A hexametrical couplet from Aristophanes' lost Amphiaraus has in the past been interpreted as a fragment of an oracular response.

Scholars have traditionally interpreted Hipponax fragment 128 as an epic parody designed to belittle the grand pretensions and gluttonous habits of his enemy. I suggest, however, that this traditional reading ultimately falls short because of two unexamined assumptions: that the meter and diction of the fragment are exclusively meant to recall epic narrative and not any other early hexametrical genre, and that the descriptive epithets in lines 2 and 3 are the ad hoc comic creations of the poet and simply (...) refer to the table manners of a glutton or a parasite. I argue instead that this fragment in several ways reflects the language, the meter and the performative goal of hexametrical chants or incantations designed to expel harmful famine demons or to escort human scapegoats from the city. I also suggest that the vivid and somewhat comic descriptions of the enemy in fragment 128 probably do not aim at his personal eating disorders, but rather they are drawn from two interrelated and generic features of archaic Greek thought: a tradition of describing famine-demons as insatiable eaters, and a popular theme in Greek invective which demonizes political enemies as rapacious pests who threaten to gobble up the commonwealth of the city and who therefore must be expelled from the community, precisely like a famine-demon. (shrink)

Une gemme en agate peu étudiée provenant d’Anapa, datée de la période impériale, présente un grand intérêt, dans la mesure où elle diffère de la plupart des gemmes magiques par sa forme sphérique, sa grande taille et son contenu : elle commence par une référence aux rituels traditionnels grecs d’expulsion et se termine par une liste des parties de la tête humaine semblable à celle que l’on trouve dans un manuel médical hippocratique. La gemme ne serait pas une amulette, comme (...) les éditeurs précédents l’ont supposé, mais plutôt un manuel miniature contenant des instructions pour la fabrication d’amulettes. (shrink)

La réutilisation des haches néolithiques (également appelées « celts » ou « pierres de foudre ») comme des amulettes à l’époque romaine est aujourd’hui sous-estimée. En conséquence, la date ancienne des deux petits exemples inscrits du British Museum (BM nos 1* et 504) est maintenant remise en doute, en raison d’une évaluation négative qui découle de l’utilisation insuffisante de comparanda. En comparaison avec le corpus croissant de pierres magiques, les médias de ces deux petites haches (jadéite ou serpentine), leur poli (...) et leur forme semblent en effet suspects et difficiles à évaluer comme gemmes en soi, mais quand on les compare à d’autres haches néolithiques inscrites et anépigraphes trouvées dans sites romains et plus tard, il s’avère que les deux pierres à Londres appartiennent à une catégorie bien définie de « pierres de foudre » réutilisées comme amulettes. (shrink)

The idea that the womb moved freely about a woman's body causing spasmodic disease enjoyed great popularity among the ancient Greeks, beginning in the classical period with Plato and the Hippocratic writers and continuing on into the Roman and Byzantine periods. Armed with sophisticated analyses of the medical tradition and new texts pertaining to the magical, this essay describes how both approaches to the wandering womb develop side by side in mutual influence from the late classical period onwards. Of special (...) interest will be the tendency in both traditions to imagine both demons and errant wombs as wild animals and to use fumigations to control both. It concludes with a discussion of the historical development of and consequences for the idea that women alone possessed an internal organ that was variously interpreted as a mechanically defective body-part, a sentient and passionate animal, and then finally a demon with malicious intent, who bites and poisons the female body. It also argues against the hypothesis or assumption that midwives or wet-nurses were the original source for the idea of the wandering womb, suggesting that the syndrome never fit comfortably into the category of gynecological illness, because the womb was not the site of disease, but rather a cause of spasmodic disease in other areas of the body. (shrink)

Theocritus divides his second Idyll into two roughly equal sections, each punctuated by ten refrains: in the first half, a courtesan named Simaetha describes an ongoing erotic spell that she and her servant are performing and at the same time she enacts it by reciting a series of short similia-similibus incantations; in the second half, she speaks to Selene in the night sky and tells her the story of her brief affair with and betrayal by a handsome young athlete named (...) Delphis. Literary scholars have written much about this poem, but they are more often concerned with the second, confessional half, with its complicated narrative layers and its charmingly naïve and unreliable narrator. Historians of religion and magic, on the other hand, have focussed most of their energies on the first half of the poem, using as comparanda the much later evidence of Roman-era curse tablets and late antique magical papyri to make sense of what Simaetha does and says during her long ritual, an approach that was enshrined by Gow in the middle of the last century, when he argued that, because of the conservative nature of these later magical spells, there was little risk of serious anachronism in using them for comparison. (shrink)

This essay argues that the Nestor's Cup Inscription is not a joke, but rather a magical spell designed to work as an aphrodisiac. It is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the hexametrical couplet and the second with the opening line. In the first section the author argues that the hexameters comprise a bonafide magical incantation, pointing out that: the two hexameters take the semantic form of a conditional curse well known from oaths and proprietary inscriptions of the (...) archaic period and from the earliest extant magical texts; hexametrical verse was commonly used as early as the classical period-and probably much earlier-in magical incantations; prosaic words in the inscription that do not appear elsewhere in literary hexameters, but are used in the Greek magical tradition, may in fact be terms of a quasi-technical nature that survive from a very old, but poorly documented, tradition of metrical incantations; and the deictic pronoun in the second line of the inscription signals the use of performative language common in magical spells. The second section of the paper turns to the opening line of the inscription, arguing that instead of introducing some sophisticated intertextual joke, this line can be best understood as a label or rubric of the sort frequently used to signify authorship or ownership in archaic inscriptions and other early texts to "seal" a writer's name to his œuvre. In later magical texts such rubrics boast a legendary author of a particular incantation or ritual. The author concludes that this inscription records an erotic spell traditionally spoken over a cup without any recourse to writing, and that its appearance on the cup from Pithecusae resulted from a random and ultimately unsuccessful experiment to transfer and transform an oral incantation into a written one in an age of incipient literacy. (shrink)