Classics

We live in an era of convenience, and trying to make someone fall in love with you using only your personality is time-consuming. It might be time to try a different kind of charm: ancient Greek magic! The Core spoke with Chris Faraone, Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer in Classics, about the kinds of love spells described in his book Ancient Greek Love Magic. Faraone explained that men and women typically used different kinds of spells, an eros spell for men and a philia spell for women. The eros spell was used as more of a curse, designed to cause the woman an unbearable amount of torture which could only be relieved by the man who cast the spell. The philia spell was designed to bind the man closer to the woman, and was related more to healing magic than to torture (which presumably comes in the later stages of the relationship).

Clifford Ando, Professor of Classics and the College, has received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Winners of the €45,000 prize are invited to spend a year collaborating with a colleague in Germany. Ando is an expert on law, religion and government in the Roman Empire and plans to collaborate with Jörg Rüpke, a professor of comparative religion at the University of Erfurt’s Max Weber Kolleg.

From the article:

During his stay at the University of Erfurt, Ando plans to finish Roman Social Imaginaries, a book exploring cognition and metaphor in Roman social thought. In collaboration with Christopher Faraone, the Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the Humanities and the College, and Chicago's Center for the Study of Ancient Religions, Ando and Rüpke are also organizing a conference on the notion of public and private in ancient Mediterranean law and religion.

More about the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation can be found here.