Papers by Christopher Faraone
Phoenix, 1990
uses the eca6b ipdi to facilitate her famous deception of Zeus. Deianeira, in a last-ditch effort... more 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.
Romanitas - Revista de Estudos Grecolatinos, 2017
In this article, we propose to analyze the connection between Zeus Dodonaios and Serapis in the G... more In this article, we propose to analyze the connection between Zeus Dodonaios and Serapis in the Greek world from the analysis of some magical gems bearing representations of Zeus Dodonaios enthroned as Sarapis and reports collected from the Greek Magical Papyri.
Kernos, 2017
Centre international d'étude de la religion grecque antique
The close connection between initiation into a mystery cult and acquisition of a special kind of ... more The close connection between initiation into a mystery cult and acquisition of a special kind of post-mortem comfort or status has been thoroughly discussed by modern scholars, but in recent years this discussion has shifted to include the non-eschatological benefits that initiation was also thought to confer. Walter Burkert, for example, has stressed how some initiates claim to be protected in times of physical danger in this world, as well as in the next. His two clearest examples are Samothracian initiates, who were thought to enjoy special immunity from shipwreck and storms at sea, and Mithraic initiates, who were believed to have a similar advantage on the battlefield. 1 I shall argue that a neglected passage from a Euripidean satyr-play reflects a similar tradition connected with Orphic-Dionysiac initiations. In the Cyclops, a play set on the island of Sicily, the chorus of satyrs, who strongly identify themselves as devotees of Dionysus, claim to know an incantation of Orpheus that will bring down a form of fiery destruction upon their enemy-in this case the eponymous ogre of the play. As we shall see, some of the language used to describe this spell echoes that used in traditional hexametrical incantations of the fifth-century. In their boast about the power of this Orphic spell, moreover , the satyrs diverge from the canonical Homeric version of the Cyclops' story in ways that suggest they are recalling a popular Orphic myth about the Titans, who murdered and ate the young Dionysus, and their subsequent punishment at the hands of Zeus. As we shall see, this variation also fits into a wider pattern, in which theogonic or cosmogonic myths are used in protective incantations to recall a primordial moment in history when the forces of order, in this case Zeus, triumph over the forces of destruction and havoc. The satyrs' boast about their Orphic charm, then, provides good evidence for both the linguistic form and the narrative content of Orphic incantations that were in use in ancient Athens in the fifth century.
Mhnh Revista Internacional De Investigacion Sobre Magia Y Astrologia Antiguas, 2012
Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, 2005
On these conditions they made an agreement, those who stayed there (i.e. on Thera) and those who ... more On these conditions they made an agreement, those who stayed there (i.e. on Thera) and those who sailed on the colonial expedition, and they put
Continuity and Innovation in the Magical Tradition
Kernos, 2014
Although it was the focus of extended discussion at the turn of the last century, the reuse of Ne... more Although it was the focus of extended discussion at the turn of the last century, the reuse of Neolithic axe-heads-also known as "celts" or "thunderstones"-as amulets in Roman times is nowadays underappreciated. 1 As a result, the ancient date of two small inscribed examples in the British Museum (BM nos. 1* and 504) is now in doubt, 2 a negative assessment that arises, I will suggest, from the use of insufficient comparanda. When compared with the growing corpus of magical gems, the media of these two small axe-heads (jadeite or serpentine), their high polish and their shape do indeed seem suspicious and difficult to assess as gems, but when viewed alongside other, inscribed and uninscribed thunderstones found in Roman and later sites, we can see that both of the London stones belong to a clearly defined category of body-amulets. 2 Such stones were originally shaped and polished in Neolithic times and used as axes or adzes, either hand-held or attached to a wooden haft. But they sometimes turn up in later archaeological sites or graves from the Bronze Age down to the medieval period, because they were apparently thought to have some kind of magical power to protect buildings and people, especially from lightning and violent storms. We know something about these beliefs thanks to a string of testimonia in technical treatises on stones, beginning with a third-century BCE Greek author named Sotacus and ending with a twelfth-century bishop of Rennes. At least ten of these prehistoric axe-heads carry Greek inscriptions and sometimes Egyptianizing images that corroborate their use as amulets during the Roman Empire. We shall see, too, that nearly all of the inscribed thunderstones of known provenance come from the eastern half of the Mediterranean, although many uninscribed examples were clearly reused as amulets in Italy, France, Britain and elsewhere. One should stress, moreover, the fact that there is no evidence that the Greeks or Romans realized that these axe-heads were manufactured by previous stone-age cultures and
Demokratie, Recht und soziale Kontrolle im klassischen Athen
Despite the reluctance of some modern scholars to discuss the topic, the ancient Greeks, like the... more Despite the reluctance of some modern scholars to discuss the topic, the ancient Greeks, like their Near Eastern neighbors, used curses for a variety of purposes, sometimes to control social disputes and sometimes to exacerbate them 1. On the socially positive side, we find that conditional self-curses were a regular part of important oath ceremonies to sanction treaties and political agreements, to keep public officials, athletes and prosecutors honest in competitive venues, and to vouchsafe important testimony about paternity or citizenship. On the other hand, private binding curses were often deployed in some of the same competitive arenas to prevent open and free competition between private citizens, a social practice that underscores an important parallelism between athletic games and legal courts as areas that focus and exacerbate aggressive competition, rather than diffuse it. The best example of the socially constructive use of curses is to be found in this oath used by the people of Thera in the seventh century BCE, when they sent off colonists to found the city of Cyrene in Libya 2 : On these conditions they made an agreement, those who stayed there (i.e. in Thera) and those who sailed on the colonial expedition, and they put curses (arai) on those who should transgress these conditions and not abide by them ... They molded wax images and burnt them up while they uttered the following imprecation, all of them, having come together, men and women, boys and girls: "May he, who does not abide by these oaths but transgresses them, melt away and dissolve like the images-himself, his seed and his property."
Sacred Words: Orality, Literacy and Religion
Words, especially well crafted or set in special meters or rhythms, can have a powerful impact on... more Words, especially well crafted or set in special meters or rhythms, can have a powerful impact on sentient beings, both divine and human. This idea is, of course, a central tenet of most human societies and it was important to the ancient Greeks, who were especially conscious of the need to cultivate the science of rhetoric and who in many ways became obsessed with its special power. That words can likewise affect or influence the natural world is a more difficult proposition for most moderns to accept, but this too was a popular idea among the Greeks. We hear, for instance, of Orpheus, a mythical hexametrical poet, who moved trees and boulders with his songs and of Empedocles, the famous Sicilian poet and charismatic, who in his own verses claims to know how to heal the sick and control the weather by means of his poetry. And the recent publication or republication of a series of inscribed lead amulets from Crete and Magna Graeca provides for the first time important new evidence that the Greeks in the late-classical period used hexametrical verses in a similar manner to ward off danger from their houses and persons. Parallels, moreover, between these new texts and previously known literary accounts allow us to see where and how contemporary authors quote or paraphrase traditional charms and how these charms change from one area of Greece to another and from one time period to the next. A propos of this volume, I discuss these hexametrical incantations as both oral and written phenomena, beginning with the growing evidence that the Greeks from the fifth-century onwards used such incantations for a variety of purposes. As we shall see, variations in these texts point to an even older (and now invisible) oral prehistory. The inscribed lead amulets, on the other hand, are themselves obvious testimony to an entirely new phenomenon: the special power of these same incantations once they are preserved in writing. I close my paper by discussing how one of the Sicilian amulets emphatically calls attention to itself as a text that is powerful precisely because it is written down.
Mnemosyne, 2011
The different epigraphic versions of the so-called Erythraean Paean date from the early fourth ce... more 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 ent...
Transactions of the American Philological Association, 2013
Some Hesiodic catalogues praise the individual named last as superlative and worthy of greater de... more Some Hesiodic catalogues praise the individual named last as superlative and worthy of greater description or narrative. This traditional feature reveals different levels of composition. The catalogues of the Muses or the Titans, for example, reveal two versions, one claiming that groups operate collectively and another stressing the individual agency of the last-named sibling (Calliope or Cronus). In other cases the original framework of the catalogue seems to have been extended by additional names that aim at a different compositional scheme. Plato's myth of the locusts in the Phaedrus (259c-d) and the closing verses of the famous Catalogue of Ships in Iliad 2 may reflect the same phenomenon. * I would like to thank Jacobo Myerston, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, who in the course of a dissertation on the Mesopotamian and Greek poetic practices of etymology asked in the summer of 2008 that we read in close detail the catalogues of the Hesiodic Theogony, because they are often rich in etymological detail. By reading the catalogues in isolation I came unexpectedly to appreciate the sophistication and artistry of the Hesiodic catalogue as a poetic form. Earlier versions of this paper were given as lectures at the
Mnemosyne, 2004
Metis appears twice in the Hesiodic corpus as an anthropomorphic goddess, who is courted and then... more Metis appears twice in the Hesiodic corpus as an anthropomorphic goddess, who is courted and then ingested by Zeus. In the Theogony this narrative ends with the permanent stabilization of his monarchic rule over gods and men. We argue that the myth of Metis and Zeus most probably derives - directly or indirectly - from Egyptian royal ideology, as it is expressed most emphatically in a series of New Kingdom and later (i.e. 1500 BCE-200 CE) texts and relief sculptures that depict the offering to various monarchical male gods of the goddess Maat. Like Hesiodic Mêtis/mêtis, Maat appears in Egyptian texts both as an abstract idea (maat) and as an anthropomorphized goddess Maat and several odd details in the Hesiodic narratives can be explained by Egyptian influence, especially the idea that Zeus swallows Metis and that afterwards she gives him moral guidance. Metis and Egyptian Maat are both closely connected to the idea of legitimate monarchic rule, a relationship that is expressed by t...
Kernos, 2010
Centre international d'étude de la religion grecque antique
The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1997
The separate entrances of the male and female semi-choruses in Aristophanes'Lysistrataare mar... more The separate entrances of the male and female semi-choruses in Aristophanes'Lysistrataare marked by an unusual bit of stagecraft whose importance to a general theme of the play the salvation of Athens–has never been fully appreciated. The old men enter the stage at v. 254 each carrying a pair of olive-wood logs, a vine torch and a small pot of live embers. Having heard that Lysistrata and her comrades have taken control of the Acropolis, they come intent on burning down the gates of the citadel and removing the women, whom they liken to the Spartan general Cleomenes who occupied the citadel in 510. The men pile their logs before the closed gate, ignite their torches in the hot coals and then try to set fire to the logs (vv. 307-11). But after a few minutes of hilarious bumbling their plans are foiled for good by the sudden appearance of a semi-chorus of old women who rush in with water-jars on their shoulders or in their hands; these women threaten the men and then finally–with ...
The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1993
The so-called ‘Cyrenean Foundation Decree’ describes and paraphrases what appears to be the oath ... more The so-called ‘Cyrenean Foundation Decree’ describes and paraphrases what appears to be the oath of the seventh-century Theran colonists who founded the city of Cyrene in Libya. This oath contains a conditional self-imprecation, a common enough feature of many Greek oaths, but one which in this case involves wax effigies in what can best be described as a ritual employing ‘sympathetic magic’:
The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 2011
At the heart of the Thesmophoria festival lies the story of Persephone and the promise of agricul... more At the heart of the Thesmophoria festival lies the story of Persephone and the promise of agricultural fertility, but scholars point out that more seems to be at stake, suggesting that the scene of women ‘camping out’ in the sanctuary under the control of the female archons recalls a primitive time when women, perhaps, ruled the city or that the festival creates a place where women are at least beyond the control of men. There are hints, moreover, that during the Thesmophoria women were also actively involved in some kind of juridical activity, especially on the second day of the festival, when they fasted in imitation of Demeter's grief over the abduction of Persephone and the injustice perpetrated against her. Indeed, the epithet Thesmophoros was understood already in ancient times to have some connection with human law. This paper argues that on the second day of the festival women engaged in some kind of impromptu juridical procedure aimed at solving crimes and punishing ano...
Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 2007
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Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, 2009
N RECENT YEARS the publication and re-edition of a series of late-classical lead amulets from Cre... more N RECENT YEARS the publication and re-edition of a series of late-classical lead amulets from Crete and Sicily have revealed a fairly widespread Greek tradition of protective hexametrical incantations similar in its geographical and chronological range to that of the so-called Orphic Gold Tablets. 1 This tradition is, moreover, reflected in even earlier Greek literature, for example in the description of Helen's famous pharmakon in the Odyssey and the boast of the disguised Demeter in her Homeric hymn. 2 Although the dactylic hexameter appears to have been a more popular vehicle for protective incantations in the Greek world, recent studies of magical papyri, lamellae, and gemstones reveal that the iambic trimeter and occasionally the trochaic tetrameter were used in similar ways. These new studies provide ample material for a fuller and more nuanced discussion of various features of the genre, such as length, syntax, and metrical shape, as well as special poetic effects, for example alliteration and word repetition.
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Papers by Christopher Faraone