Christopher A. Faraone

Talismans and Trojan horses : guardian statues in ancient Greek myth and ritual

The legends and historical accounts of the early Greeks contain many references to special statues or images upon whose presence the continued safety of a city or house depended. These images included statues of animals believed to be omens of great disasters, predatory beasts, dangerous goddesses and plague gods. This study describes the variety and range of these images and demonstrates that the many legends about such statues are actually grounded in rituals that were shared by many of the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. The author argues that a continuous tradition existed, shared by Greeks and neighbouring cultures, which was passed down from one generation to the next relatively unchanged.

Magical and Medical Approaches to the Wandering Womb in the Ancient Greek World

The idea that the womb moved freely about a woman9s 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.

The "Performative Future" in Three Hellenistic Incantations and Theocritus' Second Idyll

ONE OF THE MANY IMPORTANT ADVANCES in Pindaric criticism in the last twenty-five years has been the growing appreciation of his peculiar use of first-person future verbs of singing, praising, or testifying, which all seem to refer to the present activity of performing the ode in which they appear.1 Thus, for example, when Pindar says vi)v. . . KEka6fpoji60a (01. 10.78-79), viv ... KFca6flcY) (01. 11.11-14) or ?y& .E. . ?aGKfo) (Nem. 9.9-10), he is not promising to sing another poem at some future time, but rather he is talking about the poem he is in the process of performing.2 In recent years scholars have noted that this peculiar use of the future is not, in fact, limited to the epinician genre, but occurs regularly in napO?vFta,3 paeans,4 other literary and cult hymns,5 and in choral

Aphrodite's KESTOS and Apples for Atalanta: Aphrodisiacs in Early Greek Myth and Ritual

uses the eca6b ipdi to facilitate her famous deception of Zeus. Deianeira, in a last-ditch effort to save her marriage, mistakenly and tragically destroys her philandering husband, Heracles, when she employs an aphrodisiac to win him back (Hesiod fr. 25.17-25 MW). In yet another early myth, Pindar tells us how Jason uses a magic iuvS-wheel to woo Medea-an act of seduction, which leads to elopement and marriage (Pyth. 4.213-219). Elsewhere we hear how apples, quinces, pomegranates and other fruit designated by the Greek word firov were apparently used to strengthen marital affections; they were regularly offered to brides-to-be, both in myth (e.g., Atalanta, Persephone) and in actual ceremony (e.g., Plut. Solon 20.4). In all these Greek legends involving aphrodisiacs, a magic spell is employed to bring about a desired, new marriage, or save a faltering one. Drawing attention to close parallels in Akkadian erotic spells of the Neo-Assyrian period and in the much later Greek magical papyri, I shall argue that in some cases such myths reflect the actual use of aphrodisiacs in early Greek culture, and that awareness of these practices can give us a much deeper insight into the narrative structure of the poetic texts in which they appear.

Aeschylus' ὓμνος δέσμιος (Eum. 306) and Attic judicial curse tablets

When the Erinyes catch up with Orestes in Athens they find him clutching the archaic wooden statue of Athena and invoking her aid along with that of Apollo ( Eum . 235 ff.). The Erinyes scorn his prayers and bid him hear their ‘binding song’: ὕμνον δ’ ἀκούσῃ τόνδe δέσμιον (306). Wecklein in his 1888 edition of the play remarked ‘erinnert an magische Kunste’ and quoted Laws 933a, where Plato, discussing murder by poison, makes brief mention of the popular belief in sorcerers, incantations and binding spells ( καταδέσeις ). Subsequent commentators repeat Weckleins brief note nearly verbatim and then elaborate it along two different lines, either claiming some vague Orphic source (Thomson 1938) or citing Wuenschs Defixionum Tabellae Atticae (Blass 1907; Groeneboom 1952). More recently, Lebeck argued that the ostensible title (‘binding song’) is incompatible with the actual content of the stasimon (Apollos encroachment on the Erinyes’ power); she concluded that the title is irrelevant or at best only of secondary importance.’ Thus on the whole, this ὕμνος δέσμιος has been treated as a remnant of magical or chthonic lore too obscure to have any real bearing on our understanding of the immediate dramatic situation in Eumenides . I shall argue to the contrary that the song is closely related to a specific kind of curse tablet used to affect the outcome of law cases in Athens as early as the 5th century bc , and as such it is important to the dramatic context of a tragedy which depicts the mythical foundation of Athens’ first homicide court.

The Getty hexameters : poetry, magic, and mystery in ancient Selinous

PREFACE LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS INTRODUCTION GREEK TEXT AND TRANSLATION PHOTOGRAPHS AND DRAWINGS 1. The Getty Hexameters: Date, Author, Place of Composition 2. The Language of the Hexameter Verses from Selinous Variants and Archetypes 3. Spoken and Written Boasts in the Getty Hexameters 4. The Ephesia grammata: Genesis of a Magical Formula 5. The Ephesia grammata: Logos Orphaikos or Apolline Alexima Pharmakaa 6. Magical Verses on a Lead Tablet: Amulet or Anthologya 7. Myth and the Getty Hexameters 8. The Immortal Words of Paean 9. Poetry and the Mysteries APPENDIX: THE LEAD TABLET FROM PHALASARNA BIBLIOGRAPHY INDICES

The Amuletic Design of the Mithraic Bull-Wounding Scene

Recent research reveals that in the so-called Mithraic tauroctony, the god is, in fact, wounding a bull, not killing it. I argue that the scene combines the overall design of evil-eye amulets with the pose of the goddess Nike performing a military sphagion and I suggest that the scene must have been understood by its creator and by some viewers, at least, to offer protective power in this world, as well as salvific assurance about the next, a dual focus that seems to have been especially strong in Mithraism.

Exhortation and Meditation: Alternating Stanzas as a Structural Device in Early Greek Elegy

t is a fairly well-established notion that vigorous exhortation and sober meditation are two of the basic rhetorical functions and linguistic actions of the elegiac genre, especially in its earliest phases.1 It has not been noticed, however, that early elegiac poets do not deploy these two modes randomly, but that in the longer extant fragments, at least, they often show a tendency to organize their thoughts into stanzas of equal length, which alternate back and forth between advice in the imperative and rumination in the indicative. The idea that elegiac poets composed by stanzas is not entirely new. Around the time of the American Civil War, Heinrich Weil floated the hypothesis that many of the early elegists divided their poems into “strophes” that occasionally displayed a kind of responsion similar to that found in ancient Greek choral poetry.2 Weil did not suggest, however, that these elegiac “strophes” lent any special rhetorical pattern to the poems in which they appeared. Although his contemporaries quickly rejected the main argument of his brief study—that Solon 13 was primarily composed of four-couplet “strophes”—they paid scant attention to some of his other, passing observations, most notably that Tyrtaeus seems to use a five-couplet “strophe” to lend structure to all three of his longer fragments (nos. 10–12), and that Xenophanes 1 and 2 both seem to be composed as a pair of six-couplet “strophes.”3 Although Weil’s overall thesis about elegiac strophes was ultimately rejected, Rossi, in a detailed study nearly a century later, confirmed that the

The Many and the One: Imagining the Beginnings of Political Power in the Hesiodic Theogony

Herodotus famously asserts of Homer and Hesiod: “These are the ones who composed a theogony for the Greeks, gave the gods their significant names, determined their honors and functions, and described their outward forms” (Hdt. 2.53.2: ovtoi d] eQs· oR poi^samter heocom_gm þkkgsi ja· to?si heo?si t±r 1pymul_ar d|mter ja· til\r te ja· t]wmar diek|mter ja· eUdea aqt_m sgl^mamter). Since this passage is at the center of a long-standing controversy about Herodotus’ account of the evolution of Greek religion, I will use it only to make one general point, namely that Herodotus believed that Hesiod was actively involved in the creation of the nomenclature, spheres of influence and images of the Greek gods. This flies in the face of the common scholarly understanding that hexametrical catalogue poetry in general is a very old genre designed to collect and preserve important and traditional facts from a long distant past. There has, indeed, been a lot of excellent work on the traditional use of lists in Homer and Hesiod and there is no doubt that these lists in large part do preserve traditional knowledge and nomenclature about the gods, but as we shall see it is equally likely that in some places poets manipulated, enlarged

An Athenian Tradition of Dactylic Paeans to Apollo and Asclepius: Choral Degeneration or a Flexible System of Non-Strophic Dactyls?

The different epigraphic versions of the so-called Erythraean Paean date from the early fourth century BCE to the mid-second century CE and are generally thought to trace the degeneration of an original monostrophic lyric poem attested in the eponymous late-classical version. I argue that such an approach is inadequate and that the later versions of this poem are witnesses to a hitherto unappreciated genre of paean to Apollo and Asclepius composed almost entirely in dactyls and organized into segments of varying length, which generally begin with a dactylic tetrameter and end with a version of the traditional paeonic cry (the so-called epiphthegma): Παιν or Παιν. The space between the opening tetrameter and the closing cry can, however, accommodate between four to eight additional dactylic feet. The late Hellenistic paean composed in Athens by Macedonicus of Amphipolis is yet another witness to this tradition, which probably dates back at least as early as a famous—albeit almost entirely lost—paean of Sophocles and is reflected in the first two strophes of the parodos of his Oedipus Rex.