[citation needed] Erasmus noted in his Adagia that the Greek and Latin versions of the proverb had been recorded by the Carthaginian grammarian Sulpicius Apollinaris (fl.
), as quoted in Aulus Gellius's Attic Nights:[1] "πολλὰ μεταξὺ πέλει κύλικος καὶ χείλεος ἄκρου" ("much takes place between the (wine) cup and the upper lip") and "multa cadunt inter calicem supremaque labra" ("many things fall between the chalice, and the upper lips").
In this account, the verse was a comment by a seer who told Ancaeus, who was setting out on the perilous enterprise of the Argonauts, that he would never taste wine from his newly planted vineyard.
[12] In Ben Jonson's play, A Tale of a Tub (1633) the Latin proverb is partly mentioned, then explained: "But thus you see th' old Adage verified, / Multa cadunt inter—you can guess the reſt.
[16] For example, an early record is in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's The Linwoods: or, "Sixty Years Since" in America (1835), in the form "there is many a slip between the cup and the lip".
[17] The proverb is also alluded to in the voice of one of the characters earlier in the novel – the leader of a group of banditti drops a bottle of brandy while ransacking a house; it shatters and he says, "Ah, my men!
[18] Subsequently, "there is many a slip 'tween the cup and the lip" appears in David Macbeth Moir's The Life of Mansie Wauch (new edition, 1839).