SUDA entry kappa 2800: Κύφωνες (pillories)

They were timbers placed on the tendons of the condemned, so that they might not find [...] rising up.
[1] Aristophanes in Wealth [writes]: "o racks and pillories, will you not come to my aid?"[2] A pillory is a
wooden binding which some call a 'collar' and others a 'woody'. Hence even a criminal person [is called]
a pillory. It is also applied to all things that are difficult and destructive. Also 'pillorization' [is applied] to
punishments. Archilochos [uses the term] to means evil and destructive. It is called a 'pillory' [κύφων]
from the fact that the captives are compelled to bend over [κύφειν].

"But if someone be so bold and pay no heed to what is in the law, let him be bound to the pillory next to
the town hall for 20 days, doused in honey, naked, and in milk, to that he may be dinner for bees and
flies. And when the time has passed, that he be pushed off a cliff, wrapping him in a woman's robe."[3]

Notes

[1] In place of ἀνακύψαν here the scholia to Aristophanes (see next note) read ἀνακυ̂ψαι, producing
better sense: "so that they might not find a way to rise up." From this and other references the "tendons" in
question must be tendons of the upper body: the arm, perhaps, or the neck.

[2] Aristophanes, Wealth [Plutus] 476 (footnote 1), preceded and followed by comments from the scholia
there; cf. already kappa 2796.

[3] From Aelian fr. 42a Domingo-Forasté (39 Hercher), quoted more extensively and coherently at epsilon
2405. The text purports to be part of a law from the city of Lyktos (Lyttos) in Crete dealing with the
banishment and punishment of Epicurean philosophers.

Keywords: botany; clothing; comedy; definition; dialects, grammar, and etymology; ethics;
food; gender and sexuality; geography; history; imagery; law; medicine; philosophy; poetry;
politics; women; zoology
Translated by William Hutton; edited by David Whitehead and Catharine Roth.
This is the version of the Suda On Line entry created 25 March 2013; the current version,
at http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/sol/sol-entries/kappa/2800, may be
different.

1
 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Aristoph.+Pl.+476