A Case of Unrequited Desire: Hermeias and Tigerous
Somewhere in Egypt in the fourth century C.E., a young woman named Tigerous attracted the amorous attention of a male suitor named Hermeias. That’s when the trouble started.
About these two persons we actually know quite little.
Tigerous was the daughter of a woman named Sophia (a common enough name in antiquity), and Hermeias’ mother was called Hermione. Apart from these maternal ties, nothing is known about their families. What we know about their (apparently quite dysfunctional) relationship must be gleaned from a mere twenty-five lines of text in a single papyrus.[714] Such a meager source is not exactly fodder for a full biography, but it is enough to confirm a couple of salient facts: first, that Hermeias’s attraction to Tigerous was frustratingly unrequited - he complains about her shameful “arrogance” (υπερηφάνεια) and “calculation” (λογισμός)[715] - and, second, that her rejection of him, far from dissuading him, only served to make him all the more determined to have her.The papyrus itself stands as proof of that determination: it is a love spell of attraction, commissioned by Hermeias personally, addressed to the dog-headed god Anubis (he addresses him thrice as “dog, dog, dog”),[716] [717] and designed (from the perspective of the spell-giver) to attract her (sc. Tigerous) to me, beneath my feet, melting with passionate desire, at every hour of the day and night, always remembering me (άεί μου μιμνησκουμενην) while she is eating, drinking, working, conversing, sleeping, dreaming, having an orgasm in her dreams, until she is scourged by you and comes desiring me, with her hands full, with a generous soul and graciously giving me both herself and her possessions and fulfilling what is appropriate for women in regards to men, serving both my desire and her own unhesitatingly and unabashedly, joining thigh to thigh and belly to belly and her black to my black most pleasantly. Whether this spell did the trick for Hermeias - whether it had its intended effect on Tigerous and she ended up succumbing to his less-than-subtle wiles - is unknown to us. B.