Ancient Greek Love Magic (review)

Ancient Greek Love Magic. By Christopher A. Faraone (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999) 223 pp. $35.00

This exemplary book studies ancient Greek magical spells designed to attract or keep lovers, and it advances a clear and persuasive argument. Faraone divides erotic spells into two distinct types: eros magic, "those rituals used generally by men to instill erotic passion in women," and philia magic, "those used generally by women to maintain or increase affection in men" (27, emphasis original). The first type tortured or maddened its victims, usually young women still in their natal home, so that they would leave their family and come to the user. The second type enervated or mollified its victims, usually male heads of household, so that they would reduce their anger and esteem and remain with their companion. The few examples of women using eros spells and men using philia spells reveal the socially constructed character of gender in ancient Greek culture. The women who used the traditionally male forms of erotic magic were courtesans and prostitutes, whose social autonomy and sexual freedom placed them, at least occasionally, in the "masculine" role according to the ancient gender ideology (146-160). The assumptions that structure these rituals--that men are naturally lustful and uncontrolled and that women are naturally chaste and self-controlled--disrupt the prevailing gender stereotypes in elite texts from antiquity, which usually assume the opposite (160-171). These spells, then, provide an illuminating access to ancient Greek ideologies of love, sexuality, and gender, which enriches and complicates the standard modern understandings of them.

As Faraone discusses in a particularly clear-headed way, the definition of "magic" and how, if at all, to distinguish it from "religion" and "science" are famously contested issues in modern scholarship (16-18). The very intractability of these problems signals the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach in examining the rituals studied here. A purely philological method, which dominates many studies of ancient magic, would limit itself to the spells themselves, establishing a taxonomy of their literary forms but eschewing wider questions of their social contexts and cultural implications. Wisely and with great care, Faraone uses a variety of ancient sources, such as literary depictions of the use of magic, to provide a thicker description of ancient erotic discourse. The diversity of the texts required that Faraone master the interpretive skills of disciplines ranging from literary theory to cross-cultural anthropology, with illuminating insights on old problems.

For example, modern scholars have struggled to make sense of the graphic violence in many of the spells that seek to bring a woman to a man presumably in love with her ("agoge spells"), epitomized by a famous clay effigy in the Louvre of a bound woman pierced by thirteen needles. A recent popular approach interprets such violence as therapeutic, intended to project and so to ameliorate the lovesick spell user's own feelings of pain, madness, and helplessness. Feminists and others have rightly criticized this view as anachronistic in its psychological underpinnings and insensitive in its avoidance of the reality of the desired violence. Faraone adds that many practitioners of such spells appear to be "dispassionate" in their use, rather than "helpless victims of erotic infatuation" (82-84). Making use of ethnographic studies of abduction marriage in a variety of cultures, Faraone places such spells next to ancient bridal theft as similarly practical attempts to initiate a relation with a woman to whom access is blocked "by parental interference or disapproval, by betrothal to another man, or by the unwillingness or haughtiness of the woman herself." In each case, violence is "a necessary but transitory step" in the creation of "a new social alliance" in the face of obstacles (84). This interpretation neither psychologizes nor dismisses ritualized violence, but contextualizes it in a wider cultural discourse of gender, eroticism, and social networks.

David Brakke
Indiana University

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