ABSTRACT
This prayer is embedded in a magical recipe which bears the rubric: Agōgē (‘Spell for Attraction [i.e. of a Lover]’), a popular genre of erotic spell that is almost always designed to force an unwilling female to abandon her family and come to make love to the practitioner. Because it is part of a handbook, the names of the male practitioner and his female target are indicated generically as ‘Mr so-and-so’ and ‘Ms so-and-so’ (ho deina and hē deina respectively). As is true for nearly all Greek prayers, this one is set in the context of a ritual: the recipe directs us to burn Ethiopian cumin and fat from a goat on a roof-top on the thirteenth or fourteenth of the month, while saying the long prayer (the recipe calls it a logos 1 ) which is translated below. The text is, in fact, composed almost entirely in dactylic hexameters 2 and takes the rhetorical form of a cletic hymn – a type of hymn used to summon a far-off deity to come close, listen to the petitioner and eventually grant his or her request. The papyrus handbook (PGM IV) itself dates to the fourth century ce and most probably comes from the personal library of a professional magician working in Upper Egypt. 3 The date of composition for this individual spell is of course earlier, but it is impossible to say how much earlier. The syncretism of Hecate–Selene–Artemis can be dated as early as the late classical period, as can Hecate's association with ghosts and crossroads. 4 The Hellenistic poet Theocritus, moreover, seems to have imitated hymns like this one in his Idyll 2, the first half of which constitutes an elaborate hexametrical incantation that evokes the same triad of goddesses for the same purpose: the erotic arousal of another person. 5 There are three other examples of hexametrical hymns to Selene–Hecate–Artemis in the same handbook: PGM IV 2242–2417, 2522–67 and 2786–2870.
