After looking at the Mediterranean as a zone characterized by the movement of goods, people and ideas, this chapter examines the sea as the element from which hybrids arise, such as Skylla, Nereus, the Nereids and monsters of Hesiod’s Theogony. These hybrids give expression to the anxieties of Greek speakers on the move. Contact zones like Sicily stimulated a powerful response from Greek speakers, who were constantly faced with other people, other tongues and other habits. Hybridity emerges as a useful mechanism for envisaging otherness and rendering it manageable, either as monstrous threat or as something in a more muted register: similar, yet at the same time different. It is this polarity of similarity and difference that is the pendulum swinging through Archaic Greek culture. Two places of particularly rich cultural encounters, Naukratis and Samos, illustrate how the categories of exotic and hybrid overlap. Even more complicated is Cyprus, demonstrating the most intense cultural layering in the eastern Mediterranean. Here where EteoCypriots, Mycenaean Greeks, Assyrians and Phoenicians all mingle, hybridity was a recurring feature of the island’s culture.

Greek hybrids cannot be read in isolation. To understand them requires an examination of the Near Eastern antecedents. The Greek imagination was powerfully influenced by a creative engagement with other cultures throughout the eastern Mediterranean. These engagements were characterized by bilingualism, intermarriage and the movement of artisans, traders, poets and itinerant religious practitioners. Such a pattern of cultural exchange can be seen in the so-called International Style of the Late Bronze Age, which relied heavily on hybrid motifs to fashion a shared visual language for the elites of Egypt and the Near East. In this context, the significance of hybrids varied depending on audience or market. Taweret in Egypt was utterly transformed when taken up on Crete. Greek and Near Eastern cosmogonies shared many characteristics, but Greek speakers freely adapted old motifs. Wherever we find traces of cultural exchange, ideas and objects always take on new forms in Greek settings. Each instance of a hybrid emerging in a Greek context it is testimony to the flexibility of hybrids to convey new meanings in new settings. Hybrids gave a face to the shock of the new.

In Part 1 of this book, we have felt the heavy materiality of defixiones, the weight of the lead despite the thinness of the hammered sheets onto which letters were inscribed. These curses may have been nailed or suspended or deposited in gestures and with archival practices that paralleled contemporaneous, official legal modes of display and collection. Justin, a Christian, similarly displayed documents seeking justice by citing or appending them to his Apologies. Sotērianos placed a judicial curse in a shaft or well in Amathous, Cyprus, along with many other such lead and selenite tablets, participating in another materially constituted archival practice. The very substance and location of the curse against Babylas were mechanisms for its successful working: the cool of the lead, the watery chill of the well. Drawing upon the coldness and deadness of lead to chill or thwart the tongue of a speaker was a common strategy of curse tablets. These substantial and sensory elements were essential to the ritual efficacy of the curse.

Titus Kaphar’s painting To Be Sold depicts Princeton University’s president Finley (1761–66), partially obscured by shredded, hanging canvas strips affixed with nails (Plate 2).2

When I was an undergraduate student, deeply clueless, around nineteen years old, I wandered into John Gager’s course “Ancient Christian Magic.” I had (shockingly) only recently realized that the Bible itself was something other than a unitary Word of God, excitingly and frighteningly more than a single book offered by one divine voice and spirit. Gager drenched unsuspecting undergraduates in understudied and (to me) surprising aspects of the history of ancient Christianity and of Mediterranean antiquity more generally. I can’t remember many details from the course. But I know it left me with at least two books that I’ve lugged around from school to school, job to job, home to home: an old, blandly toned gray-green print version of the first volume of the Ante-Nicene Fathers and Betz’s Greek Magical Papyri in Translation.

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and angels, but do not have love, I am resonating bronze or a clanging cymbal” (1 Cor. 13.1).2 These words were written in a letter by Paul and Sosthenes and read aloud to Christ-followers in Roman Corinth in mid-first century. The first recipients of the letter called themselves an ekklēsia or assembly, a political term indicating civic engagement and debate.3 They included those of low status, the enslaved, and women. We already met the garland weaver Karpimē Babbia, whom we met in the Introduction. To their north, the blue waters of the Corinthian Gulf lapped at Lechaion Harbor; to their south, they were shadowed by a high, rocky Acrocorinth, which sheltered defixiones or curse tablets. Eighteen curses have been found at the Acrocorinth’s Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore, and more than thirty within the larger region of the Corinthia.

Clement of Alexandria’s Protreptikos or Exhortation to the Greeks, written in the late second century, begins with an elaborate story of a song that lures fish, and a cicada that jumps up to fill in for the broken string of a lyre, scraping away with perfect pitch. I have long thought this was odd. The ancient genre of protreptic offered a kind of professional calling card, an introduction to speakers’ cultural sophistication, the strength of their argument and teaching, and a demonstration of their ability to argue for the superior form of philosophy-theology.

Someone had it out for a garland weaver named Karpimē Babbia, a low-status woman who lived in Corinth in the late first or early second century CE. Chthonic Hermes, the goddess Anankē or Necessity, and the justice-exacting Fates are called upon to bring monthly destruction to her entire body, head to toe. Someone – a ritual practitioner with a client, most likely – made this curse by inscribing letters onto a thin lead tablet (Figure 0.1). What they wrote included rhythmic Greek, but also bubbled into a continuous stream of letters and sounds, the meaning of which is still unclear, which scholars call voces magicae: magical utterances. The curse-makers then rolled up the lead and pierced it with a nail, depositing it on or near a pedestal at the sanctuary of the goddesses Demeter and Kore, midway up the Acrocorinth, facing the busy city below and the blue of the Gulf of Corinth beyond.