Blaming the Witch

Some Reflections on Unexpected Death

Radcliffe G. Edmonds III

They say that the following incident happened to the Italian Euthynoos. He was the son of Elysios of Terina, a man foremost among the people there in virtue, wealth, and re­pute, and Euthynoos came to his end suddenly from some unknown cause.

When Euthynoos dies suddenly from unknown causes, as Plutarch relates, his father immediately suspects pharmaka - witchcraft or sorcery or poi­sons, but he is at a loss to put his suspicions to the test. Someone or some­thing must be to blame for an anomalous death, but too many unverifiable possibilities exist to allow the surviving relatives to pinpoint the blame. If this were a detective novel, we would say there are too many suspects, too many people who might envy the young, rich, and distinguished aristocrat who was heir to his father’s fortunes. This envy, the natural product of a competitive environment, might have led to some action against him, sor­cery or witchcraft, whether by pharmaka in the sense of attacking through magical spells or in the sense of administering poisons. The suspicion of witchcraft is natural in such a situation, Plutarch remarks; it is the first thing that would have occurred to anyone.

“Witchcraft” is a term used in the modern anthropological study of many different cultures, and it has proven a useful analytic category de­spite the fact that many of these cultures, like the ancient Greeks and Ro­mans, have no particular term in their own vocabulary that corresponds to the range of things “witchcraft” signifies in English. E. E. Evans-Pritchard defines witchcraft as an explanation of unexpected misfortune,^[692] but, while there are many ways in which such misfortunes might be explained, witch­craft specifically refers the cause of the misfortune to a personal agent within the society - blaming the witch.

A “witch” may thus be defined as the sort of person who would use witchcraft, abnormal or supernatural powers, to cause misfortune for an­other member of the community, and these witches tend to be imagined in a variety of ways as Other, as somehow different from the normal mem­bers of the society. While witches are thus often imagined as foreigners, alien people from outside the community, gender is of course often the marker of the “internal outsider,” resulting in the familiar association of witches with female gender.^[695] Many cultures at different times, from the Azande of Evans-Pritchard to early Modern Europeans, make extensive use of accusations of witchcraft to explain events, but, despite elaborate depictions of witch figures in Greek and Roman literature, there is little evidence of widespread witch-hunts or even a consistent pattern of blam­ing witches for misfortunes in life, whether failure of the crops or the un­expected death of a youth like Euthynoos.

The epitaphs Fritz Graf has collected that refer to an unexpected death as caused by witchcraft provide a welcome supplement to the evidence scholars of ancient religions generally rely on to understand the ideas of magical harming and untimely death, the curse tablets and the literary de­pictions. It is worth noting, however, that, in the evidence Graf has com­piled, the relatives of the deceased, like Euthynoos’s father, tend to indi­cate their uncertainty about the cause, naming multiple possibilities rather than piling up the levels of alterity into a single “witch” figure to take the blame.

The stele from Alexandria that relates the sad tale of Thermis and Sima- los provides a striking example of this kind of uncertainty and offers the opportunity for investigating the ways in which the ancient Greeks and Romans thought about how this kind of harm might work and what sort of strategies they had for dealing with it in the social sphere. The young mother Thermis has died after a three-month wasting disease. That untime­ly death has traumatized her loving husband Simalos, leaving him, like the father of Euthynoos, seeking some explanation of this tragedy:

Thermis, worthy one, greetings. Lords of the daimones down there and you, noble Per- sephassa, Demeter's Daughter: Admit this unfortunate and shipwrecked guest, me Ther­mis, born to her father Lysanias, the noble wife and companion of Simalos. If someone has directed the terrible Erinyes of poison/spells against my entrails and my life, do not, immortal gods, send him any other fate than one that is similar to what I have been suf­fering - I who now dwell down here, having left behind, in three months of a wasting illness, the fruits of life, bereft of what Earth, Giver-of-All, gives to humans, of my chil­dren, Lords, and of my husband, whose soul existed for me only, and sweet was my life with my spouse. I have already forgotten all this, wretched me, and in my grief I pro­nounce a curse: “Make them go to the big deep Vault of Hades and the Gates of Dark­ness, utterly deprived of their children and their city. But may all my children enjoy an unharmed, blessed life, as well as my husband, arriving at old age's time.” And if there is even small respect for prayers in Hades: may this curse reach those to whom I address it.

Like Euthynoos’s father, Simalos, too, is at a loss to pin down the respon­sibility for this unexpected death. In his epitaph for her, Simalos has Thermis invoke the deities of the Underworld to bring a curse against any­one who might have been responsible for her illness: “If someone has di­rected the terrible Erinyes of pharmaka against my entrails and my life,” may that person suffer in the same way that Thermis has. Within this re­markable formulation, we may discern four different possibilities for the agent of harm: Simalos covers the whole range in his response, from the indefinite person who willed the harm (a witch), to the pharmaka that pro­vide the means, to the daimonic forces of the Erinyes, to the chthonic dei­ties like Phersephassa. Simalos’s formulation may be in some ways idio­syncratic, a poetic expression of his grief and uncertainty, but it neverthe­less outlines the multiple possibilities for causation of untimely death. An investigation into each of these types can help illuminate the ways in which this kind of magical harming was imagined to work.

The very start of Thermis’s curse emphasizes the uncertainty - “if someone has directed.” Not only is the person indefinite, ti$, but the clause is conditional, ei - there may not in fact have been someone who is responsible. As Graf has shown, this conditionality is a relatively common feature of such epitaphs, in sharp contrast to the literary imagination, where the author can specify to the audience the responsible entity.^[697] In creating a fictional model of the unknown threat, the portrait of the witch, a literary author can use established stereotypes that mark alterity - other­ness of gender, of age, of nationality.

In her recent study, Naming the Witch, Kimberly Stratton has examined the way different modes of alterity are emphasized in different historical contexts.^[700] She notes the prominence of young, vengeful female witch­figures in Greek tragedy in contrast to the old, lustful women in Roman poetry, pointing out that both these female types differ from the male, alien sorcerers of early Christian literature. Stratton rightly draws attention to the links between the choice of type of alterity (age, alien status, gender) and the specific historical circumstances in which particular images of the witch were produced, but her account becomes at times overly schematic. The different types of alterity coexist with one another as possibilities for accusations of witchcraft in all of the historical periods she examines - male, foreign witches show up in Greek and Roman literature; young, vengeful sorceresses appear in both pagan and Christian literature of the Roman era; and old hags abound from the earliest Greek sources to the Christian period. The social and political circumstances she examines cer­tainly play a role in determining which kinds of witches predominate, but considerations of genre and even individual authorial preference also have their influence.

However, while the female foreign witch, powerfully sexual in either an exotically alluring or repulsively hideous way, may be the most satisfying literary creation, life is never as clear-cut as literature, although the stereo­types of alterity from the literary tradition remain available for use. The epigram that attributes the death of a little child to the hand of a witch seems to borrow from the literary trope, although it is unclear whether the author is hinting at a particular witch whose continued practice remains a threat to loving parents or whether the epitaph provides a general warning of the uncertain threats that may destroy a beloved child. “The most cruel hand of a witch (saga) has killed me, while she remains on earth and caus­es damage through her craft. I Parents, guard your children, lest grief will attach itself to your heart.”^[701] If the parents had a specific saga in mind, we might see the epitaph as a strategy to mobilize public opinion against this individual, but the parallels suggest that a specific target would be cursed by name. The uncertainty indicates the generalized concern.

This very uncertainty, however, could create problems in the social sphere; an unsolved mystery leads to speculation and rumors, as different members of the society answer the question of “who did it?” in their own way. The epigram from Andros for Abaskantos illustrates the problem and one strategy for dealing with it.

After I visited Rome and Asia on much business and suffered the strife of many fights, I lie here in this tomb I together with my child, a man from Andros, from the family of Aeacus, I Abaskantos, son of mighty parents. I have I been taken not by love potions as was the son of Peleus, but as great Ares by fatal unholy plants. But my father's I terrible [---]. and my mourning mother [---].^[702]

The world-famous athlete - if that is what the references to his travels and his contests indicates - perished from some unholy poison, not from an overdose of love potion; the very protestations suggest the social scenario that would make such a strategy necessary. Specifying the individual per­petrator is less important than classifying him - and not her - as the sort of enemy this important man might make (perhaps an athletic rival or some­one bested in one of Abaskantos's many business affairs) rather than as the sort of witchy woman with whom Abaskantos might have formed, from the family's perspective, an undesirable entanglement.

In other circumstances, of course, it might be useful to employ the ste­reotype of the witch, even if there is no accusation that the anomalous death was itself caused by magical means. Nothing in the story of Acte and M. lunius Euphrosynus suggests that the death of lunius or his little daugh­ter lunia were caused by the spells or poisons of Acte, but labeling Acte as a venenaria assimilates her to one witch stereotype, the dangerous female of uncontrolled sexuality for whom it is in character to abandon her chil­dren and run off with another lover.

Here is written the eternal disgrace of the freedwoman Acte, sorceress, faithless, treach­erous, with a hard heart: a I nail and a hemp rope to hang her neck, and boiling pitch to burn her evil breast! Freed for nothing, she followed an I adulterer, cheated on her master and abducted the servants, a maid and a boy, while her master was lying in bed, so I that the old man, left alone, pined away. (And for Hymnus and Zosimus who followed the same disgrace.)^[703]

Acte may not, like Medea, have killed her children, but like Medea, she values caring for her children less than following her own passions. In this case, the reputation of the victim is less damaged by the idea that he was seduced by an evil witch than that he was a cuckold who lost out to a slave in the competition for the affections of the lady. For the family too, it is better to marginalize Acte as a venenaria and blot out her name from the family tomb; the neighbors still will talk, but it is better to be pitied than scorned.

A venenaria or a saga is the sort of person who would use venenum or pharmaka, the poisons or spells that are also part of Thermis’s curse. There, however, not only the agent but the means themselves are unclear: what are the terrible Erinyes of pharmaka? As Graf has pointed out, the term pharmaka itself is ambiguous, since it could refer either to poisonous drugs or to magical spells, but the reference to the terrible Erinyes of pharmaka, raises the possibility that the affliction of Thermis came, not from ingesting poisonous substances administered by an enemy, but by demonic attack from spirits led on (enqyayev) by the will of some enemy. The possibility that unexpected or inexplicable illness or death could be caused by demonic intervention is reflected in the variety of protective amulets, such as the silver lamella from Aleppo, dating to the 2d/3d centu­ry c.e. that requests protection for a certain Juliana, “Release Juliana from all sorcery and from all passive suffering and all active influence and de­monic apparition of the night and day; now, now; quickly, quickly; imme­diately, immediately, immediately.”^[704] Curse tablets, too, invoke the dai- mones of the netherworld to afflict the target.^[705]

Daimones under the earth and daimones whoever you may be; fathers of fathers and mothers who are a match for men, whether male or female, daimones whoever you may be and who lie here, having left grievous life, whether violently slain or foreign or local or unburied, whether you are borne away from the boundaries of the stars or wander somewhere in the air and you who lie under here, take over the voices of my opponents.

In her curse, Thermis asks for equal retribution against whoever brought about her death; that is, she asks for terrible Erinyes of pharmaka equally to afflict her enemy. The idea that one untimely and violently dead might bring the Furies against the one responsible for her death is an idea that recurs in literary sources - most famously in Aeschylus, whose portrait of the Furies bears many of the same stamps of alterity that later pictures of witches do - but, just as in Thermis’s curse, the precise agent of the de­ceased’s wrath is often left uncertain. Orators warn of the danger to the whole community if justice is not done, but they never specify whether the danger comes from the ghost of the deceased, from some demonic entity like the Erinyes who would inflict harm, or simply from the anger of the gods.^[706] A similar ambiguity is found throughout the tradition. Elpenor begs Odysseus to bury him, lest he become a cause of wrath for the gods, but it is never clear what exactly Odysseus would be worrying about - Elpenor’s restless shade, some Furies, or yet another god who might be angry at him.^[707]

While the Erinyes can represent just retribution, there is, however, no reason to see them here as indicating that Thermis’s illness comes in re­venge for something wrong she did, for Simalos explicitly concludes his poem with the claim that “blameless were the ways of your life.” Again, we can see such a protestation as a strategy against potential blame from the community. Some of the confession stelae show that one possible community response to an unexpected death was to attribute it to the will of a god. A stele recording the death of the woman from Knidos who was accused of using a pharmakon against her son-in-law evokes a whole com­plicated narrative of accusations of witchcraft and divine vengeance.

The 241^st year, the month of Panemos, the 2^nd day. Great Artemis Anaetis and Men of Tiamos. Because loukoundos fell into a condition of insanity and it was noised abroad by all that he had been put under a spell by his mother-in-law Tatia, she set up a scepter and placed curses in the temple in order to defend herself against what was being said about her, having suffered such a state of conscience. The gods sent punishment on her which she did not escape. Likewise, her son Sokrates was passing the entrance that leads down to the sacred grove and carrying a vine-dressing sickle and it dropped on his foot and thus destruction came upon him in a single day’s punishment. Therefore great are the gods of Axiottenos! They set about to have removed the scepter and the curses that were in the temple, the ones the estate of loukoundos and Moschios had sought to undo. The descendants of Tatia, Sokrateia and Moschas, along with loukoundos and Menekrates, constantly propitiate the gods and praise them from now on, having inscribed on this ste­le the deeds of the gods.^[708]

Tatia, it seems, was accused of having bewitched her son-in-law, but her protestations of innocence, which included a public oath in the temple, were proved false in the eyes of the community when both she and her son suffered some unexpected misfortunes that were understood by the com­munity as the vengeance of the god.

Another confession stele from Maionia was published by a mother who claims her 13 year old son was killed by the god because she had failed to properly honor the god.

And the god took revenge for this, because Syntyche had not publicized and exalted the god. Therefore he made her set up in his sanctuary this account of the revenge he took on her child of thirteen years, Heraclides, because Syntyche held the things of man in higher account than the things of the god. It is Syntyche the daughter of Apollonius and Meltine who has published this act of vengeance.^[709]

The unexpected death of the young Heraclides was attributed to the venge­ance of the dishonored god, and his mother, Syntyche, publicly blames herself instead of putting the blame upon some malevolent witch figure, specific or unspecified. There may well have been factors in the tangled social situation that preceded this public declaration that made the mother of Heraclides feel it was indeed her fault or that made the blaming of an alien witch impossible, but, for the Greeks, the gods always remain a pos­sible cause of the unexpected, with their personal whims and angers, their unfathomable motivations, and their endless desire for honor.^[710]

Ultimately, in the story of Euthynoos, too, it is the will of the god, not some jealous rival employing witchcraft, that brings about the untimely death of the youth. When his father consults the oracle of the dead, he sees the shades of his son and his own father, who inform him that the son’s early death was not caused by malice, but by the favor of the gods.

Being in perplexity as to how he might put his suspicions to the test, he visited a place where the spirits of the dead are conjured up, and having offered the preliminary sacrifice prescribed by custom, he lay down to sleep in the place, and had this vision. It seemed that his own father came to him, and that on seeing his father he related to him what had happened touching his son, and begged and besought his help to discover the man who was responsible for his son's death. And his father said, “It is for this that I am come. Take from this person here what he brings for you, and from this you will learn about everything over which you are now grieving.” The person whom he indicated was a young man who followed him, resembling his son Euthynoos and close to him in years and stature. So Elysios asked who he was; and he said, “I am the daimon of your son,” and with these words he handed him a paper. This Elysios opened and saw written there these three lines:

Verily somehow the minds of men in ignorance wander;

Dead now Euthynoos lies; destiny so has decreed.

Not for himself was it good that he live, nor yet for his parents.

Such, you observe, is the purport of the tales recorded in ancient writers.^[711]

The minds of men wander in folly, says the oracle; the gods know an early death to be the best thing for a good man. Plutarch includes this anecdote within his consolation speech to a father whose son has died young, trans­forming the uncertainty of the cause of death into a philosophical sermon on the limitations of mortal perspective. Don't blame a witch; trust instead that the gods provide what is best for mortals.

The place of the witch, then, of the horrific scare-figure who piles up levels of alterity - female, foreign, and superhumanly powerful - is more in the imaginary of the Greco-Roman world than in its reality.^[712] While a variety of individuals may have engaged in practices that they or others might have labeled “magic,”^[713] including curse tablets and pharmaka in­tended to bring harm upon others, the kinds of witches we meet in litera­ture, from Medea to Erichtho, do not, from the evidence of the epitaphs or from contemporary historical accounts, seem to have been regularly identi­fied as the figures responsible for particular misfortunes, such as the un­timely death of a young wife or the promising young heir to his father’s estate. Rather than fastening the blame on a specific individual and identi­fying her as the witch or engaging in widespread witch hunts, those afflict­ed with misfortunes seem more likely to express their uncertainty over the precise cause - it might have been a witch, but then again it might have been something else.

Thus, we see that, within the range of possible causes, either the speci­fication of one - a witch or a poison - or the emphasis on the uncertainty itself can serve as a strategy for dealing with the social situation. This cor­pus of epitaphs can help illuminate the complex social situations that sur­rounded the phenomenon of untimely death in Greek and Roman societies, giving us insight into the structures of the society and the ways people ne­gotiated within them. At the same time, these epitaphs, with their range of attributed causes for death, can help us understand the multiple ways in which magical forms of harming were thought to work in the ancient world, particularly with the insight that one mode need not exclude others in an explanation. These epitaphs supplement the literary accounts and the evidence of the curse tablets, providing new light on this murky, yet fasci­nating, aspect of the ancient world.

Works Cited

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