Tantalus and hemorrhage: an inscribed hematite gem and its tradition

Uncontrolled bleeding, in the ancient Greek world as today, presented a grave problem. Organic and inorganic styptics, unlike transfusions, were not unknown then, but in certain cases healers turned to an alternative less familiar to moderns, namely incantations. This technique, as its name suggests, originally consisted in an oral performance, but texts of the same form and genre could also be inscribed, lending a permanence and portability to the efficacious speech act. Incantations, oral and inscribed, served a wide range of healing and protective aims, but, as early as the Homeric poems, bleeding was particularly prominent. Knowledge of these incantations passed also to late antiquity, Byzantium, and the medieval West as a valuable inheritance from the earlier Greeks. In this contribution I trace a strand of that tradition as reflected in the career of a single inscribed gem. I provide the first full edition of the text (Appendix no. 1) and contextualize it in its tradition by examining later use of similar textual formulae in Byzantine and medieval Latin manuscripts.