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Thursday, July 25, 2024

Asyndetic Privative Adjectives on a Curse Tablet

I noticed some examples of asyndetic privative adjectives in D.R. Jordan, "Defixiones from a Well near the Southwest Corner of the Athenian Agora," Hesperia 54.3 (1985) 205-255. A good example, a series of three adjectives with minimal and almost certain restoration, appears on p. 216, in a curse directed against a wrestler named Eutychian, which contains the wish that he be speechless, mindless, harmless (ἄλαλο[ς, ἄ]νους ἀκέραιος, line 16, i.e., ἄλαλος, ἄνους, ἀκέραιος).

This is curse Tablet ID 2 in the Thesaurus Defixionum database.