Franek / Urbanová / Ehmig Performative Adjuration Formula in Greek and Latin Inscriptions

A Survey of Amulets, Curse Tablets, and Funerary Monuments
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-8233-0520-0
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 4, 364 Seiten

Reihe: Sprachvergleich

The edited volume presents the rst comprehensive corpus of performative adjuration formulae collated from Greek and Latin epigraphical sources. The original texts-for the most part artefacts connected with magico-religious beliefs and practices of their users-are all translated into English and accompanied by a philological and socio-religious commentary. The international team of three specialists adopts a synoptic approach that tracks various classes of epigraphic documents to analyse permutations and developments in the syntactic structure of the adjuration formula, and its pragmatic function. This major study of the adjuration formula in Antiquity and its continued tradition in the Middle Ages will be of interest not only to the scholars of these linguistic traditions, but also to researchers working in the elds of Religious Studies, Ancient History, Theology, and Archaeology.

Juraj Franek, Associate Professor at the Department of Classical Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, specializes in Greek epigraphy, early Christian literature and methodological approaches to religious. Daniela Urbanová, Professor at the Department of Classical Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, specializes in Ancient magic and Roman epigraphy (especially archaic inscriptions and curse tablets). Ulrike Ehmig is the director of the Corpus Insciptionum Latinarum at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Franek, Juraj

Urbanová, Daniela

Ehmig, Ulrike

Leseproben

1.1 Methodology
The corpus of epigraphical documents collated in this survey involves 171 entries in total, of which 119 are inscribed in Greek and 52 in Latin. The Greek material is not only more numerous, but also often more varied, with lengthier and more elaborated texts than its Latin counterparts. Performative adjuration formula has been attested almost exclusively in three types of documents: curse tablets (49 instances in total, with 36 Greek and 13 Latin), amulets (48 instances in total, 34 Greek and 14 Latin), and funerary inscriptions (71 instances in total, 49 Greek and 22 Latin). The exceptions to this rule are three Latin texts stemming from the Iberian Peninsula (155–157): a notarial document (155) and a sacral inscription (156), each preserved on a slate plate, and a dedicatory text preserved on a limestone slab (157). The texts included in this survey have been excerpted on the basis of a rather simple criterion: to qualify for inclusion, epigraphic documents of practical magic written in Greek and Latin were required to present at least one verb of adjuration (?????? and its prefixed variants in Greek, adiuro/coniuro in Latin) in a performative formula. Simply put, performativity in our context means that the formula is not merely transmitting information, but is intended to produce very specific yet variegated results, ranging from exercising influence on the outcome of chariot races (e.g. 64, 125) and curing the beneficiary from fever or other ailments (e.g. 8, 19) to gaining the affection of a love interest (e.g. 47, 120) and protecting the sanctity of the final resting place of family against grave robbers and/or repeated burials (virtually the entirety of the funerary inscriptions employing performative adjuration formula, 72–119; 133–154). The corpus of excerpted texts has been put together by a combination of using digital databases (see above), as well as rather meticulous analogue methods of scouring indices of epigraphical corpora, which has been necessary especially in the case of Greek material, given the wide variety of spellings of the verb of adjuration. While the requirement for an unambiguously attested ??????/???? in Greek and adiuro/coniuro in Latin was necessary for heuristic purposes, we must point out that functional equivalents of a performative adjuration formula may occasionally be identified even in instances where no ??????/adiuro has been used. First, semantically related verbs, most notably the Greek ?p??a???µa?, might be used in a formula that is structurally identical with a formula introduced by ??????/adiuro (37, 46, 56, 67); indeed, at times several semantically related verbs are grouped together to create an amplification effect in expressions such as ?p??a???µa? ?? pa?a?a?? ?a? ???????? ?µ?? (‘I call upon and I exhort and I adjure you’; 11) and ?????? se ?a? ??a??µa? se ?a? ??e???µa? s‹s›?? (‘I adjure you and I implore you and I pray to you’; 36). In Latin documents, we may cite the sequence adiuro te demon quicunque es et demando tibi (‘I adjure you, daemon, whoever you are, and I command you’) on a North African defixio (125) and coniuro vos et contestor per Patrem (‘I conjure and appeal to [you] through the Father’), preserved on a mediaeval amulets from Scandinavia (167, 171). Second, a verb of adjuration might be omitted entirely, yet without the allocution losing its performative force. By way of example, a magical gem preserved in the Biblioteca Universitaria Valencia, dated to the 3rd to 4th cent. CE, reads t?? ?e?? s?? t?? ???s{s}t?? µ? µe ?d???s?? on Side A and µ??a t? ???µa on Side B. The beginning of the inscription on Side A must be understood as (??????) t?? ?e?? s?? t?? ???s{s}t?? (‘I adjure you by the Highest God’), with the omitted verb governing the accusative that follows. To qualify for inclusion in the survey, the verb of adjuration also had to be attested in the text of the inscription proper, since editorial restitutions of verbs of adjuration are often highly conjectural. Examples with such restitutions include: (1) a fragment of a Roman terracotta lamp from Corinthus with an apotropaic formula, dated to the 6th cent. CE; (2) a fragment of a Christian liturgical exorcism on a silver lamella from Cyprus, invoking Jesus Christ, his apostles, and angels (possibly 4th cent. CE); (3) a Christian titulus from Sparta, a fragment of a marble stele dated to the 5th to 6th cent. CE, mentioning the Trinity and possibly threatening potential wrongdoers with the fiery wrath of God; (4) an undated Christian titulus from Lesbos, possibly invoking a ‘martyr’; (5) a pagan epitaph for Annia Eutychis from Thessaloniki, engraved on a sarcophagus and dated safely to the 2nd to 3rd cent. CE, apparently adjuring ‘heirs’ and ‘all the gods’ to prevent repeated burials; and, finally, (6) a much damaged, undated funerary inscription from Olympos (Lycia), invoking God Almighty, also to prevent future burials (and threatening a monetary sanction should someone violate the beneficiary’s wish). Another item not excerpted in our survey is the so-called Phalasarna tablet, a puzzling apotropaic text from Crete containing the sequence a???µeµp?µpa[..]et?????e, interpreted by David Jordan as ???õµeµ ?????[..]??O? ???e. To be sure, it is not impossible that the verb of adjuration (?????µe?) is here being used performatively, but the general sense of the adjuration is unclear and did not warrant inclusion in the corpus. The verb ???? with performative force is attested very rarely in our survey—only 7 of the 119 Greek epigraphic documents use it (73, 74, 104, and 118 have ????; 96, 98, and 99 employ the prefixed ??????). Another complicating factor is the dating of the Phalasarna tablet. The ‘4th or perhaps early 3rd century’ BCE, proposed by Jordan, would predate the earliest unambiguous use of a performative adjuration formula by several centuries. To achieve our primary aim of producing a compact, single-volume monograph accessible to a wider audience, with all texts translated into English, we had to narrow the focus to epigraphical documents involving practical magic and performative funerary adjurations, thereby also excluding material that is closely related to the spells and curses excerpted in our survey, namely handbooks and instructions for the preparation of spells found in the (rather inappropriately named) Greek Magical Papyri (PGM), edited in two volumes by Karl Preisendanz. In keeping with our methodology, we included only those items in PGM that count as documents of practical magic, as opposed to written instructions on how to prepare apotropaic amulets or curse tablets. The dividing line between the two groups is thin, to be sure, especially considering less experienced practitioners who miscopied the instructions found in magical handbooks (e.g. 9) or failed to replace the generic placeholder de??a (‘so-and-so’) with the name of the beneficiary (e.g. 28). The Greek documents are ripe with such errors, and we occasionally find them also in Latin texts—one interesting example is an amulet from Schleswig (164) where the writer apparently copied the entirety of the apotropaic spell from a formulary and forgot to include the name of the person that the amulet was supposed to protect, writing only N (possibly short for nomen and equivalent to the Greek de??a). That being said, markers of practical use do exist and include the insertion of the proper names of the beneficiaries (and/or targets in the case of curse tablets) or traces of folding, which either compressed the size of the papyrus or thin sheet of metal to make it easier to wear in a small container (in the case of amulets) or served as part of a ritual action (in the case of defixiones, with the folding of the tablet often followed by it being pierced with a nail). The material in the survey is organized by language (Greek, Latin) and document type (amulets, curse tablets, funerary inscriptions); within the resulting eight chapters, the entries are grouped together by location rather than date of origin. Each entry represents a single object, with several exceptions, most notably the ‘serial curses’ from Amathous (59) and Rome...