In my paper, I hope to examine the interface between magic and writing in early Greek curses (c. 8th-6th centuries BCE). It has been suggested that the mass amount of curse tablets that have been found throughout the Greek and Roman worlds stem from a far earlier oral tradition of magic (Eidinow 141; Faraone “Nestor’s Cup” 82-83). Literary evidence, such as Aeschylus’ Eumenides along with the Greek Magical Papyri both point to the oral tradition (Eidinow 141). In this way, my goal for this project is to examine what we know about this early period of written magic in order to explore the reasons behind why there might have been a shift from an oral tradition to a written one.
Our earliest forms of written magic come in a few extant examples of what are called ‘conditional curses’ (Eidinow 141). ‘Conditional curses’ “are intended to discourage those who are planning to do a crime” (Eidinow 140) often by stating that something (bad) will happen if the person reading does something that the curser does not want them to do (e.g. “if you do X, then X”).
Possibly the earliest example of these conditional curses, as well as of Greek writing in general, is the so-called ‘Nestor’s Cup’ (Faraone “Nestor’s Cup” 77). In 1954 during excavations of the late eighth century BCE Euboean colony of Pithekoussai, fragments of an unassuming proto-Corinthian cup with a three-line inscription were found in the grave of a cremated youth (Faraone “Nestor’s Cup” 77).
This short verse is normally reconstructed as:
Νέστορός : ε[ίμ]ι : εὔποτ[ον] : ποτέριον :
hός δ’ άν τοδε πίεσι : ποτερί[ο] : αυτίκα κενον
hίμερος hαιρέσει : καλλιστε[φά]νου Ἀφροδίτες.
“I am the cup of Nestor, good for drinking
Whoever drinks from this cup, desire for beautifully
crowned Aphrodite will seize him instantly”
(Faraone “Nestor’s Cup” 78)
Upon first glance, these three lines may seem as unassuming as the cup itself. However, quite to the contrary, they have engrossed the minds of several scholars for decades (Faraone 77-79; Hansen 25- 26; West 9). I have chosen to write this blog post about this source because it is problematic for a few of reasons.
First, it is unclear whether or not the verse is in reference to the legendary cup of Nestor from the Iliad or if it is simply a cup belonging to a man named Nestor. This is significant because the answer could greatly affect the interpretation of the cup. Several early scholars did not put much credence in the classification of this verse as a curse, but rather preferred the interpretation of joke (West 9).
The cup of Nestor from the Iliad is described:
…δέπας περικαλλές, ὃ οἴκοθεν ἦγ᾽ ὁ γεραιός,
χρυσείοις ἥλοισι πεπαρμένον: οὔατα δ᾽ αὐτοῦ
τέσσαρ᾽ ἔσαν, δοιαὶ δὲ πελειάδες ἀμφὶς ἕκαστον
χρύσειαι νεμέθοντο, δύω δ᾽ ὑπὸ πυθμένες ἦσαν.
ἄλλος μὲν μογέων ἀποκινήσασκε τραπέζης
πλεῖον ἐόν, Νέστωρ δ᾽ ὁ γέρων ἀμογητὶ ἄειρεν.
…. and beside them a beauteous cup, that the old man had brought from home,
studded with bosses of gold; four were the handles thereof, and about each
twain doves were feeding, while below were two supports.
Another man could scarce have availed to lift that cup from the table,
when it was full, but old Nestor would raise it right easily.
(Iliad 11.632-7)
In this way, the Pithekoussain cup may be poking fun at the juxtaposition between itself (a fairly plain ceramic cup) and the grand golden cup of mythic Nestor. I agree with Hansen in his statement that it would be a nearly unbearable coincidence if the cup is merely a cup owned by a man named Nestor (Hansen 42). However, it is quiet unusual (although not without contemporary precedent) for men to be named after heroes, which did not become a popular naming practice until the 4th century BCE (Hansen 34). Therefore, the phrase “I am Nestor’s cup, good to drink from” has been considered humorous because the Nestor’s cup from the Iliad is in fact very difficult to drink from (Hansen 42).
Because Hansen finds this first line humorous, he goes on to construe the following two lines to further this joke in the way that a curse upon the cup would “have offended against all rules of hospitality” by forbidding a guest to drink from their cup (41), which is perhaps similar to Nestor’s cup, which is too heavy for most besides him to lift.
To expand on this, the verse is also thought to be a joke because the consequences of drinking from the cup are not the typical negative result that comes with curses in general. For example, a near-contemporary aryballos from Cumae also features a conditional curse, in which the tone is much more serious:
Ταταίες ἐμὶ λ- / έϙυθος· hὸς δ’ἄν με κλέφσ- / ει θυφλὸς εσται
I am the jug of Tataie. / Whoever steals me / will go blind.
(Faraone “Nestor’s Cup” 81; Miller146)
The serious tone of this curse is similar to another early instance of a conditional curse, dating from the early sixth-century BCE in Rhodes, this time upon a tombstone sending the wrath of Zeus upon whoever might desecrate it:
σᾶμα τόζ’ Ἰδαμενεὺς ποίησα hίνα κλέος εἴη./ Ζεὺ⟨ς⟩ δέ νιν ὅστις πημαίνοι λειόλη θείη
I, Idameneus, made this tomb in order that I might have fame. / Whoever harms (it), may Zeus make him utterly accursed.
(Faraone “Nestor’s Cup” 81)
In comparison to these instances, the Nestor’s cup inscription, with its promise of sexual desire, seems to be strangely lacking in gloom. Hansen attributes this to humour (41). While I would agree that the tone in the verse is not as serious as the aryballos or Rhodian tomb, I think that it might be worth exploring the implications of sexual desire in Ancient Greece. To us, the curse of arousal might seem like something a teenage boy would laugh about to his friends; however, as we have seen in this class, it is often erroneous to put modern conceptions, especially those of love, intimacy and sex, upon the ancient. In fact, later love spells, as Faraone points out in his book Ancient Greece Love Magic, often feature violent, uncontrollable language (42-43). This is also a sentiment found in Greek literature. In plays like Euripides’ Hippolytus, for example, desire is portrayed like madness or a disease, using words like “unclean” (348), “pure agony” (359) and “torture” (520). In this way, we can see that the discourse surrounding desire in Ancient Greece could be quite negative. However, while these later Greek examples are hopefully closer to the conceptions of desire in the time when the Nestor’s cup inscription was written, I must admit that further research is necessary.
Finally, an important aspect of the verse is the meter in which it is written. Faraone points out in his article that our evidence for magical oaths, incantations and early conditional curses are written in hexametrical couplets (“Nestor’s Cup” 79). The second two lines of this inscription follow this pattern nicely (Faraone “Nestor’s Cup” 79). The meter of the first line, however, is either lyric, iambic trimeter, “catalectic trochaic trimeter,” or perhaps not metrical at all and just prose (Faraone “Nestor’s Cup” 97-98; Hansen 33). This first line and its categorization are problematic because they inhibit the extent to which we can understand the text. If the entire verse was in the regular hexametrical couplets, I believe it would be much easier to interpret the verse as a serious curse, given the parallels with other contemporary curses.
While Faraone admits that the meter of the first line is most likely one of the three “irresolvable” problems of the text (with the other two being the lacuna following Nestor’s name and the identity of this Nestor [discussed above]), he, nevertheless, attempts to reconcile this issue by posing the theory that the inscription is “a (failed) experiment in rendering a traditionally oral incantation in some epigraphic form” with the first line being a “title” or “rubric,” giving evidence for later parallels (“Nestor’s Cup” 97-98).
———————————————————————————————————————————————-
Work Cited
Primary
Euripides. “Hippolytus.” The Complete Euripides. Vol. III. Trans. Robert Bagg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Homer. The Iliad. Trans. A.T. Murray. Cambridge: Harvard University Press and London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1924.
Homer. Homeri Opera in Five Volumes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1920.
Secondary
Eidinow, Esther. Oracles, Curses and Risks Among the Ancient Greeks. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Faraone, Christopher. Ancient Greek Love Magic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Faraone, Christopher. “Taking the ‘Nestor’s Cup Inscription’ Seriously: Erotic Magic and Conditional Curses in the Earliest Inscribed Hexameters.” Classical Antiquity 15:1 (1996): 77-112.
Hansen, Peter. “Pithecusan Humour: The Interpretation of ‘Nestor’s Cup’ Reconsidered.” Glotta 54 (1976): 25-44.
Miller, Gary D.. Ancient Greek Dialects and Early Authors: An Introduction to the Dialect Mixture in Homer, with Notes on Lyric and Herodotus. Boston and Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Inc., 2014.
West, Stephanie. “Nestor’s Bewitching Cup.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 101 (1994): 9-15.