Erotic spells, potions, curses, and mojo

As the Nurse and Phaedra continue to talk about how to resolve Phaedra's plight -- her passion for Hippolytus -- in a way that does not involve her death, the Nurse alludes to the potency of verbal spells:

There are incantations, and words that charm: something will turn up to cure this love. [480]

εἰσὶν δ᾽ ἐπῳδαὶ καὶ λόγοι θελκτήριοι:
φανήσεταί τι τῆσδε φάρμακον νόσου. 480

A little while later, she says she suddenly remembers she has a drug in the house. She has already described Phaedra's condition as νόσος - which can mean literal sickness, as well as a bane, or madness, so thinking of a medicine is perfectly understandable. But it does shift the kind of magic from words to things:

Nurse 

I have love-medicine (θελκτήρια ἔρωτος) [510] within the house—I just thought of it this very moment—that will free you from this malady without disgrace to you or harm to your mind, if only you do not flinch. 

***We must get some token from the man you love, a lock of hair, a piece of clothing, [515] then compound from the twain a single blessing.*** 

Phaedra 

This drug (φάρμακον), is it an ointment or a potion? 

Nurse 

I know not: strive for benefit, not lore.

Note the lines above in italics are omitted in Grene's edition, but are found in Kovacs on Perseus. To complicate matters, Richard Hamilton's Bryn Mawr edition has "word" (logos) instead of "lock of hair" (πλόκον). He assumes it would be a magic word identifying Hippolytus.

Phaedra asks about the medicine. But for the Nurse, once it's a question of a potion, ointment, or compound, bothering to understand what it is becomes pointless. All that matters is what it does.

There seems a certain incoherence here. The Nurse's words lead us to think she intends some magic drug or object. Yet in the next scene, the first thing we learn when, mediated by Phaedra, we overhear the Nurse talking to Hippolytus is that she has revealed to him Phaedra's passion for him. We never hear the Nurse's exact words, or learn why she tells him, and we also do not hear her extracting his oath of silence. We the audience have auditory gaps in our understanding. This will probably merit some attention further on. The seeming inconsistency might explain why Grene omits the lines that introduce thingly magic entirely. 

For now I just want to point to some of the thinking about ancient love spells, charms, and the like, since these modes of trying to cause someone to fall in love, or to fall out of love with someone else (separation spells), seem to go back as far as language and inscriptions can take us. 

Christopher Faraone associates much erotic incantation with the form of the curse. "What I discovered was that most of the technologies that are used in spells for throwing erotic passion into someone are borrowed from the realm of cursing," he says in an interview.

Eleni Pachoumi surveys several kinds of spells in this article. Some are supposed to lead the loved one to the lover; others unbind them from those they currently love. She also speaks of defixiones -- curse tablets in which a god or gods are asked to do harm to someone.

[Update: Here's a note on two medieval love charms.]

Incidentally, it is gratifying to see articles like Pachoumi's published in an open access format, rather than behind the accursed paywalls of JSTOR, Project MUSE, or others.

Here's an ancient curse - the words and translation are here:

Horace's very funny satire I.8, has Priapus as a half-carved block of wood recounting how he was forced to confront two witches invading Maecenas's garden.

While Horace was having his laugh, credence in the power of lotions, powders and potions that attract, separate, or destroy is alive and well in the world of love, magic and commerce:

Lucky Mojo

Nietzsche on Horace

In his last year of literary production, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote several books, including Twilight of the Idols. By the time this book hit the booksellers, Nietzsche was no longer sane - he didn't recognize his own works. This is one of the last passages from that last work, in which he begins to reflect on his literary relationship to the ancients. The whole passage can be found here by scrolling nearly to the end.

WHAT I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS

1 In conclusion, a word about that world to which I sought interpretations, for which I have perhaps found a new interpretation — the ancient world. My taste, which may be the opposite of a tolerant taste, is in this case very far from saying Yes indiscriminately: it does not like to say Yes; better to say No, but best of all to say nothing. That applies to whole cultures, it applies to books — also to places and landscapes. In the end there are very few ancient books that count in my life: the most famous are not among them. My sense of style, of the epigram as a style, was awakened almost instantly when I came into contact with Sallust. Compact, severe, with as much substance as possible, a cold sarcasm toward "beautiful words" and "beautiful sentiments" — here I found myself. And even in my Zarathustra one will recognize my very serious effort to achieve a Roman style, for the aere perennius [more enduring than bronze] in style.

Nor was my experience any different in my first contact with Horace. To this day, no other poet has given me the same artistic delight that a Horatian ode gave me from the first. In certain languages that which Horace has achieved could not even be attempted. This mosaic of words, in which every word — as sound, as place, as concept — pours out its strength right and left and over the whole, this minimum in the extent and number of the signs, and the maximum thereby attained in the energy of the signs — all that is Roman and, if you will believe me, noble par excellence. All the rest of poetry becomes, in contrast, something too popular — mere sentimental blather.

Horatian Mash-Up

Thespis, they say, discovered the Tragic Muse,
An unknown form, presenting his plays from carts,
Sung and acted by men, faces smeared with wine-lees. (faecibus)
Aeschylus, after him, introduced masks, fine robes,
Had a modest stage made of planks, and demanded
Sonorous speech, and the effort of wearing buskins.
Old Comedy came next, winning no little praise,
But its freedoms led to excess, to unruliness
Needing legal curb: the law was obeyed, the chorus,
Shamefully, fell silent, losing its rights of attack.

Horace, Ars Poetica

As we discovered reading Horace last year, he's more our contemporary than most. Here, a group of Flamenco dancers, using swarm technology, take a kind of satyr's chorus to the bank.

To Mercury

Horace Odes I.10:

Mercuri facunde nepos Atlantis,

qui feros cultus hominum recentum

voce formasti catus et decorae

more palaestrae,

te canam, magni Iovis et deorum

nuntium curvaeque lyrae parentem,

callidum, quidquid placuit, iocoso

condere furto.

te, boves olim nisi reddidisses

per dolum amotas, puerum minaci

voce dum terret, viduus pharetra

risit Apollo.

quin et Atridas duce te superbos

Ilio dives Priamus relicto

Thessalosque ignis et iniqua Troiae

castra fefellit.

tu pias laetis animas reponis

sedibus virgaque levem coerces

aurea turbam, superis deorum

gratus et imis.

An old translation by John Conington, 1882:

Grandson of Atlas, wise of tongue,

O Mercury, whose wit could tame

Man's savage youth by power of song

And plastic game!

Thee sing I, herald of the sky,

Who gav'st the lyre its music sweet,

Hiding whate'er might please thine eye

In frolic cheat.

See, threatening thee, poor guileless child,

Apollo claims, in angry tone,

His cattle;—all at once he smiled,

His quiver gone.

Strong in thy guidance, Hector's sire

Escaped the Atridae, pass'd between

Thessalian tents and warders' fire,

Of all unseen,

Thou lay'st unspotted souls to rest;

Thy golden rod pale spectres know;

Blest power! by all thy brethren blest,

Above, below!

Two translations of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes: Evelyn-White, and here.

The Satyr in the corner

NPR had an interesting story recently about Botticelli's painting, Venus and Mars. Apparently no scholar had noticed until now that in the lower right corner, next to the little horned satyr, is a plant known to possess hallucinogenic powers.

This opened a new angle of interpretive interest in the painting, about which we can read more here. The point of interest just now is the presence of the satyr. Horace will also bring satyrs into the Ars Poetica more than once, and of course made his poetic reputation first as a writer of satires. While "satire" does not derive directly from the Greek word for satyr, Σάτυρος, the literary use of the term seems to have been influenced by it.


From Wikipedia:

The satyrs' chief was Silenus, a minor deity associated (like Hermes and Priapus) with fertility. These characters can be found in the only remaining satyr play Cyclops by Euripedes and the fragments of Sophocles' The Tracking Satyrs (Ichneutae). The satyr play was a lighthearted follow-up attached to the end of each trilogy of tragedies in Athenian festivals honoring Dionysus. These plays would take a lighthearted approach to the heavier subject matter of the tragedies in the series, featuring heroes speaking in tragic iambic verse and taking their situation seriously as to the flippant, irreverent and obscene remarks and antics of the satyrs. The groundbreaking tragic playwright Aeschylus is said to have been especially loved for his satyr plays, but none of them have survived.


More here.

A few supplemental links for Horace

Horace tacitly assumes his readers will be entirely familiar with Aristotle's Poetics, which he cites, alludes to, and plays off of throughout the Ars Poetica.

Many of the key oppositions in the Ars -- virtus et venus, ordo / facundia, utile / dulce - derive from Aristotle's systematic approach to speech and theater in the Poetics as well as in the Rhetoric.

Here is how the philosopher parses the modes of persuasion:

it has three divisions -- (1) the speaker's power of evincing a personal character which will make his speech credible (ethos); (2) his power of stirring the emotions of his hearers (pathos); (3) his power of proving a truth, or an apparent truth, by means of persuasive arguments (logos).

The rich Greek word logos (λόγος) is set in opposition to lexis, the outward form that motions of the soul take when clothed in words. See, in the Poetics, book III, on style. Curiously, even as this distinction becomes a fundamental opposition in the Ars Poetica, its binary terms are actually forms of the same root, as Wikipedia notes:

both words, both logos and lexis derive from the same verb legō (λέγω), meaning "to count, tell, say, speak."

Finally, the question of where poets are supposed to acquire the logos:

To have good sense, is the first principle and fountain of writing well. 

            scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons. 

leads to Plato:

 The Socratic papers will direct you in the choice of your subjects

For the readers of the Ars Poetica, the Symposium and the Phaedrus, and the Republic, at the least, would help. Behind the tension between logos and lexis stands the banishment of the poets by the Philosopher King.

To Torquatus: Practice with Horace

From A.S. Kline's online Horace:

Bk I Ep V:1-31 An invitation to dinner

If you can bear to recline at dinner on a couch

By Archias, and dine off a modest dish of greens,

Torquatus, I’ll expect to see you here at sunset.

You’ll drink wine bottled in Taurus’ second term,

Between marshy Minturnae, and Mount Petrinum 

Near Sinuessa. If you’ve better, have it brought,    

Or obey orders! The hearth’s bright, the furniture’s

Already been straightened. Forget airy hopes, the fight

For wealth, and Moschus’ case: tomorrow, Caesar’s birthday

Gives us a reason for sleeping late: we’re free to spend

A summer’s night in pleasant talk with impunity.

What’s the use of my fortune if I can’t enjoy it?

The man who scrimps and saves on behalf of his heirs,

Too much, is next to mad. I’ll start the drinking, scatter

Flowers, and even allow you to think me indiscreet. 

What can’t drunkenness do? It unlocks secrets, and makes

Secure our hopes, urges the coward on to battle,

Lifts the weight from anxious hearts, teaches new skills.

Whom has the flowing wine-bowl not made eloquent?

Whom constrained by poverty has it not set free?  

Here’s what, willing and able, I commit myself

To provide: no dirty seat-covers, no soiled napkins

To offend your nose, no plate or tankard where you can’t

See yourself, no one to carry abroad what’s spoken

Between good friends, so like may meet and be joined  

To like. I’ll have Butra and Septicius for you,

And Sabinus unless he’s detained by a prior

Engagement, and a prettier girl. There’s room too

For your ‘shadows’: but goatish smells spoil overcrowded

Feasts. You reply with how many you want, then drop 

Your affairs: out the back, evade the client in the hall!  

This letter to Torquatus breathes the urbanity of Horace. At once casual, conversational, and learned, amusing, yet never to be underestimated in terms of his range of reference.

In this brief invitation to a lawyer friend, he downplays his furniture, specifies the wine (with allusions that might relate to the lawyer's family history), freely labels fiscally conservative people as borderline mad (insano), then launches into a vision of how he'll begin drinking and scattering flowers, and even let his legal eagle buddy think him less than entirely discreet (inconsultus).

This leads to the question at the exact midpoint of the poem (Horace is big on centers):

Quid non ebrietas dissignat?

What can intoxication not unseal?

The poem then turns to explore manifold modes of opening that link indiscretion with courage, confidence with confidentiality, empowerment to learn with encouragement to hope, eloquence of tongue with the accession to a kind of freedom from care.

From the promised flow of wine and talk, the poet goes on to talk about his napkins, silverware and who's on the guest list. The thought of close quarters sets up a joke about body odor.

The remarkable fluidity of the poem, its physicality, its playful scamper up and down the tonal gamut, the joy of anticipating an intimate evening with trusted friends, seems effortless -- how could anyone, even a harried lawyer, refuse the enticing summons:

rebus omissis

atria servantem postico falle clientem

                                                       then drop                      

Your affairs: out the back, evade the client in the hall!     

Fish and Horace on Classical Education

In today's times, Stanley Fish, former Milton scholar and current New York Times blogger, offers "A Classical Education, Back to the Future," in which he discusses three books that appear to share the common aim of persuading the nation of the need to return to a classical model of education.

As we begin to read Horace's Epistle to the Pisos, it might be worth looking at how the Roman poet speaks to us of the uses and abuses of art, of poetry, of making in a very broad sense (poiesis), and then ask whether, after spending some time with him, we think Horace would applaud the classical model that Fish presents.

Links for Horace

Horace didn't call his poem about poetry "Ars Poetica" - that title was conferred only later. It was known in his day as the third poem of his second book of Epistles. It was also known as the Epistula ad Pisones (Letters to the Pisos, a prominent plebeian Roman family).

It's worth noting that the second book of Epistles, published in 14 B.C., contains only three fairly long poems. The first of these mature works, Epistles II.i, is addressed to Emperor Augustus, and is a wide ranging summation of the poet's thoughts about Roman culture, its relation to the Greeks, the place of the arts and of poetry in the larger cultural matrix. Epistles II.ii, To Florus, is a witty tour de force about why he never answers letters and dislikes writing poetry. It deepens into a meditation on time, its passing, and on the relation of poetry to philosophy.

Epistles II.iii, Ad Pisos, is Horace's best known, most widely quoted poem. Here are a few links:

The Perseus site offers the Latin text - click on almost any word, and it will open a new page where you can get brief or detailed dictionary entries for the word. A few nouns are not defined because they are "obscene," by the standards of Classical Lit editors and professors.

Perseus also allows you to open an English prose translation on the same page. Go to the right, and click where it says "load," and this will open the English next to the Latin, with footnotes below the English. If you click on "focus," the English text will open on the left, and the Latin will disappear (but can be opened by clicking on "load," on the right. It's rather arcane.)

For those who wish to refer to the Perseus English without bothering with the Latin, the full English prose translation is here,.with line numbers and notes. This has the advantage of having the English all on one page.

Another translation we'll be using is A. S. Kline's free verse version, with a few notes, here.

So, for now, three ways to access Horace's Ad Pisos:

Perseus Site (Hyperlinked Latin + English Prose with notes)

Perseus English on one page

Kline