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Ancient Greek Love Magic Ancient Greek Love Magic Christopher A. Faraone Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Copyright © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Second printing, 2001 First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2001 library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Faraone, Christopher A. Ancient Greek love magic / Christopher A. Faraone. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 0-674-03320-5 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-00696-8 (pbk.) 1. Magic, Greek. 2. Love—Miscellanea—History. I. Title. BF1591.F37 1999 133.4Ј42Ј0938—dc21 99-10676 For Susan sê gfir Ãn seautá tfi f©rmaka Æxeiv (Plutarch Moralia 141c) Contents Preface ix 1 Introduction 1 1.1 The Ubiquity of Love Magic 5 1.2 Definitions and a New Taxonomy 15 1.3 The Advantages of a Synchronic and Comparative Approach 30 2 Spells for Inducing Uncontrollable Passion (Ero%s) 41 2.1 If ErÃs Is a Disease, Then Erotic Magic Is a Curse 43 2.2 Jason’s Iunx and the Greek Tradition of Ago%ge% Spells 55 2.3 Apples for Atalanta and Pomegranates for Persephone 69 2.4 The Transitory Violence of Greek Weddings and Erotic Magic 78 3 Spells for Inducing Affection (Philia) 96 3.1 Aphrodite’s Kestos Himas and Other Amuletic Love Charms 97 3.2 Deianeira’s Mistake: The Confusion of Love Potions and Poisons 110 3.3 Narcotics and Knotted Cords: The Subversive Cast of Philia Magic 119 4 Some Final Thoughts on History, Gender, and Desire 132 4.1 From Aphrodite to the Restless Dead: A Brief History of the AgÃgÁ Spell 133 4.2 Courtesans, Freedmen, and the Social Construction of Gender 146 4.3 Aelian’s Tortoises and the Representation of the Desiring Subject 160 Contents viii Glossary 175 Abbreviations 179 Bibliography 183 Subject Index 205 Index of Foreign Words 213 Index of Passages from Ancient Authors 217 Index of Magical Texts 221 Preface Despite the well-documented separation and polarization of male and female spheres of action in ancient Greece, scholars traditionally treat love charms as one undifferentiated mass of data and assume that individuals of either gender could without discrimination use any type of charm they wished on any victim they so chose. I offer here a survey of ancient Greek love magic and a new bipolar taxonomy based mainly on the genders of the agents and their victims: those rituals used mainly by men to instill erotic passion (erôs) in women and those used primarily by women to maintain or increase affection (philia) in men. This taxonomy is not procrustean, however, and in the final chapter I discuss several important deviations from it, suggesting that most of the apparent anomalies in the gender of the person using a spell are not in fact anomalies at all, but rather give us some new and interesting insights into how ancient Greek ideas about gender were socially constructed. In the case of philia-producing magic, for instance, I show how freedmen and other socially subordinate males are constructed as female, according to widespread patriarchal notions of fe- male inferiority. Conversely I argue that courtesans and prostitutes employ aggressive erotic magic—usually the purview of males—because, as autonomous operators free to indulge in their passions, these women are constructed as male in Greek culture. Finally, I discuss of how the Greeks constructed the victims of these spells as desiring subjects. My conclusions here may surprise some readers, as they did, indeed, surprise me, for they call into question the widespread orthodoxy of what we might call the “misogynist” model of Greek culture, which generally attributes men’s mis- treatment and control of women to their fears that women are “naturally” lascivious and are therefore a constant threat to male schemes for the orderly transference of property by means of betrothal and marriage. I argue to the contrary that the evidence assembled here suggests the exist- ence of another, competing set of cultural assumptions, which I call the “misandrist” model, according to which men are the “naturally” lascivious Preface x and wild gender, who often need to be sedated and controlled by “natu- rally” moderate and chaste women. It has been my goal to write a book for the generally educated person who has no familiarity with the ancient Greek language or the often equally arcane jargon of professional scholars. This approach has appreciably lengthened the gestation period of this study, during which I have publish- ed a series of more technical arguments in various professional journals, where I have laid out in considerably more detail the historical and phi- lological evidence for some of the assertions in this volume. This does not mean, of course, that this book is without use to professional scholars or graduate students, but rather that they may from time to time want to consult these earlier studies for more detailed arguments. Acknowledgments This book is the fruit of some seven years’ labor and as such requires a somewhat extended list of acknowledgments. My initial interest in the subject was sparked by one of the most stimulating teachers I have ever encountered: Jack Winkler, to whom I owe an entire Greek chorus of thanks for having challenged me to think for myself even when it meant that I ended up disagreeing with him, as I do from time to time in this volume. It saddens me greatly that he will not see the results of our many conversations about the nature and taxonomy of ancient Greek love magic and what such a taxonomy might tell us about Greek notions of desire and gender. Many thanks also to my friends and colleagues at the University of Chicago, especially to Bob Kaster, for first suggesting that I write a book on this subject and for supporting me in ways too numerous to mention; and to Jamie Redfield, for our many hours of team-teaching and conversation, which have taught me more about ancient Greek culture than most books on the subject. I also owe many special thanks to Zeph and Diana Stewart, codirec- tors of the Center for Hellenic Studies, to the other junior fellows, and to the staff for making my stay during the academic year 1991–92 a particu- larly enjoyable and productive one; and I am deeply grateful to the Hu- manities Division of the University of Chicago for help in funding my stay there. For it was there and then that I laid out the foundations for this project and began to test many of my arguments. Timely grants from the Preface xi National Endowment for the Humanities in 1995–1996 and the Guggen- heim Foundation in 1997 allowed me to finish the project, but none of this would have been possible in a department as busy as ours without the active support, flexibility, and encouragement from my chairmen, first Braxton Ross and then Bob Kaster, and especially from Philip Gossett, the Dean of the Division of the Humanities. This book has benefited enormously from the time and energy of many other people as well. First, I should like to thank H. D. Betz, W. Brashear, R. Daniel, J. Gager, A. Henrichs, D. R. Jordan, R. Kotansky, F. Maltomini, D. Martinez, R. Merkelbach, E. Voutiras, and D. Wortmann, who in the last two and a half decades have spearheaded the renewed inquiry into ancient Greek magic with a steady stream of new editions, surveys, translations, and detailed studies of epigraphic and papyrological texts that have put the study of magical texts on an extraordinarily firm textual and historical basis. It is no exaggeration to say that without their primary research I could not have even conceived of this project, a point that all scholars should remember in this age when so much of the basic research in the arts and sciences is threatened. At its best, I think, scholarly research is a team effort, with each individual building on and contributing to the work of others; if we who study ancient societies allow such crucial colleagues as archaeologists, epigraphers, and papyrologists to go unsup- ported, the whole team suffers considerably and in time our endeavor will falter. As it turns out, many of the individuals named above have also taken the time over the last seven years to answer queries and look over earlier drafts of lectures and essays that eventually made their way into this book. I am particularly grateful for the help and expertise of D. Bain, H. D. Betz, M. Blundell, M. Dickie, K. Dover, M. W. Edwards, H. Foley, D. Halperin, J. Henderson, A. Henrichs, R. Janko, D. Obbink, W. H. Race, E. Reiner, J. Scurlock, R. Seaford, L. Slatkin, H. S. Versnel, and F. Zeitlin. But the greatest thanks are owed to Danielle Allen, Maud Gleason, Fritz Graf, Sarah Johnston, Bob Kaster, Marilyn Arthur Katz, Ludwig Koenen, Roy Kotansky, Bruce Lincoln, and two anonymous readers at Harvard University Press, who read through various versions of the entire manuscript, offering me much important advice and saving me from numerous blunders. To those whose early comments and help I have inadvertently omitted, I offer my sincere apologies. Thanks, also, to Mr. Kenneth Wear for his help in assem- Preface xii bling and typing the bibliography, and to Ms. Deva Kemmis Hicks for her assistance with the preliminary versions of the indexes. I owe a very different and special kind of gratitude to my children, Alex and Amanda, and my wife, Susan, for their patience and their love. Finally, I am grateful to the journals that have allowed me to use previously published material here.