No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2021
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 (katadesmoi) 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.
1 Despite persistent scholarly belief that Simaetha is a down-on-her-heels daughter of a citizen, Dickie, M.W., Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World (London, 2001), 100–1Google Scholar has shown decisively—by drawing many parallels from Hellenistic and Roman literature—that she would have been easily recognizable to Theocritus’ readers as a courtesan living in her own home with a single servant financially dependent on arranging a series of hopefully long-term sexual relationships with men.
2 See e.g. Segal, C., ‘Simaetha and the iunx’, QUCC 15 (1973), 32–43Google Scholar; Segal, C., ‘Under-reading and intertextuality: Sappho, Simaetha and Odysseus in Theocritus’ Second Idyll’, Arethusa 17 (1984), 201–9Google Scholar; Segal, C., ‘Space, time and imagination in Theocritus’ Second Idyll’, CSCA 16 (1985), 103–19Google Scholar; F.T. Griffiths, ‘Poetry as pharmakon in Theocritus’ Idyll 2’, in G.W. Bowersock, W. Burkert, M.C.J. Putnam (edd.), Arktouros: Hellenic Studies Presented to Bernard M.W. Knox on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday (Berlin, 1979), 81–8; Parry, H., ‘Magic and songstress: Theocritus Idyll 2’, ICS 13 (1988), 43–55Google Scholar; and S. Goldhill, The Poet's Voice: Essays on Poetics and Ancient Greek Literature (Cambridge, 1991), 261–72.
3 A.S.F. Gow, Theocritus, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1952), 36–7. His main argument was that the numerous agreements between the PGM, on the one hand, and Idyll 2 and the Roman poets, on the other, ‘show that much of the material that they [that is, the papyri handbooks] systematize is far older than themselves and some of it of immemorial antiquity’.
4 Lambert, M., ‘Desperate Simaetha: gender and power in Theocritus Idyll 2’, AClass 45 (2002), 71–88Google Scholar, at 74 and Hordern, J.H., ‘Love magic and purification in Sophron, PSI 1214a, and Theocritus’, CQ 52 (2002), 164–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 164, for example, argue that the PGM are not reliable comparanda, because they are ‘significantly later’. F. Graf, Magic in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 18 is more measured when he says that Theocritus ‘constructs a mosaic, a kind of super-ritual capable of activating in its readers all sorts of associations connected with magic, and he constructs it following ritual facts that are well-informed but, taken as a whole, would not work’. On the other hand, I. Petrovic, ‘ΦΑΡΜΑΚΕΥΤΡΙΑ ohne ΦΑΡΜΑΚΟΝ: Überlegungen zur Komposition des zweiten Idylls von Theokrit’, Mnemosyne 57 (2004), 421–44 has argued that Simaetha's incantations (and also her complaints to Selene in the second part of the poem) do in fact accurately recall the so-called ‘prayers for justice’ found on curse tablets of the Classical and Hellenistic periods.
5 R.W. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley, 1982), 168 (‘not very skilled in magic’); Lambert (n. 4), 71 (‘a comic parody of a magic ritual in which the lovesick practitioner perpetrates ritual mayhem for the entertainment of Theocritus’ audience’) and 80–1 (‘would-be witch … who gets everything wrong’ and ‘comic send-up of a bungled magical ritual’); and J. Domány, ‘Magic and irony in Theocritus Idyll 2’, Hermes 141 (2013), 58–64, at 61 (‘she makes mistakes and therefore none of her charms can bring her love back to her’).
6 C.A. Faraone, ‘The agonistic context of early Greek binding spells’, in id. and D. Obbink (edd.), Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion (Oxford, 1991), 13–15.
7 Faraone, C.A., ‘The wheel, the whip and other implements of torture: erotic magic in Pindar Pythian 4. 213–9’, CJ 88 (1993), 1–19Google Scholar; id., Ancient Greek Love Magic (Harvard, 1999), 41–68.
8 Theoc. Id. 2.18–62. Throughout this essay I use the text and translation of N. Hopkinson, Theocritus Moschus Bion (Cambridge, MA, 2015), who follows Gow and most editors in placing verses 28–32 after verse 43 in order to produce a regular series of four-verse stanzas divided by a single-verse refrain.
9 For this use of the ‘performative future’ to refer to a present ritual action, see n. 31 below.
10 Here, we might imagine that the parallel wish would have been: ‘as this fringe is shredded and burns in the fire, so too Delphis’.
11 Steps 4–5 are the outliers; they appear in the same quatrain.
12 Barley, bran and laurel are never burned in the PGM recipes, although laurel crowns are worn and laurel sprigs are carried in divination spells that invoke Apollo, for which see C.A. Faraone, ‘The collapse of celestial and chthonic realms in a late-antique “Apollonian invocation” (PGM I 262–347)’, in R. Abusch, A.Y. Reed and P. Schäfer (edd.), Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions (Cambridge, 2004), 213–32; PGM III 410–23, a spell for gaining a good memory, tells us to make a dough of barley meal and milk, shape it into twelve female figures and then eat them on an empty stomach. Two late antique texts (that is, roughly contemporary with the PGM) do mention the use of barley or dough. In the Orphic Argonautica, the narrator ‘Orpheus’, with the help of Medea, fashions figures from barley and throws them into a fire in a complex magical ritual; see D. Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Oxford, 2009), 92. Heliodorus mentions in a similar context a dough cake shaped in the form of a man and thrown into the fire (Aeth. 6.14).
13 Wax is sometimes used in the PGM to make images, but only two are used as effigies in curses, and these images are impaled, but (surprisingly) not burned (PGM IV 296–312 and CXXIV 10–15). Plato does indeed mention (Leg. 933b) that people could be frightened when they saw moulded wax figurines on doorsteps or tombs, but these were not melted. Wax, both melted and pierced by female practitioners, does appear more prominently in later Latin poetry, e.g. Verg. Ecl. 8.80–1 and Hor. Sat. 1.8.30–3, for which see C.A. Faraone, ‘Clay hardens and wax melts: magical role-reversal in Vergil's eighth Eclogue’, CPh 84 (1989), 294–300. Ovid twice mentions witches who make wax effigies and pierce their livers with needles (Her. 6.93–4 and Am. 3.7.30).
14 The PGM handbooks use the term ousia (‘stuff’) to refer generally to hair, fingernails and threads from garments. It is used thrice in recipes where ousia is attached to effigies—a bat (PGM IV 2950) or a pierced wax image (IV 296)—or placed with the victim's name in the mouth of a dead dog (XXXVI 370) or glued to the wall of a hot steam bath (XXXVI 74). But ousia is (again surprisingly) never burnt.
15 See e.g. L.R. LiDonnici, ‘Single-stemmed wormwood, pinecones and myrrh: expense and availability of recipe ingredients in the Greek Magical Papyri’, Kernos 14 (2001), 61–91 and ead., ‘Beans, fleawort, and the blood of a hamadryas baboon: recipe ingredients in Greco-Roman magical materials’, in M. Meyer and P. Mirecki (edd.), Ancient Magic and Ritual Power (Religions of the Graeco-Roman World 129) (Leiden, 2001), 359–77; myrrh was especially popular in erotic spells; see Faraone (n. 7 [1999]), 50–60.
16 D. Pralon, ‘Théocrite, La Magicienne’, in A. Moreau (ed.), La Magie (Montpellier, 2000), 1.315.
17 Theocritus further emphasizes this ring-composition by having the first and the last quatrains of Simaetha's incantation end with these similar-sounding verbs.
18 Pralon (n. 16), 316–17. See above at the end of note 12 for a dough cake in the shape of a man.
19 See Gow (n. 3), ad loc. and K.J. Dover, Theocritus: Selected Poems (London, 1971), ad loc. for surveys of the various opinions.
20 With the rhombus, Simaetha attempts ‘to whirl' or ‘twirl’ Delphis to her door, using the verb dinein and thereby presumably combining the over-the-head circular movement of the rhombus with the linear goal of forcing Delphis to come to her house. Scholars have suggested that Simaetha must have spun the iunx-wheel to a similar effect throughout the ritual, because it is invoked ten times in the refrain to draw Delphis to her home; see Pirenne-Delforge, V., ‘L'iynge dans le discours mythique et les procédures magiques’, Kernos 6 (1993), 277–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Johnston, S.I., ‘Song of the iunx: magic and rhetoric in Pythian 4’, TAPhA 125 (1995), 177–206Google Scholar. Simaetha does not, however, use the language of spinning in connection with the iunx, nor does Pindar in his description of a similar device, a passage that is discussed in detail below in Section III.
21 See e.g. Tavenner, E., ‘Iynx and rhombus’, TAPhA 64 (1933), 109–27Google Scholar; Gow, A.S.F., ‘ΙΥΓΞ, ΡΟΜΒΟΣ, rhombus, turbo’, JHS 54 (1934), 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Segal (n. 2 [1973]); F. Capponi, ‘Avifauna e magia’, Latomus 40 (1981), 292–301; Johnston (n. 20); and Pirenne-Delforge (n. 20).
22 Xen. Mem. 3.22.16–17; see Faraone (n. 7 [1999]), 1–2 and Dickie (n. 1), 82–3, who cites this passage as evidence that ‘erotic magic is integral to the equipment of a courtesan and that it is needed to make sure that lovers are drawn to her and remain faithful’.
23 Anth. Pal. 5.20, with the discussions of Faraone (n. 7 [1999]), 151–2 and Dickie (n. 1), 103–4.
24 Lucian, Dial. meret. 4.5.4 with Faraone (n. 7 [1999]), 150–1.
25 The rhombus appears once in the PGM, not as a device used in a recipe but rather as a kind of mystic symbol in a hymn addressed to Hecate; see L.M. Bortolani, Magical Hymns from Roman Egypt: A Study of Greek and Egyptian Traditions of Divinity (Cambridge, 2016), 256–7.
26 Aesch. Eum. 306–48 in the translation of H. Lloyd-Jones, Aeschylus: The Oresteia (Berkeley, 1979) and with the discussion of Faraone, C.A., ‘Aeschylus’ hymnos desmios (Eum. 306) and Attic judicial curse tablets’, JHS 105 (1985), 150–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Faraone (n. 6).
28 For the regular meaning of katadesmos (‘binding spell’) and katadein (‘to bind with a spell’), see Gow (n. 3), on line 2.3.
29 Gow (n. 3), ad loc. and Dover (n. 19), ad loc.
30 Gow (n. 3), 2.35–6.
31 For the use of the performative future on curse tablets, in other magical spells and in ritual utterances more generally, see C.A. Faraone, ‘The “performative future” in three Hellenistic incantations and Theocritus’ Second Idyll’, CPh 90 (1995), 1–15, who quotes other examples. Simaetha's use of the middle is appropriate in a spell performed jointly by herself and her slave.
32 See DTA 108 and Faraone (n. 31), 4–6 for full discussion. The metre of the first line is marred, as is often the case in e.g. funerary epigrams and dedicatory inscriptions, by the name of the victim Sosikleia, which cannot, of course, be omitted. The curse begins on the inner surface of the rolled-up tablet and the last three words spill over onto the outer surface. I give here the reconstruction of G. Kaibel, Epigrammata graeca ex lapidibus conlecta (Berlin, 1878), no. 1136, who dates the text to the third or second century b.c.e. and rightly assumes that the last half of line 4 was accidentally left out by the scribe.
33 The adjective ἡλιθιώναις is a hapax legomenon, which means something like ‘who makes [sc. another] foolish’ or ‘who distracts’. See LSJ s.v. and Wilamowitz apud Kaibel (n. 32), no. 1136, who compares similar words used to describe the binding song of the Erinyes quoted and discussed at the beginning of this section.
34 I give here the text of the only published example, for which see J.L. Lamont, ‘A new commercial curse tablet from classical Athens’, ZPE 196 (2015), 159–74, who will publish the others soon. The two halves of the second line are reversed on the tablet, but Lamont rightly inverts their order to correct the scansion, since the phrase ἐν αἵματι καὶ κονίαισιν appears at line end in Od. 22.383–6.
35 The evidence of the Classical period for ghosts as agents of curses is admittedly slim; see S.I. Johnston, Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (Berkeley, 1999), 127–60 for the best argument.
36 I assume with Gow (n. 3), ad loc. that ‘the goddess’ in question is Hecate.
37 See e.g. Gow (n. 3), ad loc.
38 R. Daniel, D. Ben Ami and Y. Tcheckhanovets, ‘A juridical curse from a Roman mansion in the city of David’, ZPE 186 (2013), 227–36. The dactylic verse comes at the end of the comprehensible Greek text of the curse; there follow some symbols and then some nonsensical names.
39 P.Oxy. LXV 4468, col. i, 26.
40 Faraone (n. 7 [1999]), 44–95.
41 See above in Section I, steps 1 (melting), 2 (burning), 3 (burning), 4 (melting) and 7, where the fringe of his cloak is shredded and then thrown into the fire.
42 Pind. Pyth. 4.213–19 as translated by Race, W.H., Pindar Olympian and Pythian Odes (Cambridge, MA, 1997)Google Scholar. For full discussion see Faraone (n. 7 [1993]) and Faraone (n. 7 [1999]), 56–8.
43 Gow (n. 21).
44 Faraone (n. 7 [1999]), 41–68.
45 Vergote, J., ‘Folterwerkzeuge’, RAC 8 (1972), 112–41Google Scholar, at 113–15. The most common expression in Greek is ‘to be racked (streblousthai) upon the wheel’ (Hdt. 2.89; Dem. 29.40; Plut. Vit. Nic. 30; Ar. Plut. 875 and Ran. 620; and Antiph. 5.32). The basic meaning of streblousthai is ‘to be twisted’ or ‘to be strained tight’ as in the case of cables in a windlass (Hdt. 7.36) or strings on a musical instrument (Pl. Resp. 531b). The focus seems to be on the stretching or the tension of the victim's body, for example the simile in Ar. Lys. 845–6: ‘Such is the strain and the stretching that hold me—as if I were being racked (streblousthai) upon the wheel.’
46 See Faraone, C.A., ‘Animal-effigies in ancient curses: the role of gender, age and natural behavior in their selection’, Mediterraneo Antico 22 (2019), 307–34Google Scholar, at 323–6.
47 DT 241.15–20 (Carthage, second century c.e.). See also DT 111–12 (Aquitania, first century c.e.): ‘Just as this puppy is prone and unable to rise up, so, too, may they be unable to rise. May they be transfixed, just as the puppy has been transfixed.’
48 DT 222B1–5 (Carthage, first century c.e.)
49 Marcie Handler kindly made me aware of this interesting find and I thank her for the description I have used here; she gave a preliminary report at the 2009 APA Meetings in Philadelphia entitled: ‘Chicken soup for the soul: new evidence for the practice of magic in Hellenistic Athens’.
50 See especially the Berlin ‘Apple Spell’ (PGM CXXII 1–15), quoted and discussed in detail below.
51 The idea that in this passage Pindar is thinking about a specifically hexametrical charm might, in fact, be expected in a heavily dactylic poem such as Pythian 4, whose metrical scheme was apparently chosen to reflect the fact that the bulk of the text is said to be an oracle chanted by Medea herself. For the reflection of other hexametrical genres as well, see e.g. B. Gildersleeve, Pindar's Olympian and Pythian Odes (New York, 1897), 281: ‘this poem, among all the Pindaric odes, approaches epos most closely, so the rhythmical composition reminds one of a hexametrical hymn. Four times in succession we have precisely the same pentapody, the close of which reminds us of the hexameter.’ The poem also recalls epic verse in places, as Gildersleeve himself says a bit earlier (at 280).
52 PGM CXXII 1–15, with the commentary in the editio princeps of Brashear, W., ‘Ein Berliner Zauberpapyrus’, ZPE 33 (1979), 261–78Google Scholar, whose reconstruction of the hexameters I print here.
53 The second column of the same Berlin papyrus, for example, includes two other examples where the hexametrical coda appears at the end of an erotic curse in prose. The first of them replaces Aphrodite with Isis (δέσ[ποι]να Ἶσι, τέλει τελέαν ἐπαοιδήν) and the second retains Aphrodite: πότνια Κυπρογενεία τέλει τελέαν ἐπαοιδήν (PGM CXXII ii 7–8 and 24–5). There is yet another recipe for an agôgê that ends κ]αλῶς μο[ι τέλει ταύτην τὴν ἐπα]οιδήν (PGM VII 991–2) and a recently published erotic curse of a late first-century c.e. date to inflict insomnia (P.Oxy. LXV 4468, col. ii, 9–10): Κυπρο]γένεια τέλει τελέαν ἐπαοιδήν.
54 Fr. 29 K.–A. = Ael. NA 12.9; see Faraone, C.A., ‘Aristophanes Amphiaraus fr. 29 (K.–A.): oracular response or erotic incantation?’, CQ 42 (1992), 320–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
55 See Fontenrose, J.E., The Delphic Oracle: Its Responses and Operations with a Catalogue of Responses (Berkeley, 1978), 154–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar and C. Platter, Aristophanes and the Carnival of Genres (Baltimore, 2007), 108–42.
56 See Tavenner (n. 21), 110–11 and Capponi (n. 21), 295–6, who quote and discuss all the relevant passages in the natural historians and the scholia to Pindar and Theocritus.
57 Faraone (n. 7 [1999]), 64–5.
58 Ps.-Hdt. Vit. Hom. 32 = Epigr. 14.13–14. This curse was probably composed in the late Classical or Hellenistic period; for a detailed discussion, see C.A. Faraone, ‘A collection of curses against kilns (Homeric Epigram 13.7–23)’, in A.Y. Collins and M.M. Mitchell (edd.), Antiquity and Humanity: Essays on Ancient Religion and Philosophy Presented to Hans Dieter Betz on his 70th Birthday (Tubingen, 2001), 435–50. The Life was composed in Ionic prose during 50–150 c.e. and embeds a number of much earlier hexametrical poems into a narrative frame that was itself probably based on the work of a sophistic contemporary of Plato's; see West, M.L., Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, Lives of Homer (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 304Google Scholar.
59 Rutherford, I., ‘The immortal words of Paean’, in Faraone, C.A. and Obbink, D. (edd.), The Getty Hexameters: Poetry, Magic and Mystery in Ancient Greek Selinous (Oxford, 2013), 157–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.