Antiphanes said merrily that in a certain city the cold was so intense that words were congealed as soon as spoken, but that after some time they thawed and became audible; so that the words spoken in winter were articulated next summer.

Plutarch attributes to the comic poet Antiphanes a playful paradox: speech itself becomes a physical substance, frozen by extreme cold and only later “released” when it thaws. The joke turns on delayed communication—what is said in one season is only heard in another—suggesting how meaning can be postponed, mis-timed, or recovered long after the moment of utterance. Read more broadly, it anticipates later literary fantasies about “frozen words” and treats language as something that can be stored, preserved, and reanimated. The image also satirizes the fragility of human exchange, making audibility depend on external conditions rather than intention.