At the Origins of Dionysus and Wine: Myths, Miracles, and Festivals

For the Greeks, the connection between Dionysus and wine is almost unanimous. The god diffuses wine-related know-how and its cultivation throughout the inhabited world. Certain myths place the birth and infancy of Dionysus in regions where wine plays a prominent role, either for its excellence, because wine-related wonders take place there, or because the existence of wine-springs is attested. The cause-and-effect relationship between the birth of Dionysus and the miraculous appearance of wine is used by some cities to support their claim to be his birthplace. In some cases, myths concerning the origins of Dionysus are combined with a ritual component that celebrates the epiphany of the god through festivals in which the focal point is wine. This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of mythology and aetiology by adopting a novel approach to the case study of Dionysus’ birth, examining the extent to which the importance of wine in these areas determines whether they are linked to the origins of the god.

Séquences onomastiques divines à Ostie-Portus

The corpus of dedications from the ports of Rome, Ostia, and Portus, is examined through the lens of divine onomastic sequences, as defined by the Mapping Ancient Polytheisms (MAP) team. About forty onomastic attributes have been identified, nearly half of which appear more than once. The agents of these dedications are then investigated, before assessing the extent to which chronological and spatial dimensions have had an impact on the divine onomastic sequences attested at Ostia and Portus. Some reflections are also proposed on: the onomastic attributes augustus, sanctus, and Numen, frequent in the ports of Rome; divine onomastic sequences linked to groups or individuals; “functional” and “altero-divine” onomastic sequences. Finally, the variety of onomastic sequences that can be applied to the same deity is considered. This research thus testifies to the interest and operability of the tools forged by the MAP team, also in the Latin-speaking world.

Creation in the Poimandres and in Other Creation Stories

My paper develops from the observation that the cosmogonies in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Hermetic Poimandres are related to each other. After an analysis of Ovid’s text as an example of a diakrisis cosmogony in which the world is created by the sorting out of its originally confused elements, I give a short overview of the history of this type of cosmogony before Ovid. I then analyze the respective cosmogony in the Poimandres as another example of the same typology. A look at the use of diakrisis cosmogonies in late antiquity, including in the first ‘Moral Poem’ of Gregory of Nazianzus, closes the paper and demonstrates the attraction of this cosmogonical model in the Imperial epoch.

Typhoeus or Cosmic Regression (Theogony 821 – 880)

The Typhonomachy (Theogony 821 – 880) has long been deemed an anomalous and inorganic intrusion into the Hesiodic text. The main reason for such a judgment is that the Typhoeus episode is an unnecessary and redundant doublet of the Titanomachy that precedes. In addition, Gaia’s role in giving birth to the monster seems to contradict her benign role both before (624 – 628) and after the Typhoeus episode (883 – 885). Looking afresh at the passage through the wider lens of the cosmogonic program of the Theogony allows us to grasp its function within the overall economy of the poem. Typhoeus, offspring of Gaia and Tartarus, takes us back to the very origins of cosmogony. The Typhonomachy brings us to a critical temporal crossroad where a recrudescence of the primeval irrupts into and threatens the evolved universe. If at issue in the Titanomachy was the kingship in Heaven, at stake in the Typhonomachy is the very existence of the cosmos itself.

And You Will Be Amazed: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Greek Magical Papyri

An analysis of the rhetorical strategies used in the so-called Greek Magical Papyri to bolster the authority of the authors provides insight into the authors of these texts and their intended audiences. This article reviews the scholarship on the identity of the composers of the Greek Magical Papyri and explores the rhetorical strategies used in the texts to create authority, before comparing the dominant strategies in the Greek Magical Papyri with similar ones in other kinds of recipe collections, specifically alchemical and medical texts. The authors of the recipes in the Greek Magical Papyri make little use of the traditional authority of the temples but instead justify their claims of superiority with reference to the amazing efficacy of the procedures they describe. The direct, second person address in formulas such as “and you will be amazed” suggests that the intended audience was imagined not as potential clients who need to be convinced of the author’s expertise, but rather as potential practitioners interested in impressing their own clients.

A Syntactic Approach to the Orphic Gold Leaves

The present paper provides a plausible interpretation of how a variety of literary elements and religious practices can augment our current understanding of ancient Orphism, although all of the sources seem to reflect a common religious function. The analysis is primarily based on close readings and deals with textual interpretation only as much as is necessary in order to highlight the intrinsic relations of textual constructions on the compositional, syntactical, and grammatical level. By focusing on structural relations, this syntactic approach enables us to integrate all the diverse emic interpretations on the basis of functional rules, while restraining us from the problem of interpreting surface meanings. The primary sources of the paper are specifically the A and D type Orphic gold leaves, because the structuring of these texts follows a common compositional pattern that seems to allude to a “model experience.” Using this “model experience” paradigm, this paper also aims to exceed the contemporary neo-ritualist interpretations of these texts as mere “ritual representations” and to propose a more holistic approach based on functionality. This is accomplished by separating formulaic components and treating them as contextualization cues which refer to the different stages that the initiate embodies, in an interdiscursive textual composition.

The Cultural Biography of a Pilgrimage Token: From Hagiographical to Archaeological Evidence

Across the eastern Mediterranean, the personnel of late antique pilgrimage sites distributed terracotta tokens stamped with depictions of saints, scenes from the life of Christ, and related imagery. Using primarily hagiographical sources, scholars associate tokens with healing practices, the veneration of icons, and the worship of relics. Certainly, hagiographies offer valuable representations of ritual processes, but they also make claims on the proper distribution, meaning, and use of tokens amidst a diversity of intercessory activities. How, in practice, was a token produced and distributed? How did pilgrims use tokens at and away from pilgrimage complexes beyond the assertions made by hagiographers? This article answers these questions by tracing the “cultural biography” of a token. It analyzes the archaeological contexts of tokens in order to clarify select statuses that a token might occupy during its lifetime, including commodity, gift, domestic object, funerary object, relic, rubbish, and art object. This approach lays the foundation for examining hagiographical claims regarding the use of tokens as one among many assertions in the contested process of harnessing the power of saints. It illustrates the capacity of devotees to exhibit diverse practices as well as the efforts of personnel at pilgrimage sites to shape those practices.

The Politics of Beginnings: Hesiod and the Assyrian Ideological Appropriation of Enuma Eliš

This article proposes a new way to understand Near Eastern literary and mythological parallels in Hesiod’s Theogony by focusing on the meaning of these parallels for a contemporary Greek audience. In particular, a case study analyzing a parallel shared by the Theogony and Enuma eliš is pursued here to illustrate this approach’s utility. This new approach draws partly on methodologies borrowed from the study of globalization and combines these methodologies with recent insights into the ideological motivations for Greeks’ deployment of Oriental(izing) art in the Orientalizing Period (ca. 750 – 650 BCE). Rather than focusing on individual parallels out of context or on diachronically stable elements that creation stories around the eastern Mediterranean shared, this article instead reconstructs a contemporary ideological background with the Neo-Assyrian Empire at the center of a globalizing Mediterranean. Because the Assyrians invested Enuma eliš with new ideological meaning at this time and broadcast this through their propaganda, the Akkadian creation epic could take on new meaning in an international context. It is consequently possible that specific correspondences Enuma eliš and the Theogony share show Hesiod subverting Assyrian ideological discourses. The subjects discussed here have implications for our broader understanding of Greek-Near Eastern interactions of the Orientalizing Period.