I can see Curly!
An ancient slip of the tongue
Hegelochus (pronounced in English he-geller-cus) was the star theatre actor of Athens in the late 5th century BC. With a commanding presence and a penetrating vocal timbre, he was the actor of choice for the most avant-garde and innovative of playwrights, Euripides. But the poor man is remembered today not for his acting, but for a hilarious, career-defining, slip of the tongue.
Euripides staged his tragedy Orestes in 408 BC. It tells of the madness that strikes the young hero Orestes after he has killed his mother Clytemnestra (in revenge for her murder of his father, Agamemnon). The dead Clytemnestra’s spirits of vengeance haunt Orestes, so that he experiences fearful frenzies and terrible visions.
Near the start of the play Orestes is catching a rare moment of rest, before waking up and experiencing a bout of madness. Eventually emerging from it he exclaims (line 279) “Coming out of the waves, again I see calm!” The word for ‘calm’ in Greek is galḗn’, which is similar to the word for a weasel, galên. The difference is that the latter has a circumflex accent, which inflects the last syllable differently.
Three other words in the same verse also have a circumflex accent, which might have led Hegelochus to over-enunciate the last syllable of galḗn’. The result was that the solemn line came out as meaning “Coming out of the waves, again I see a weasel!” The audience fell about laughing uproariously. A bit as if someone singing the Jonny Nash song “I can see clearly now the rain has gone” was heard to sing “I can see Curly, now the rain has gone.”
The comic playwrights never let Hegelochus live down his lapse. We know of at least four ancient comedies that repeat the joke in some form - “What’s that I see, then, a weasel!” “Oh you got caught in the sea? Weaselly done!” Hegelochus, we are told, never took to the stage again. The only consolation is that we probably would never have heard of him had he not become notorious for the episode.
Can you hear the difference between these two renderings?
ek kymáton gar aûthis aû galḗn’ horô
ek kymáton gar aûthis aû galên horô
The ancient Athenians heard the difference because it was the actor’s duty to project his voice strongly and enunciate every syllable clearly.
Only, in this case, that final syllable came out…curly.
Hmm. I, for one, cannot hear the difference. But Ancient Greek had, it seems, a pitch-accent, like modern Mandarin or Vietnamese. This predominated over a light stress-accent. The word meaning ‘calm’ has an uptone (aptly enough, for the meaning of the line) on its second syllable, whereas the word meaning ‘weasel’ has a neutral or holding tone. As you suggest, that difference would have to be instantly audible to a large audience.
I had to listen 2 times, but then I know nothing of either ancient or modern Greek, nor languages with pitch-accents. It's subtle, but a native speaker would certainly hear it right away and it would indeed be worth laughing about!
The Duolingo Latin course also teaches you the word "weasel' and I realized that even though it's a short course (I was brushing up on my long-ago high school Latin), I had learned enough to describe the scene in "The Big Lebowski" where the criminals fling a ferret into the tub with The Dude. I'm sure that's not an accident.