourd itself, but of the calabash made from it.