A Callimachean Case of Lovesickness: Magic, Disease, and Desire in Aetia frr. 67-75 Pf

American Journal of Philology 130 (2009) 341–365 © 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

1 On the relationship of the two accounts, see Rosenmeyer 1996, 10, and n. 4. The fifth-century C.E. epistolographer gives the details of the trick in Epistolai 1.10; citations from Aristaenetus below are from Mazal 1971. Ovid also incorporates the story into Heroides 20 and 21; cf. Barchiesi 1993 and Rosenmeyer 1996, 23–31. Translations below are my own unless otherwise indicated.

2 On the setting of Aristaenetus’ version, see Rosenmeyer 1996, 15: “Cydippe stands in the sanctuary of Artemis, virgin goddess, while Acontius lurks suggestively in a nearby grove of Aphrodite.”

A CALLIMACHEAN CASE OF LOVESICKNESS: MAGIC, DISEASE, AND DESIRE

IN AETIA FRR. 67–75 PF.

NICHOLAS RYNEARSON

Abstract. Among its multiple sources and literary models, Callimachus’ story of Acontius and Cydippe in Aetia 3 draws on three main discourses of desire in order to create a multilayered erotic narrative: literary topoi of eros in lyric and tragedy, the conventions of erotic binding magic, and medical notions of the diseased and desiring body. This essay explores Callimachus’ playful readings of each of these discourses through the lenses of the others, exposing both continu-ities and contradictions among them. This conscious manipulation of frames of reference then provides a model for the interpretive sophistication that typifies the Hellenistic poet and his muse.

INTRODUCTION: POISONED APPLE

EROS HIMSELF, SAYS CALLIMACHUS, taught Acontius a techne for love when the handsome Cean youth conceived a burning desire for Cydippe at a festival of Apollo on Delos (Aetia fr. 67.1–3). The details of this techne are missing from Callimachus’ account of the story in the fragments of Aetia 3, but the narrative is recorded in the Epistolai of Aristaenetus, who bases both the details and language of his prose version directly on that of the Alexandrian poet.1 Acontius inscribes a first-person oath to Artemis promising to marry him on the surface of an apple, suggestively picked, according to Aristaenetus, from a grove of Aphrodite.2 He rolls this inscribed apple into his beloved’s path, a variation on a canonical

342 NICHOLAS RYNEARSON

3 For apples as love tokens and the practice of pelting the beloved object with apples, cf. Theocritus Id. 6.6–10, 11.10–11; Greek Anthology 5.79–80 (attributed to Plato by Diogenes Laertius 3.32); Longus Daphnis and Chloe 3.25, 34; Lucian Dialogues of the Courtesans 12.1. Cf. Trumpf 1960; Littlewood 1967, 149–60, 162, 180–81; Rosenmeyer 1996, 17; Faraone 1999, 69–72.

4 On the ambiguity of the “cure” Polyphemus supposedly effects in Id. 11, see Goldhill 1991, 249–61; Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004, 164–67 (the latter argue against the interpreta-tion of the song as a “do-it-yourself catharsis” [165, n. 129] put forth by Cozzoli 1994). As Faraone 2006 demonstrates, the love of Polyphemus for Galatea represents a particularly prominent site of convergence for discourses about medicine, magic, and poetry in the Hellenistic authors, treated in Theocritus’ Id. 6 and 11 and Callimachus’ epigram 46 Pf. As an anonymous reader for AJP points out, the motif of erotic magic as a solution to Polyphemus’ predicament is already foreshadowed in the well-known song of Philoxenus of Cythera, where, according to Synesius’ summary (PMG 818), Odysseus offered to teach the Cyclops epoidas, katadesmous and erotikas katanagkas to induce desire in Galatea.

gesture of courtship made with a traditional love token.3 Upon picking up the apple, Cydippe reads the oath aloud and is thus bound to marry Acontius, regardless of her will and despite other arrangements made by her father. After a lost section of narrative from which only brief frag-ments survive, Callimachus’ account continues as Cydippe is about to be married to another suitor at home on Naxos (fr. 75). Before the wedding can take place, however, she falls ill. The nuptials are attempted three times with similar results, prompting Ceyx, Cydippe’s father, to consult Apollo at Delphi, where he learns of the oath and returns to arrange a marriage to Acontius in order to fulfill it. The trick of the inscribed apple is thus indirectly but completely effective, ultimately bringing Acontius’ beloved object to him and resulting in their marriage.

This efficacy makes Acontius’ apple more than a mere love token: it mimics the effect of a love charm on Cydippe and acts as a cure for Acontius’ burning desire. The apple thus becomes an effective erotic pharmakon that elsewhere proves elusive, as in Theocritus’ Idyll 11, another Hellenistic narrative of frustrated desire, which explicitly describes Polyphemus’ failure to discover such efficacy in terms of sickness and cure.4 The inscribed apple is, moreover, particularly well suited to this role, since, as Christopher Faraone has shown, apples are traditionally connected with love magic, as in the following spell from a Hellenistic magical handbook:

!"# $# %# &'(# [)] !# "#*+&, -./0,12# [']3 %&# ['](# 4#0 [ 4] +#56#7 -8+9 :;.%# 2<[(=] <2/.4(= 2>9$1.7-?= @=A-(B#0 [email protected]"(464 <2$ C@2=;-(464 @9(B64=.D# E# = +3 %&'* -9 1;'7 %&'* -9 "2-;F7

343MAGIC, DISEASE, AND DESIRE IN AETIA FRR. 67–75 PF.

5 Supplementum Magicum 72; text and translation Faraone 1995, 9. On the text, see Daniel and Maltomini 1992, 106–27; Brashear 1979; and Janko 1988; on the date, see Brashear 1979 and Faraone 1995, 9, and notes. Faraone 1999 argues (persuasively in my view) that the apple is a traditional erotic charm and represents a very old form of love magic, specifically supposed to arouse desire in a woman (69–78); for a brief discussion of this particular spell, see Faraone 1999, 73–74, in addition to fuller discussions in Faraone 1990 and 1995, 8–10.

6 On the double nature of the pharmakon, see Derrida 1972; Bergren 1981; Goldhill 1991, 61–64. In Odyssey 4 pharmaka are divided into the good (esthla) and bad (lugra), in connection with Helen’s drug for forgetting pains (4.219–32). For the two meanings of techne, see LSJ techne I.2 and 3; cf. Vernant and Detienne 1974, esp. 69–70, 111, and 147–48.

";=-2 G"9.@9%H=A %2/=(4-’ !"’ !%I :4'8-A-49J-’ != K94.$ '21([L]6# 2# :;M(4 < - - - - - - - >N != <8'"* <2@/624 <<2$> %O "2P6# 2# 4#-( :4'3= %9.<"8-=42> Q)".(MH=942 -H'94 -9'H2= !"2(4+&=.

Incantation over an apple. (Say it) three times:I shall strike with apples . . . I shall give this pharmakon, always timely <and?> edible to mortal men and immortal gods. To whomsoever I give (this pharmakon) or at whomsoever I throw the apple or hit with it, setting everything aside, may she be mad for my love—whether she takes it in her hand and eats it . . . or sets it in her bosom—and may she not stop loving me. O lady Kyprogeneia, bring to perfection this perfect incantation.5

Callimachus’ narrative draws on the associations with magical discourse suggested by Acontius’ use of the apple for a complex staging of an erotic pharmakon that works in two directions, in the doubled and dangerous way that we have come to expect of the pharmakon from Homer on, both producing disease in Cydippe and eventually alleviating his own lovesickness. The apple thus becomes both remedy and poison, a dual role shared by Callimachus’ term techne, itself both a ruse or trap for Cydippe and a means of escape for Acontius.6

Erotic magic, however, provides only one of Callimachus’ models for this unusual love story, which freely combines the imagery and lan-guage of magic with traditional literary representations of desire and with medical representations of disease in order to create a complex literary triangulation that reads each of these discourses of the diseased and desiring body against the others.


7 According to Aristaenetus at 1.10.38–40, Cydippe apparently rejects the oath by throwing the apple away; cf. Rosenmeyer 1996. On love as a disease, see Carson 1986, 148; Faraone 1999, 43–44; see also Toohey 1995.

LOVESICKNESS, SICKNESS AS LOVE

In fragment 75, Callimachus describes Cydippe’s experience of three separate diseases, which frustrate each of three attempts to marry her to someone other than Acontius. When the preparations for the wed-ding are made for the first time, she is seized by the so-called “sacred disease” (75.12–15):

+949'4=O= -O= +’ 9R'9 <2<?0 K'8(0, S# '@9# +T =(L6(0, 2UM20 !0 CM.4;+20 -O= C"("9%"8%9@2, V9)+8%9=(4 +’ W9.O= :A%/X(%9=· Y -8-’ C=4M.& -O= <(P.A= Z# [/+]9# 7 %HK.40 [-AF9 +8%7=.

An awful pallor seized the poor girl, and on came the disease that we cast off onto wild goatsand falsely call “sacred.” That sickness wasted the girl away to the point of death.

The second attempt at the wedding is foiled by a quartan fever, which lasts for seven months (75.16–17):

+9P-9.(= !6-8.=)=-( -\ <'46%/2, +9P-9.(= ] "# 2# [B]0# ^"-\ -9-2.-2/* %_=20 [<2%=9 ")./.

For a second time they prepared the couches; a second time the girl was sick with a quartan fever for seven months.

When the wedding is planned a third time, a deadly chill settles on the bride (75.18–19):

-,? -./-(= !%=&62=-( M;%() <;# -#2# , -? -./-(= 2 #̀ -# [40 Q)+/""A= a'(?0 <.# )%?0 !6*</62-(.

For a third time they turned their attention to the wedding, and a third time in turn

a destructive chill settled on Cydippe.

Though Cydippe expresses no desire for Acontius, each of her three diseases is marked by bodily signs associated with the experience of eros in the Greek literary tradition, where love is often represented as a disease.7


8 Odyssey 8.522 (Demodocus’ song moves Odysseus to tears) and 19.204–8 (Penelope weeps at Odysseus’ mention of himself in his Cretan tale).

Above all, Cydippe’s various ailments recall Sappho 31 V, which serves as a locus classicus of embodied desire. The pallor of the sacred disease (chloos, fr. 75.12), the burning fever (puri, 75.17), and the chill (krumos, 75.19) produce a composite reminiscent of Sappho’s description of the burning (pur), cold sweat (hidros psuchros), and paleness (chlorotera poias) that the vision of the beloved produces in the lover (31.9–16):

'H"-(=+’ 2b-4<2 K.c "L. d"2+9+.8%2<9=, a"";-9664 +’ (d+T= e.A%%’, !"41.8- %9464 +’ f<()24,

†H<2+9 %’ J+.70 VLK.(0 <2<KH9-24†, -.8%(0 +T"2B62= fM.94, K'7.(-H.2 +T "(/20[%%4, -9@=;<A= +’ a'/M7 ’"4+9PA0 :2/=(%’ [%’ 2b-g

a subtle flame suddenly runs under my skin,I can’t see a thing and my ears ring,a cold sweat pours down upon me and trembling seizes me all over; I’m paler than grassand I seem to myself to be about to die.

The combination of these violent assaults on the body of the speaker when she looks upon the beloved brings her, like Cydippe, close to death (31.15–16).

Furthermore, the wasting produced by the sacred disease (etexe, Aetia fr. 75.15) corresponds to a widely used Hellenistic trope for love-sickness, which is modeled on the epic and tragic uses of this verb in con-nection with emotion.8 It occurs in connection with eros in, for example, Apollonius’ Medea (Argonautica 3.1019–21) and in Theocritus’ lovesick figures, Daphnis (Id. 1.66, 7.76), Simaetha (Id. 2.83), and Galatea (Id. 6.27). Cydippe’s analogous symptoms bring her into this class of lovers, a status forced upon her by the diseases she suffers: illness assaults her body just as desire attacks the body of the lover through the irresistible power of Eros or Aphrodite.

Moreover, as the parallels with both the physiological language of Sappho 31 V and Theocritus’ use of the verb teko suggest, Cydippe’s


9 See Carson 1986, 12–17. Following Carson, I read the symptoms described in fr. 31 V as not (at least primarily) meant to signify jealousy but the violent experience of eros; however, frustration and attempts to endure desire that can never or can no longer be fulfilled are recurrent themes in, e.g., frs. 1, 94, and 96 V and may not be out of place here, especially if the text continues after line 16 with the phrase, C''\ "\= -8'%2-(=. See further Greene 1996 and Robbins 1980 on 31 V with bibliography.

10 Cf. Rosenmeyer 1996, 27, where Barthes is also cited, but in reference to Acontius alone.

11 -.PK7 has a range of meaning similar to -&<7 and is also used of eros, in, e.g., AP 12.88.1. The change in complexion recalls Sappho 31 V (see above), and Eros is, of course, the “limb loosener”: e.g., Hesiod Theogony 120–21; Sappho 130 V; Archilochus 96 W.

symptoms belong specifically to the frustrated lover. Sappho’s symptoms are described on the occasion of seeing and hearing the beloved object in intimate conversation with another and suggest the experience of the unfulfilled desire which is the focus of much of her extant poetry,9 while Theocritus’ wasting figures, especially Simaetha, suffer from love that is unrequited or impossible.

Throughout her illnesses, Cydippe remains silent in order to conceal from her father her uncontrolled and unintentional utterance of the oath on Delos but succeeds only in prolonging her suffering. Moreover, since her symptoms prompt Ceyx’s visit to Delphi and her subsequent confes-sion of the whole story, these bodily signs ultimately betray her attempts to hide the oath. Like Roland Barthes’ frustrated lover, Cydippe is caught in a web of silence and signification she cannot control: “Ce que je cache par mon langage, mon corps le dit” (“What I hide with my language, my body declares,” Barthes 1977, 54).10 In this sense, Cydippe’s bodily symptoms open the possibility of reading—or, in this case, misreading—her silence as the attempt to hide the open secret of the lover’s desire.

This apparent struggle, in turn, recalls another of the most prominent victims of frustrated desire in Greek literature, the Phaedra of Euripides’ Hippolytus, for whom the ultimate failure of the body to cooperate in her efforts to conceal the disease (nosos) caused by eros (392–94) precipitates the breaking of her silence and the tragic chain of events that follows. Having resolved to starve herself to death rather than face the shame of her desire for Hippolytus, Phaedra succeeds only in exacerbating the effects of Aphrodite’s nosos. Phaedra lies “weakened on her sick bed” (teiromenan noserai koitai, 131) and “wasting” (truchei, 147), and when she appears on stage, the chorus observes that her body is “spoiled” (dedeletai, 174) and “changed in complexion” (allochroon, 175), while Phaedra herself complains that her “limbs are loosened” (lelumai meleon sundesma philon, 199), a composite that points to the embodied experi-ence of eros.11 The chorus then attempts to interpret Phaedra’s bodily


12 Rosenmeyer 1996 also provides an outline of Acontius’ suffering based on Cal-limachus and Aristaenetus.

signs in order to determine their cause (173–75, 266–83). When the nurse eventually extracts her secret, she promises to procure a pharmakon (479, 516) for her mistress’ desire and exits for her disastrous encounter with Hippolytus.

In contrast to the tragic outcome of the Hippolytus, Callimachus transforms the Euripidean complex of silence, speech, and sickness that lies at the heart of Phaedra’s fate by making Cydippe’s return to health correspond with breaking her silence, which he links in turn to its foreshad-owing analogue, the utterance of Apollo to Ceyx (Aetia fr. 75.38–40):

S @980· 2d-\. h i;F(= [1A ";'4=, 9J.9-( +’ 2d-&= <(P.A=, ] +’ C=’ !-3# 0# "j= !<;')V9= ["(0<S= 2` 630.

The god spoke; he [Ceyx] then went back to Naxos and questioned the girl herself; she revealed the whole story truthfullyand was well again.

Thus Callimachus not only draws on but also significantly transforms elements of Euripides’ depiction of the frustrated lover to produce a narrative in which the revelation of Cydippe’s secret restores her to health and prevents, rather than produces, tragic consequences for both herself and Acontius.

EROS, SELF AND OTHER

In addition to bringing her in line with the lovesick figures of Greek literature exemplified by Sappho, Euripides’ Phaedra, and Theocritus’ wasting lovers, the symptoms of her three afflictions and her attempt to conceal their cause also make Cydippe’s experience parallel to that of Acontius, since he, too, suffers in the manner of the literary model of the lover, as Callimachus’ introductory précis already suggests at 67.1–2: “the youth burned passionately for the beautiful maiden Cydippe” (<2'I / k@9-( Q)+/""l "2B0 !"$ "2.@9=4<I). Although most of the account of Acontius’ lovesick suffering is lost to us, some key features may be traced in the fragmented narrative space between fragments 67 and 75, along with some speculations based on the structure of what survives and the version of the story in Aristaenetus.12 We can see in these traces how Callimachus’ narrative suggests that Acontius in fact reproduces in the body of Cydippe


13 Kenney 1983, 48–49, also notes this reversal.

the symptoms he suffers as a result of his own lovesickness, making her into a kind of double for himself.

First, when Cydippe experiences the symptoms of the suffering lover as a result of being desired by Acontius, she reproduces a reversal not unlike that which has occurred in his own erotic history. Fragments 68 and 69 show that he, too, was once a beloved object, apparently frustrat-ing the desire of his male admirers:

%H%1'9-( +’ 9>6"=&'240 h""8-9 <(L.(0 J(4:7'9?= mT '(9-.8= (68)

he was a concern to lovers whenever he went, as a young man,to the schoolhouse or the bath

"(''($ <2$ :4'H(=-90 Z<8=-4(= n<2= [.2X9 (>=("8-24 o4<9'\0 !< <)'/<7= ';-2M20 (69)

and many lovers of Acontius cast to the ground the last Sicilian drops from their cups when drinking wine

Fragment 70 suggests that Callimachus played on the idea of reversal as Acontius is transformed from eromenos to erastes, from the object of desire to its subject:13

C''’ C"? -8F()2d-?0 h -(F9)-O0 f.+4= [K7= ^-H.()

but from the bowof another the archer himself experiencing the sharp point

This is a reversal typical of the lyric lover’s revenge, the justice Anne Carson (1996) discerns in Sappho 1 V, arguing that Aphrodite promises the frustrated lover not that her love will one day be requited, but that the beloved object will someday know what it feels like to be a frustrated lover herself. It is not difficult to imagine Acontius’ rejected kottabos-playing lovers of fragment 69 wishing upon him the bitter pangs of love in exactly this fashion.

Like Acontius, Cydippe had many admirers before becoming his beloved object, a parallel to which Callimachus draws attention with “many lovers” (polloi kai phileontes) in fragment 69 answering “many . . . mothers” (pollai . . . meteres) in 67.9. Cydippe, too, will know the


14 For the oath as characteristic of the lover’s behavior, see Plato Symposium 183a5–6; cf. Hesiod fr. 124 M-W; Callimachus epigram 25 Pf.; Longus Daphnis and Chloe 2.39. Plato’s Lysis suggests that declaring the beloved’s name in public was commonplace: Hippothales repeats the name “Lysis” so often that his friends feel they are haunted by it (204c–d). Such verbal declarations seem to be echoed in the written form of graffiti and vase inscriptions (cf. Dover 1989, 111–24) and reflected in Acontius’ inscription “Cydippe is beautiful” on the bark of trees in fr. 73 (cited below), itself a trope taken up by the Roman elegists. I thank one of the readers for AJP for suggesting the significance of Cydippe’s declaration of Acontius’ name in the oath.

torment of the desire she produced in others, above all in Acontius, by experiencing its symptoms as a result of his trick. The difference for this pair is that lovesickness will not last but will be cured by marriage, which will alleviate the disease of desire in both bodies. Therefore, the reversal Acontius produces through the intervention of the apple is not merely the lyric lover’s satisfaction of “what goes around comes around” but a complete transformation of his relationship with Cydippe. She is not only made to suffer the physical ailments of the frustrated lover, but this suffering guarantees the eventual fulfillment of the oath, since it is relieved by marrying Acontius, who in this sense does double duty as both her erastes and the object of her (unwilling) imitation of his desire. The oath itself, which guarantees the success of Acontius’ techne, caps this doubled reversal of roles, since in swearing her faithfulness to Acontius, albeit unwillingly, Cydippe imitates the lover’s oath and the invocation of the beloved’s name.14

The doubling of the lovers, furthermore, is foreshadowed by the description of the two youths at fragment 67.7–8, where they share both a noble lineage and Callimachus’ metaphor, “beautiful stars of the islands both” (<2'($ =A6;7= C6-H.90 C%:8-9.(4). The poem perhaps continued, in the lacuna that follows fragment 67, with further emphasis on the parallel qualities of the pair through the mention of Acontius’ singular beauty along the same lines as the description of Cydippe in 67.11–14, follow-ing or perhaps chiastically leading up to the description of his status as a popular object of desire in fragments 68 and 69. Such an arrangement would set the stage for the reversal of fragment 70 to segue into an account of love at first sight on Delos.

The emphasis on the likeness of Acontius and Cydippe seems also to have been played out in a description of Acontius’ lovesickness to which elements of Cydippe’s silent suffering would have been parallel. Aristaenetus stresses the wasting effect of Acontius’ unfulfilled desire, describing him as “wasted away in his limbs and, in despair, fading in complexion and growing terribly dim in his eyes” (!<-2<9$0 +T -\ %H'A


15 For the unusual meaning of p.2<43=, see LSJ s.v. p.2<4;7.16 C''’ !=$ +O :'(4(B64 <9<(%%H=2 -8662 :H.(4-9 / M.;%%2-2, Q)+/""A= q66’ !.H()64 <2'&=

(“May you bear in your bark carved letters, as many as will declare that Cydippe is beauti-ful”). Compare Aristaenetus 1.10.56–61.

<2$ +)6@)%/240 %2.24=8%9=(0 -O= K.(4\= <2$ -? 1'H%%2 +94=30 p.2<43=, 1.10.51–52).15 Aristaenetus’ account further deepens the mirroring effect of their conditions as the two youths respond with similar attempts at concealment, since, like Cydippe, Acontius tries to hide the physical signs of his lovesickness. Ashamed to cry during the day, he “saves up his tears” to be cried at night (1.10.48–51):

+;<.)2 %8=(=, (dK r"=(= 2W =P<-90 !"_M(= -c %94.2</*· <'2/94= M\. 2>+(P%9=(0 -O= ]%H.2= -? +;<.)(= !-2%49P9-( -2B0 =)F/=.

The nights brought tears alone, not sleep, to the youth; ashamed to cry during the day he saved up his tears for the nights.

Acontius is also especially concerned that his father should not learn of his condition, just as Cydippe’s concealment of her oath focuses on her father (1.10.52–54):

!+9+/94 -c -9<8=-4 :2=_=24 <2$ 9>0 CM.?= !"$ ";6l ".(:;694 -?= "2-H.2 :9PM7= !:(/-2.

He was afraid to appear before his father and, avoiding him, visited the countryside on every manner of pretext.

Although these details are not found in the fragmentary narrative in Aetia 3, it seems that Aristaenetus borrows the motivation he attributes to Acontius directly from his Callimachean model, where it is likely reflected in the toi of fragment 72, whose language the passage above closely resembles: fM.2+9 -c ";6l64= !"$ ".(K;=l64= !:(/-2 (“for this rea-son he would visit the country on every manner of pretext”). Fragment 73, furthermore, in which Acontius addresses the trees on which he has inscribed “Cydippe is beautiful,” suggests another aspect of his struggle with the body’s signification, an attempt to displace onto their bark the message that is written all over his face (to blemma) as well as the rest of his pallid, wasting body.16

These parallels, then, show that it is the very disease Acontius himself suffers that he transmits to Cydippe. Unlike, for example, the Platonic erastes of the Phaedrus, Apollonius’ Jason or the young lovers of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, all of whom give the disease of love to


17 Cf. Petrovic 2004 on the connection between the justice sought in both judicial and erotic spells: “NN soll daher das erleben, was der Zaubernde schon erlebt hat. Dadurch wird aber nicht nur Gerechtigkeit hergestellt, sondern auch der Zauberer geheilt, da nichts die Krankheit, die Liebe heißt, so effizient heilen kann, wie die erwidernde Liebe. Genau das ist die Gerechtigkeit der Liebesbeschwörungen: Wenn die Liebe eine Krankheit ist, dann ist die einzige mögliche Heilung eine Erwiderung oder ‘Verwirklichung’ dieser Liebe. Wenn die Liebe auf eine andere Art und Weise nicht erwidert werden kann, dann sind katadesmoi und agogai die einzige Lösung für die schrecklichen Liebesmühen” (“X must therefore experience what the spell-caster has experienced. Thereby not only will justice be established, but the spell-caster will also be healed, since nothing can heal the disease called love as effectively as love returned. This is precisely the justice of the love spells: if love is a disease, then the only possible cure is a return or ‘fulfillment’ of this love. If love cannot be returned by any other manner or means, then katadesmoi and agogai are the only remedy for the terrible love pangs,” 427–28 [emphasis added], with further references to healing the disease of love in notes 26 and 27).

18 On ancient Greek love magic, see Faraone 1999; Graf 1997, 137–44, 176–90; Winkler 1990, 71–98.

their beloved objects through direct visual contact, Acontius, instead of stirring eros in Cydippe with the visible signs of desire and desirability on his own body, resorts to the intermediary of the apple. The efficacy of this indirect means of seduction proves that, as Patricia Rosenmeyer observes, “Eros has indeed taught Acontius well” (1996, 16).

SYMPATHETIC MAGIC

Acontius thus gives Cydippe the same disease of love that he himself suffers by means of the “poisoned” apple. But in cases of lovesickness, contagion and cure are coextensive, a fact at the heart of the logic of the love charm, since transference of the lover’s symptoms binds the beloved by forcing him (or more frequently her) to answer the lover’s desire in kind, the only cure for the lover’s disease.17 The evidence for erotic magic from antiquity and the literary representations of magical practices both suggest that this reciprocation is imagined at the level of the embodied experience of desire, since the efficacious love charm or spell causes the beloved to participate in the lover’s disease.18 John Winkler (1990, 87–90) has stressed that the cultural and psychological essence of ancient erotic spells is the transference of the lover’s feelings of disturbance, loss of control, and obsessive fixation to the beloved object through magical intervention, usually in the form of dreams or other divine forces.

Although sometimes shocking to modern sensibilities, it is unsur-prising that magical spells intended to induce desire often request that


19 Versnel 1998, esp. 247–51. One example cited by Versnel (229) specifically asks the divinities “below the earth” to “cast harsh fevers into all the limbs of Gamete” (!=1;''9-9 ").9-(s0 K2'9["(s0 9>0] ";=-2 -\ %H'A t2%9-_0).

20 Supplementum Magicum 49, text as cited by Versnel 1998, 219–20; trans. Versnel, modified. Furthermore, the spell is designed (with extreme anatomical specificity) to prevent Matrona from having sexual relations with any man other than Theodorus, just as Acontius’ techne prevents Cydippe from marrying any other man through the mechanism of the oath; the lines preceding the citation from the spell above read as follows: q"70 %O 14=A@I, %O ")M46@I, %O ['24]<;6l %&-9 C:.(<+4>642<?= !"4-9'H6l %9@’ ^-H.(), %O f''* C=-.$ 6)=H'@40 9> %O u9(+5.*. Compare Supplementum Magicum 50 and 51, written for the same Theodorus and Matrona, as well as 38, 45, 46, 47, and esp. 48, all of which specify that their victims should not have other lovers besides the spell-caster. Compare also a spell recorded on a fourth-century lead tablet from Pella: %O M\. ';1(4 (sc. v4(=)6(:3=) f''2= M)=2B<2 C''’ N !%w, / [!%T +]T 6)=<2-2MA.j624 v4(=)6(:3=-4 <2$ %A+9%/2= f''2= (cited by Petrovic 2004, 434).

21 On the similia similibus formula, see Graf 1997, 124–25, and 134–50, which cautions against reading simplistic correspondences into ancient spells and provides a critique of Frazer. Nonetheless, an essential homology, particularly in spells or charms designed to induce erotic passion, has been well analyzed in Winkler 1990; Theocritus’ Id. 2 suggests that liter-ary representations of erotic magic—if not necessarily the practices documented in papyri and archaeological evidence—depend heavily on a model of homology or sympathy (see below). See Faraone 1999, 42, and 65–69, on the “persuasive analogy” in ancient magic.

22 On the spell in Id. 2, including its divergence from the practices documented in the magical papyri and archaeological evidence, see Graf 1997, 176–85. Citations are from Gow 1952.

divine agents cause violent effects in their targets, since eros is typically represented as a violent onset of madness or disease. Henk Versnel pro-vides a number of examples of erotic spells that, with great anatomical specificity, call down upon their targets symptoms like those Cydippe suffers, including burning fever (pur, puratos, puromai) and wasting (teko, ekteko).19 Some erotic spells further specify that the beloved should only be restored to health once he or she is united with the lover, as in a spell cast by one Theodorus: “Let Matrona not ever be able apart from The-odorus to have strength, enjoy good health, or get sleep by night” (%[O +])=A@&-7 "5"(-9 x2-.5=2 K7.$0 u9(+5.() [%O <2.-9].B=, %O 9d6-2@B=, %A+T r"=() -)K9B= =)<-80).20

The reproduction of the lover’s violent experience in the beloved’s body also reflects in a different register the logic behind what Frazer called “sympathetic magic,” in which ritualized actions such as burning, grinding or piercing special items or effigies are meant to produce similar (or at least analogous) effects in the target of the spell, a formula also known as similia similibus.21 These two levels of analogy can be seen in the most well-known Hellenistic literary depiction of love magic, the performance of a binding spell (katadesmos) in Theocritus’ Idyll 2.22 Here Simaetha’s


23 Cf. Callimachus epigram 30 Pf., where the lover is reduced to “bones and hair.”

various charms are intended to produce in her beloved object, Delphis, the burning (Id. 2.23–26), madness (48–51), and, as in the case of Cydippe’s sacred disease, melting or wasting (28–29) she herself experiences as his frustrated lover now that he has ceased to visit her.

Simaetha repeatedly makes explicit the analogy between her ritual action and its intended effect on Delphis, for example, at 2.23–26:

vH':40 [%’ C=/269=· !My +’ !"$ vH':4+4 +;:=2=2J@7· Kz0 2r-2 '2<9B %HM2 <2"")./6262<mF2"/=20 {:@A <(d+T 6"(+?= 9J+(%90 2d-j0,(r-7 -(4 <2$ vH':40 !=$ :'(M$ 6;.<’ C%2@P=(4.

Delphis vexed me; against Delphis Iburn laurel. And as it crackles loudly and is burned upsuddenly and we see not even its ash,so may Delphis’ flesh be burned to ash in fire.

Similarly, at 28–31 she melts a wax effigy and whirls a rhombos to produce a parallel wasting and whirling in her beloved:

p0 -(L-(= -?= <A.?= !My 6s= +2/%(=4 -;<7, |0 -;<(4@’ G"’ [.7-(0 h xP=+4(0 2d-/<2 vH':40.Kz0 +4=9B@’ q+9 }8%1(0 h K;'<9(0 !F Z:.(+/-20,|0 -_=(0 +4=(B-( "(@’ ~%9-H.2464 @P.2464=.

As I melt (tako) this wax with the help of the god,so may Delphis of Myndus straight away melt (takoith’) with desire,and as this bronze rhombos whirls by the power of Aphrodite,so may that man whirl to my door.

Simaetha then draws a parallel between her own experience of desire and the disturbance she hopes to stir in Delphis when she describes her lovesickness as burning (kataithomai, 40) and, later, wasting: “As soon as I saw him, I was maddened and my heart was assaulted by fire, poor me, and my beauty wasted away” (Kz0 J+(=, |0 !%;=A=, �0 %(4 ").$ @)%?0 >;:@A / +94'2/20, -? +T <;''(0 !-;<9-(, 82–83). She goes on to describe how she was subsequently shaken by a “parching disease” (%H -40 <2").\ =86(0 !F96;'2F9=, 85) that kept her in bed for ten days and nights, wasting her away to skin and bones (86–90).23

Thus it is precisely the symptoms of her own desire that her various charms are meant to produce in Delphis, where they will mark a quite


24 On the transference between the lover who resorts to magical rites, preoccupied with disturbing and frustrated desire, and the beloved in whom an erotic spell is meant to kindle obsessive desire for the lover, see Winkler 1990, 87–88, and esp. 96: “Insofar as the operations are a wish that Miss X come to feel eros as deeply and disturbingly as the operator himself feels it, the binding and piercing [of an erotic spell] represent not a will to dominate but a replication in her of his own experience.” See also Versnel 1998, 257, discussing Winkler 1990: “The various—real!—torments called down upon the victim are nothing else than the symptoms of the love-sickness experienced and abominated by the male performer himself.”

25 The more typical daimon appears, e.g., in Simaetha’s phrase, -(L-(= -?= <A.?= !My 6s= +2/%(=4 -;<7 (Id. 2.28, cited above).

literal rekindling of his desire for Simaetha.24 In this way, the binding magic of the katadesmos extends the logic of sympathy that motivates the homology between the charm and the beloved to the inducement of likeness between beloved and lover: the love charm, in other words, makes the other, the beloved, a doublet of the self. Once effected, this doubling draws the two together through mutual desire, making the lover and beloved into the only cure for the disease they share. Without explicitly taking the form of an erotic spell, Acontius’ techne participates in the logic of sympathetic magic evident in Idyll 2 by reproducing, as argued above, his own symptoms of desire in Cydippe in precisely this kind of transference.

The apple thus acts as an indirect katadesmos through the logic of sympathy, building on the likeness of the two youths already emphasized by Callimachus as the backdrop for their parallel symptoms described above. The sense that this similarity somehow naturally links the two, marked from the outset of the story and reflected in Aristaenetus’ cita-tion of the “old saying” (palaios logos), “Like comes together with like by the grace of the divine” (q%(4(= h%(/* <2-\ @9B(= C9$ ".(6"9';X94, 1.10.2–3), thus finds its ultimate expression in the logic of the katadesmos in Callimachus’ erotic tale. The divinity to which Aristaenetus alludes, however, is not the daimon commonly invoked in ancient magic, but rather Artemis, who enforces Cydippe’s unwilling oath with the visita-tion of the illnesses.25 This divine guarantee of the charm’s efficacy is responsible for its far more powerful binding effect on Cydippe than Simaetha’s love charms. Behind Artemis’ intervention, of course, stands the power of another divinity, Eros, the originator of Acontius’ trick as his divine praeceptor amoris.

This relationship to Eros as well as his effective use of the love charm links Acontius to the heroic model of Pindar’s Pythian 4, where Jason becomes the protos heuretes of erotic binding magic with the help


26 Citations are from Snell 1953. On the iunx in Pythian 4, see Faraone 1999, 56–69; Johnston 1995. If Petropoulos 1993 is correct in reading the language and logic of erotic magic into Sappho fr. 1, then the literary representation of magical practices as a typical strategy for the frustrated lover has a long history; Pindar may then be imagining Jason as the originator of an already well-established topos.

of Aphrodite. According to Pindar, Aphrodite introduces the magical iunx to mortals for the first time (proton) and teaches (ekdidaskesen) the hero to be sophos in the use of prayers and incantations (litas t’ epaoidas) to seduce Medea (Pythian 4.216–17), just as Eros teaches Acontius his techne.26 Furthermore, as the success of Jason’s quest depends on seducing Medea, Acontius’ kleos likewise depends upon seduction, since his union with Cydippe will make him the eponymous founder of the Acontiadae, whose fame and honor (as a phulon peritimon at Aetia fr. 75.51–52) is preserved in Xenomedes’ historical work on Ceos as well as in Callimachus’ poem.

BINDING AND WRITING AS DOLIAI TECHNAI

In sharp contrast to the heroic elements of Jason’s narrative, the tragic afterlife of the myth of Jason and Medea in Euripides emphasizes what Pindar already suggests, namely, the inequality in their love story and the problematic nature of Jason’s heroism. In Pythian 4 Jason effectively entraps Medea with the aid of Aphrodite, who provides Jason with the magical iunx in order that he “might strip Medea of respect (aido) for her parents” and that she might desire to come to Greece under the “whip of persuasion” (mastigi Peithous, 4.218–19). Thus Medea’s will is subordinated to Jason’s heroic narrative, despite Pindar’s comment that “they pledged to join together in the sweet common bond of marriage” (<2-2�=A6;= -9 <(4=?= M�%(= / M')<s= != C''�'(464 %9BF24, 4.222–23).

A similar shadow hangs over the Callimachean narrative of seduc-tion, since, like Medea, Cydippe’s agency is entirely subordinated to the desire of Acontius and the historical narrative of the Acontiadae through the intervention of divine forces and erotic magic. Patricia Rosenmeyer (1996, 13), drawing on Jesper Svenbro’s model of reading in antiquity, emphasizes the aspect of “textual entrapment and domination” that Acon-tius exerts over Cydippe when she reads the oath, the result of a less than heroic deception, as Ovid further emphasizes in Heroides 21. Following Rosenmeyer, we may justifiably feel a strong sense of dissatisfaction at the fact that Cydippe participates in this love story only in so far as she


27 As noted above, Aristaenetus further stresses her unwillingness and shame at the oath she swears as she throws the apple away at 1.10.38–40.

28 Citations are from Barrett 1964.29 On the deltos in the Hippolytus, see Goff 1990, 37–38, 101; Zeitlin 1996; Rosen-

meyer 2001, 88–94.30 Zeitlin 1996, 233–34. A summary cannot do justice to the richness and subtlety of

Zeitlin’s reading; among the parallels she notes are the gesture of covering the face with garments (1996, 244–45), the binding of the noose for Phaedra and the entanglement of the reins for Hippolytus (225–57), and the shared experience of the dustropos harmonia of the body in pain (247–48).

shares the symptoms of her lover against her will, as both the absence of any sign of interest in marrying Acontius and her previous concealment of the oath emphasize (fr. 75.38–40).27 Eros thus appears to have taught the youth a dolia techne of dubious and unheroic character.

This more sinister side of the binding spell also invokes another aspect of Euripides’ tragic eros in the Hippolytus, since Phaedra explicitly seeks to reproduce her own suffering in the body of her object of desire. Having declared her resolution to end her life, she adds the following further intention (728–31):28

C-\. <2<8= M9 KC-H.* M9=&6(%24@2=(L6’, �=’ 9>+I %O ’"$ -(B0 !%(B0 <2<(B0GVA'?0 9U=24· -_0 =86() +T -_6+H %(4 <(4=I %9-26Ky= 67:.(=9B= %2@&69-24.

Yet I will become an evil for anotherin dying, in order that he learn not to be haughtyover my misfortunes; gaining a share of this diseasein common with me he will learn to be moderate.

Before she dies, Phaedra records on a writing tablet (deltos) her false but damning accusation of Hippolytus, which leads in turn to Theseus’ curse and Hippolytus’ death through the intervention of Poseidon.29 Froma Zeitlin observes that the violent destruction of Hippolytus’ body fulfills Phaedra’s promise by making “him the unwitting double of herself,” since “he will have to live through her experience in every respect, sharing the symptoms of her ‘disease’ in the eyes of the world until the condition of his sick and suffering body as seen at the end of the play symmetrically matches her physical state at the beginning.”30 In this sense, Phaedra succeeds in forcing Hippolytus to suffer the disease of eros indirectly through the efficacy of the deltos that leads to the reproduction of its violent symptoms in his body.


31 670–71: -/=20 =L= -HK=20 [K(%9= N '8M()0 / 6:2'9B624 <;@2%%2 'P94= '8M();32 On curses and erotic spells, see Versnel 1998; Faraone 1999, 43–55.

Since Acontius’ inscribed apple succeeds in making Cydippe “share in his disease,” as argued above, Phaedra’s deltos, which also achieves its effect through writing and in the absence of its author, may be regarded as the apple’s tragic analogue. Phaedra’s description of her intention to use the deltos invites comparison with the apple as techne, since she describes it as a remedy or device (heurema, Hippolytus 716), answering the need for a techne as a means of escape once the nurse has disclosed her secret to Hippolytus.31 Moreover, like Phaedra, Acontius ensures the kleos of his descendants, the Acontiadae, through a techne that com-municates the disease of eros, although in his case the outcome is the successful seduction required by the erotic/etiological narrative instead of the tragic outcome of mutual destruction.

Finally, like Acontius’ apple, the deltos resembles both a curse tab-let and a binding erotic spell, of which the curse is the negative mirror image.32 The inscribed tablet both precipitates and foreshadows the curse (ara) of Theseus that accomplishes, through the intervention of another divinity, the destruction of Hippolytus. In addition, the deltos mimics the mechanism shared by the curse and the erotic katadesmos, since it achieves this destruction through the binding power that constitutes a central motif of the Hippolytus, as Zeitlin has shown, and manifests itself in the messenger’s speech in the literal form of Hippolytus’ entanglement in his reins (1235–36, 1244). The multiple correspondences with the tragic narrative of desire and disease that binds Phaedra and Hippolytus, then, casts an additional shadow over the already troubling one-sidedness of the love story of Acontius and Cydippe.

CONTEXT AND CONCLUSION: ON BEING IN LOVE IN THE HELLENISTIC COURT

Without abandoning the sense of dissatisfaction aroused by both the eli-sion of Cydippe’s agency and the contamination of Callimachus’ erotic narrative with Euripides’ tragic version of desire’s contagion, we may approach the problem of desire and disease by posing from another angle the question, how is the experience of “being in love” to be understood? In the literature of the Hellenistic period, eros is described in increasingly detailed and precise physiological terms, producing a model in which desire becomes ever more closely identified with the experience of its


33 On the relationship of literary and medical discourses, particularly the connec-tions between tragedy and Hippocratic discourse, see Kosak 2004 and Holmes 2005, with bibliography.

34 For a succinct account of the advances in medicine in the Hellenistic period, see Keyser and Irby-Massie 2006, 249–54; see also von Staden 1989 passim, and 139–53, on dissection and vivisection.

35 Hunter 1989, 179–80, where he comments, “The juxtaposition of contemporary science and the poetic image of the Loves shooting their painful arrows [into Medea] is a mixed effect typical of Hellenistic poetry.”

36 In addition to Apollonius’ obvious interest in Euripides’ Medea, consider, e.g., 3.674–80, which recalls the speculation of the chorus as to the cause of Phaedra’s illness in the parodos of the Hippolytus (141–69).

symptoms. This model of eros is a prominent site of convergence for literary and medical discourses that has a long history in Greek literary culture but takes on a new significance among the learned Hellenistic poets.33 Remarkable advances in anatomical knowledge in Alexandria, the results of animal and human dissection and vivisection carried out by Herophilus, Erasistratus, and their students, are reflected in the precise descriptions of the desiring body in poetry.34 Apollonius, for example, uses the vocabulary of Hellenistic anatomy to describe with precision the shooting pains of love Medea experiences in the fine nerves of the back of her neck at Argonautica 3.761–65. As Richard Hunter notes in his commentary, Apollonius combines a literary topos, here Homeric anatomical specificity in describing wounds, with the diction of contem-porary medical discourse.35

This physiology of eros does not replace other literary tropes for the depiction of the lover’s symptoms but rather supplements them with an additional level of culturally coded sophistication. Again, the example of Apollonius’ Medea is particularly relevant, since her lovesickness is repeatedly framed by references to the literary tropes that mark the his-tory of this convergence, especially in those models which, as we have seen, are of particular interest in relation to the Acontius and Cydippe story, the poetry of Sappho and Euripides.36 By drawing on a complex combination of discourses in a similar way, Callimachus’ narrative begs the question of what model or combinations of models are best used to make sense of desire. If love becomes identified with its symptoms through the convergence of medical and literary tropes, then Cydippe, in this sense, is as much in love as Medea or Phaedra, figures who prove, after all, that Eros and Aphrodite are harsh gods who seldom respect the will of their victims. In other words, the physiology of desire provides another model for reflecting on the conflict between desire and the will that recurs throughout Greek literature.


37 Plut. Vit. Demetr. 38; text cited from Perrin 1920. The story is also recorded in Valerius Maximus 5.7 and Appian 11.59–61. Pliny mentions the story at HN 29.3; Galen reports his own similar experience at 14.630–35 Kühn.

Another particularly striking example of this convergence of liter-ary and medical discourses that sheds light on Callimachus’ love story is Plutarch’s account of Antiochus and Stratonice in the Life of Demetrius.37 In the setting of the Seleucid court, Antiochus, king Seleucus’ son, falls in love with his stepmother, Stratonice. Ashamed of his incestuous pas-sion, which Plutarch describes as an “incurable disease” (anekesta nosein, 38.2), Antiochus fights his feelings and ultimately decides, like Euripides’ Phaedra, to starve himself to death. As he wastes away from the combined effects of his passion and his purposeful neglect, the cause of his illness remains a mystery. Seleucus consults one of the most famous physicians of the day, Erasistratus, because of his reputation as a diagnostician: the almost superhuman refinement of his senses allows him to perceive and interpret the subtlest of the body’s signs, including the rhythm of the pulse and changes in the countenance (prosopon). According to Plutarch, Erasistratus easily recognizes that Antiochus is suffering from the disease of love, but when he questions him, the prince refuses to divulge the object of his passion. Erasistratus solves this problem by observing his reaction to different members of the royal household (38.3). Antiochus’ condition is the same whenever he is visited by anyone except his step-mother Stratonice, whose presence produces a set of violent reactions, which Plutarch characterizes with reference to Sappho’s representation of the physiology of desire (38.4–5):

p0 (`= -3= %T= f''7= 9>648=-7= h%(/70 9UK9, -_0 +T o-.2-(=/<A0 <2$ <2@’ ̂ 2)-O= <2$ %9-\ -(L o9'9P<() :(4-56A0 "('';<40 !M/=9-( -\ -_0 o2":(L0 !<9B=2 "9.$ 2d-?= ";=-2, :7=_0 !"/6K9640, !.P@A%2 ").3+90, eV97= G"('9/V940, W+.3-90 aF9B0, C-2F/2 <2$ @8.)1(0 != -(B0 6:)M%(B0, -H'(0 +T -_0 V)K_0 <2-\ <.;-(0 ]--A%H=A0 C"(./2 <2$ @;%1(0 <2$ zK./2640.

When anyone else came in, [Antiochus] remained unchanged, but when Stratonice would frequently visit, either by herself or with Seleucus, all those things in Sappho occurred in him: halting of speech, feverish blush-ing, failure of vision, sudden sweats, disturbance and commotion in the pulse, and finally, with his soul defeated by force, helplessness and stupor and pallor.

First and foremost this story suggests a model for the reception of medicine in a broader context through the filters of literary tropes that


38 Plutarch, like Longinus (On the Sublime 10.1–3), plays fast and loose with the details of Sappho’s description of embodied desire.

39 For example, a similar diagnosis is incorporated into the proliferation of stories about Hippocrates (Jouanna 1999, 31); nonetheless, Plutarch’s version resonates particularly well with other elements of the Hellenistic context, as I argue below.

40 On Nicias, see also Id. 13 and Epigr. 8; cf. Faraone 2006.41 Cf. Gow 1952, vol. 2, 208; Hunter 1999, 215–17.

grant cultural intelligibility to the activities and knowledge of its special-ized practitioners. Like Cydippe, Antiochus is assimilated to the literary model of the frustrated lover, struggling to hide his passion but unable to control the signs produced by his body in the manner of Euripides’ tragic Phaedra. These bodily symptoms are in turn rendered intelligible in Plutarch’s account by assimilating them, however loosely, to Sappho’s well-known depiction of embodied desire.38 Thus, through the use of tragic and lyric literary tropes, Plutarch makes sense not only of the his-torical event he reports—the unusual marriage between stepmother and stepson—but also of the diagnostic practice and specialized knowledge of the physician.

Plutarch’s account is late and undoubtedly shaped by the conven-tions of biographical literature and, therefore, conclusions must be drawn with caution.39 However, the story provides a suggestive glimpse of the reciprocity that marks the interaction of scientific and literary discourses in the Hellenistic milieu. Developing generic features of its own as a typical story told about famous doctors, the anecdote is one example of how other literary genres can exert the influence of their conventions on the scientific construction of the body and desire. Plutarch’s telling of the tale suggests that knowledge of the literary tradition is as essential to the diagnosis of Antiochus’ lovesickness as the physician’s medical knowledge and celebrated subtlety of perception. Erasistratus’ recogni-tion of both the general situation and the body’s specific symptoms as literary tropes is a part of his diagnostic success in the Hellenistic court, where life often imitates art, as it does here in the form of Sappho 31 V read through the filter of the Hippolytus. And in fact medical and literary skills were intimately and often explicitly linked in the Hellenistic world: as Theocritus’ Nicias reminds us, a doctor may be well acquainted with the muses (Id. 11.5–6, 28.7).40 Through his connection to Erasistratus and his school, Nicias, who combines in his person the roles of physician and poet, brings us full circle in the complex relationship of the two arts and the circulation of their discourses in Hellenistic Alexandria.41

Just as the physician Erasistratus must be “acquainted with the


42 Cf. Bing 1988, 18–19, 27–28.43 Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004, 318–20, 338–40. Epigram 43 Pf. (= AP 12.134) is espe-

cially relevant to the case of both Antiochus and Cydippe, since the xeinos of the epigram, like them, attempts to conceal his lovesickness (�'<(0 [K7= h F9B=(0 !';=@2=9=), which the poet discovers by interpreting signs (ichnia): his breath and drooping garland. As Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004, 339–40, suggest, this epigram also brings together the interpretation of physical symptoms with knowledge of literary tradition, since Callimachus seems to follow Asclepiades’ similar detection of hidden love in AP 12.135.

44 Also noted by Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004, 63.

muses” in the form of knowledge of Sappho in order to be an effective diagnostician, the well-read muse, to borrow Peter Bing’s felicitous phrase, must be versed not only in the literary tradition but also in the accumulated knowledge of other discourses, including medicine. Callimachus signals the expertise of his muse in the historical and mythological traditions throughout the Aetia; a very pointed example occurs in fragment 75 with the explicit reference to the contents of Xenomedes’ written records as his muse’s source (53–77).42 The same logic applies to the self-conscious marker of scientific savvy at 75.14, where the reference to the Hippocratic rejection of the divine causation of the so-called sacred disease marks his muse’s knowledge of medical discourse in similar fashion. Thus Calli-machus’ representation of Cydippe’s afflictions asserts a doubled expertise akin to that of Nicias and Erasistratus: the poet is master not only of the literary models of eros he reworks but also of medicine’s knowledge of symptoms and their causes. Erasistratus’ diagnosis of Antiochus’ secret desire, moreover, resonates particularly well with the persona of the “shrewd detective” Fantuzzi and Hunter have identified in Callimachus’ funerary and erotic epigrams (esp. 30 and 43 Pf.), where the poet, like the gifted physician, reads and recognizes the signs of hidden love.43

It should come as no surprise, however, that Callimachus’ gestures towards the fashionable state of the medical art, including the rejection of divine causation in the interpretive work of diagnosis, are double-edged. The twist in the tale of Cydippe’s affliction, of course, is that this instance of the “sacred disease” is caused by the intervention of a god, making it truly a hiere nousos.44 The ironic flirtation with competing ideas about the body and disease does not end here, since in addition to the etiological and historical interest that provides the raison d’être of the Aetia as a whole, the complex love story of Acontius and Cydippe, as we have seen, traverses a broad range of magical, medical, and literary tropes to reach its fulfillment under the sign of Apollo. For, just as Seleucus consults Era-sistratus in the case of Antiochus’ lovesickness, Ceyx receives a diagnosis


45 It is tempting to suggest that Callimachus’ curious description of Apollo’s revelation as an ennuchion epos (75.21) is meant to stress its diagnostic element by linking it, through an allusion to the practice of incubation, to the healing cult of Asclepius, with which Apollo is connected both as a healing god and as Asclepius’ father, who is frequently worshipped together with him at Asclepian cult sites.

46 On the recurrence of erotic magic as a motif in Hellenistic poetry, see most recently Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004, 137, 157–60; Faraone 2006.

47 I thank Andrew Ford and Denis Feeney for their helpful observations on an ear-lier version of this paper. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for AJP, whose insightful comments helped strengthen and clarify my argument.

of his royal child’s puzzling illness by consulting Delphian Apollo, who is not only the god of prophetic revelation but also the patron of both poetic production and the art of healing.45

Sympathetic love magic, which we have also seen at work in the unfolding of the story of Acontius and Cydippe, represents yet another model which partakes of aspects of both the poetic and medical construc-tions of the desiring body while adhering to its own idiosyncratic logic. Magic adds another discursive filter through which to read and, at the same time, it exerts the influence of its own topoi, providing a poten-tial multiplication of perspectives on the other discourses with which it interacts in the Callimachean love story. As the language of poetry, medicine and magic converge in new ways in the Hellenistic context, and each discourse lends novel possibilities for reading the others, the appeal of binding love magic for poets like Callimachus and Theocritus becomes clear, as does the fascination with the disease of love and its remedies with which it is connected, a fascination evident throughout the Hellenistic authors.46

In typical Callimachean fashion, then, the story of Acontius and Cydippe expands upon the complex and often contradictory interactions at the boundaries of the different discourses of poetry, magic, and medi-cine with which it engages. Making the most of the doubled sensibility of the scholar-poet, Callimachus, as we might expect, does not extricate himself from these complexities. Instead, at fragment 75.4–7 he stages the abrupt Pindaric break and the dramatic curbing of the desire of his uncontrolled thumos to reveal the full extent of its knowledge, highlight-ing with this gesture the implication of the learned poet at the very heart of the interactions of these different discourses of knowledge about the body and desire, poised, like Cydippe, at the precarious boundary of speech and silence.47

UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA

e-mail: [email protected]


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