Tuesday, March 14, 2023

 

Your Adversary the Devil, as a Roaring Lion?

Roy Kotansky, Greek Magical Amulets. The Inscribed Gold, Silver, Copper, and Bronze Lamellae. Part I: Published Texts of Known Provenance. Text and Commentary (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994 = Papyrologica Coloniensia 22/1), p. 68 (Greek simplified here):
Similar demonic-animal attributes, also with the descriptive ὡς, occurs on a special class of bronze pendants, for which see, e.g., C. Bonner, Hesperia 20 (1951), p 354, no. 51: λιμός σε ἔσπιρεν· ἀὴρ ἐθέρισεν· φλέψ σε κατέφαγεν· τί ὡς λύκος μασᾶσε; τί ὡς κορκόδυλλος καταπίννις; τί ὡς λέων βρώχις (= βρύχεις); τί ὡς ταῦρος κερατίζις; τί ὡς δράκων εἱλίσσι; τί ὡς παρᾶος κυμᾶσε; "Hunger sowed you, air harvested you, vein devoured you. Why do you munch like a wolf? Why do you devour like a crocodile? Why do you roar like a lion? Why do you gore like a bull? Why do you coil like a serpent? Why do you lie down like a tame creature?" Perhaps the last τί should be deleted and κυμᾶσε (= κοίμασαι) explained as an imperative: "Lie down like a tame creature!" A parallel text in C. Bonner, Studies in Magical Amulets (Ann Arbor, 1950), p. 217 has ὡς ἀρνίον κοιμοῦ, "go to sleep like a lamb."
I wonder about Kotansky's translation of βρώχις (= βρύχεις) as roar. Usually βρύκω (or βρύχω) means bite, gobble, consume (cf. English bruxism = teeth grinding), which is a better parallel here to the munching of the wolf and the devouring of the crocodile.



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