suicide with a decoction of colocynth. She is said to 
have drunk a large liqueur glass of the decoction and to 
have fallen unconscious ‘‘soon after’. Symptoms per- 
sisted for five days. On the sixth day, she had recovered. 
Lewin reports another case: the symptoms of the poison- 
ing lasted for two days. If we assume that colocynth is 
a deadly poison at all, we must conclude that, even if a 
coloeynth poisoning leads to death, a considerable 
amount of time elapses between the ingestion of the 
poison and exitus: one or two days—as we see it. 
This and the circumstance that even 15 grams of chemi- 
‘cally pure colocynthine do not necessarily cause death 
must disqualify C. colocynthis as a suitable poison for 
Agrippina and Nenophon’s purpose in the given situ- 
ation. They needed a tasteless poison which, even if 
administered in minimal quantities, would kill safely 
and within minutes. C. colocynthis does not seem to ful- 
fill these requirements. 
We now come to the last point of our discussion: does 
the title ‘*Apocolocyntosis’’ refer to C. colocynthis—as 
an in-group joke so to speak’ There are two ways to 
answer this question: by etymology and by text analysis. 
Between the prefix Azo- and the suffix -wovs the crip- 
pled noun -«oAokvr7- has been inserted by whoever coined 
this artificial word. We call -coAoxuyt- a crippled noun, 
because it lacks an ending. H. Stephanus gives as the 
Greek equivalents to the Latin ‘cucurbita’—i.e., the 
generic name for all cucurbitaceous plants (in German: 
Kiirbis)——the following forms: KkodokvvOy, Kodoxvytn, 
Ko\oKuvOos, KoOKuvTos, KoAOKUVOa, and KoddKuvta. He 
explains: 
oe ai , ~ ‘ - 
Hellespontii xoAoxvvtas nominare solent Tas vepufepets, Rotundas 
. , nN \ ‘ 2 ’ 
cucurbitas : olKvas vero, Tas wakpas, Oblongas: quas aliqui et *IvéiKxas 
, . A . . > Le 
xoAokurTas appellant : haeque ut plurimum €Wovrat, illae etiam O7T@vTat,’’ 
W. Pape lists the words xcodoxvvOy with the attic ver- 
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