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"Faraone, Christopher A."
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Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World
Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World explores the implications of sex-for-pay across a broad span of time, from ancient Mesopotamia to the early Christian period. In ancient times, although they were socially marginal, prostitutes connected with almost every aspect of daily life. They sat in brothels and walked the streets; they paid taxes and set up dedications in religious sanctuaries; they appeared as characters—sometimes admirable, sometimes despicable—on the comic stage and in the law courts; they lived lavishly, consorting with famous poets and politicians; and they participated in otherwise all-male banquets and drinking parties, where they aroused jealousy among their anxious lovers.
The chapters in this volume examine a wide variety of genres and sources, from legal and religious tracts to the genres of lyric poetry, love elegy, and comic drama to the graffiti scrawled on the walls of ancient Pompeii. These essays reflect the variety and vitality of the debates engendered by the last three decades of research by confronting the ambiguous terms for prostitution in ancient languages, the difficulty of distinguishing the prostitute from the woman who is merely promiscuous or adulterous, the question of whether sacred or temple prostitution actually existed in the ancient Near East and Greece, and the political and social implications of literary representations of prostitutes and courtesans.
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STATIONARY EPITHALAMIA IN HEXAMETERS? THE EVIDENCE FROM SAPPHO, THEOCRITUS, AND CATULLUS
Three ancient poets—Sappho, Theocritus, and Catullus—provide neglected evidence for Greek wedding poems composed in hexameters. Theocritus, Idyll 18 and Catullus in Carmen 62 are usually thought to reflect Greek wedding songs originally sung in lyric or choral meters; but why did Sappho, herself a lyric poet extraordinaire, compose some of her wedding poems in hexameters, a meter that she hardly uses elsewhere? This paper suggests that the Greeks traditionally performed at least one kind of wedding poem in dactylic hexameters. This in turn leaves open the possibility that when Theocritus and Catullus use hexameters in their wedding poems, they, too, are imitating the content and the form of this neglected genre. This is a circular argument of sorts, but one familiar to scholars seeking to make sense of the earliest fragments of ancient Greek poetry.
Journal Article
Oracular Commands and Avuncular Advice in the Hesiodic Calendars for Farming and Sailing (Works and Days 383–694)
The Works and Days contains a pair of agricultural and nautical calendars (383–694). We can discern a regular pattern of two genres of instruction: (i) oracular (i.e., divine) commands linked to astronomical or other natural signs; and (ii) avuncular (i.e., human) advice. This paper discusses differences in the first category that point to the melding of two different calendars, one astronomical and another inspired by local observations. The interaction between these calendars and between the oracular and avuncular forms of instruction suggests different stages of composition and gives us additional insight into the authoritative voice of the Hesiodic poet.
Journal Article
Ancient Greek Love Magic
The ancient Greeks commonly resorted to magic spells to attract and keep lovers--as numerous allusions in Greek literature and recently discovered \"voodoo dolls,\" magical papyri, gemstones, and curse tablets attest. Surveying and analyzing these various texts and artifacts, Christopher Faraone reveals that gender is the crucial factor in understanding love spells. There are, he argues, two distinct types of love magic: the curselike charms used primarily by men to torture unwilling women with fiery and maddening passion until they surrender sexually; and the binding spells and debilitating potions generally used by women to sedate angry or philandering husbands and make them more affectionate. Faraone's lucid analysis of these spells also yields a number of insights about the construction of gender in antiquity, for example, the \"femininity\" of socially inferior males and the \"maleness\" of autonomous prostitutes. Most significantly, his findings challenge the widespread modern view that all Greek men considered women to be naturally lascivious. Faraone reveals the existence of an alternate male understanding of the female as \"naturally\" moderate and chaste, who uses love magic to pacify and control the \"naturally\" angry and passionate male. This fascinating study of magical practices and their implications for perceptions of male and female sexuality offers an unusual look at ancient Greek religion and society.
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CIRCE’S INSTRUCTIONS TO ODYSSEUS (OD. 10.507–40) AS AN EARLY SIBYLLINE ORACLE
Scholars have noted that Circe’s instructions to Odysseus illustrate a speech type-scene comprised of directions and then instructions – or ‘map’ and ‘script’: first she tells him (i) how to get to the entrance to Hades and then (ii) what rituals to do and what words to say after he gets there (Od. 10.507–40). This essay argues that the Odyssey poet is, in fact, using the vocabulary and syntax of an important subset of this speech-act: hexametrical oracles, as we see them quoted a few centuries later by Herodotus and parodied by Aristophanes. Her advice, moreover, also echoes closely a specific kind of Archaic oracle that directed Greek colonists to a far-away place and that was typical of the female prophets called ‘Sibyls’, who lived near the Aegean coastline in places where the Homeric poems were originally composed and performed.
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Magical and Medical Approaches to the Wandering Womb in the Ancient Greek World
The idea that the womb moved freely about a woman's body causing spasmodic disease enjoyed great popularity among the ancient Greeks, beginning in the classical period with Plato and the Hippocratic writers and continuing on into the Roman and Byzantine periods. Armed with sophisticated analyses of the medical tradition and new texts pertaining to the magical, this essay describes how both approaches to the wandering womb develop side by side in mutual influence from the late classical period onwards. Of special interest will be the tendency in both traditions to imagine both demons and errant wombs as wild animals and to use fumigations to control both. It concludes with a discussion of the historical development of and consequences for the idea that women alone possessed an internal organ that was variously interpreted as a mechanically defective body-part, a sentient and passionate animal, and then finally a demon with malicious intent, who bites and poisons the female body. It also argues against the hypothesis or assumption that midwives or wet-nurses were the original source for the idea of the wandering womb, suggesting that the syndrome never fit comfortably into the category of gynecological illness, because the womb was not the site of disease, but rather a cause of spasmodic disease in other areas of the body.
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SEASIDE ALTARS OF APOLLO DELPHINIOS, EMBEDDED HYMNS, AND THE TRIPARTITE STRUCTURE OF THE HOMERIC HYMN TO APOLLO
Although recent and ongoing excavations of the sanctuary of Apollo Delphinios in Miletus have prompted archaeologists to discuss anew the aetiological references to the same god and his altar at the end of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, these discussions have yet to make any impact on literary scholars working on the poem itself. Indeed, we now know that in archaic Miletus an altar of Apollo Delphinios was erected, as in the hymn, directly upon a sandy beach beside a harbour and was probably the focus, as in the hymn, of some kind of sacrificial ritual, before the annual procession to another famous Panhellenic oracle of Apollo at Didyma. These new revelations provide an incentive for returning to the somewhat puzzling details in the scene on the beach at Crisa in the Homeric Hymn, with its agrarian offering and meal (both of roasted barley) followed by a paeanic procession of musician and singers. I will argue that the Milesian parallels allow us to see more clearly that, like the Delian episode at the start of the Homeric Hymn, the events at Crisa seem to reflect a shorter hexametrical hymn originally composed for a seaside sanctuary at Crisa and then later adapted, again like the Delian section, by a poet intent on praising Apollo as a Panhellenic deity, whose most important place of worship was Delphi. Such an argument leads, finally, to a positive assessment of the recent suggestion that the Homeric Hymn to Apollo does not have a bipartite structure (Delian–Delphic), as is usually assumed or argued, but rather a tripartite one (Delian–Delphic–Crisaean) that organizes the poem into three hymnic movements: birth, oracle, priesthood.
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The stanzaic architecture of early Greek elegy
In this study of poetic form in early Greek elegy, Christopher A. Faraone argues against the prevailing assumption that it was a genre of stichic poetry derived from or dependent on epic verse. Faraone emphasizes the fact that early elegiac poets composed their songs to the tune of an aulos (a kind of oboe) and used a five-couplet stanza as a basic unit of composition. He points out how knowledge of the elegiac stanza can give us insight into how these poets alternated between stanzas of exhortation and meditation, used co-ordinated pairs of stanzas to construct lengthy arguments about excellence or proper human government, and created generic set pieces that they could deploy in longer compositions. Faraone's close analysis of nearly all the important elegiac fragments will greatly enhance understanding and appreciation of this poetic genre.
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