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And You Will Be Amazed: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Greek Magical Papyri

  • Radcliffe G. Edmonds
Published/Copyright: December 2, 2020
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Abstract

An analysis of the rhetorical strategies used in the so-called Greek Magical Papyri to bolster the authority of the authors provides insight into the authors of these texts and their intended audiences. This article reviews the scholarship on the identity of the composers of the Greek Magical Papyri and explores the rhetorical strategies used in the texts to create authority, before comparing the dominant strategies in the Greek Magical Papyri with similar ones in other kinds of recipe collections, specifically alchemical and medical texts. The authors of the recipes in the Greek Magical Papyri make little use of the traditional authority of the temples but instead justify their claims of superiority with reference to the amazing efficacy of the procedures they describe. The direct, second person address in formulas such as “and you will be amazed” suggests that the intended audience was imagined not as potential clients who need to be convinced of the author’s expertise, but rather as potential practitioners interested in impressing their own clients.

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Online erschienen: 2020-12-02

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Titelseiten
  2. Titelseiten
  3. Articles
  4. Introduction
  5. Magic and Ritual
  6. Magic and Ritual
  7. Überlegungen zu einigen griechischen Wetterritualen
  8. And You Will Be Amazed: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Greek Magical Papyri
  9. Lawsuits with Headless Foes: A Greek Incantation Motif
  10. A Syntactic Approach to the Orphic Gold Leaves
  11. Materiality and Ancient Religion
  12. Materiality and Ancient Religion
  13. Accumulation, authority, and the cultural lives of objects: materiality and ancient religion
  14. Familiarity and Phenomenology in Greece: Accumulated Votives as Group-made Monuments
  15. The Cultural Biography of a Pilgrimage Token: From Hagiographical to Archaeological Evidence
  16. More than text: Approaching ritual papyri from Oxyrhynchus as inscribed objects
  17. Rethinking Orphic ‘Bookishness’: Text and Performance in Classical Mystery Religion
  18. Divine Names
  19. Divine Names
  20. Noms de dieux!” Gods at the borders
  21. Nommer les dieux hittites : au sujet de quelques épithètes divines
  22. Le culte de Zeus Brontôn : l’espace et la morphologie du dieu de l’orage dans la Phrygie d’époque romaine
  23. Séquences onomastiques divines à Ostie-Portus
  24. Myths of Origin
  25. Myths of Origin
  26. Ex arches: Looking Back at Greek Myths of Origin
  27. Typhoeus or Cosmic Regression (Theogony 821 – 880)
  28. Herakles and the Order of Zeus in Hesiod’s Theogony
  29. The Politics of Beginnings: Hesiod and the Assyrian Ideological Appropriation of Enuma Eliš
  30. Our Co(s)mic Origins: Theogonies in Greek Comedy
  31. At the Origins of Dionysus and Wine: Myths, Miracles, and Festivals
  32. Creation in the Poimandres and in Other Creation Stories
  33. The God Aion in a Mosaic from Nea Paphos (Cyprus) and Graeco-Phoenician Cosmogonies in the Roman East
  34. Ἀρχή and δῖνος: Vortices as Cosmogonic Powers and Cosmic Regulators. Study Case: The Whirling Lightning Bolt of Zeus
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