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Early Greek Alchemy, Patronage

and Innovation in Late Antiquity

CALIFORNIA CLASSICAL STUDIES

NUMBER 7

Editorial Board Chair: Donald Mastronarde

Editorial Board: Alessandro Barchiesi, Todd Hickey, Emily Mackil, RicharEd Martin, Robert Morstein-Marx, J. ?eodore Peña, Kim Shelton California Classical Studies publishes peer-reviewed long-form scholarship with online open access and print-on-demand availability. ?e primary aim of the seriesE is to disseminate basic research (editing and analysis of primary materials both textual and phEysical), data-heavy re search, and highly specialized research of the kind that is either hard Eto place with the leading publishers in Classics or extremely expensive for libraries and individuEals when produced by a leading academic publisher. In addition to promoting archaeological publications, papyrolog ical and epigraphic studies, technical textual studies, and the like, thEe series will also produce selected titles of a more general pro?le. ?e startup phase of this project (2013-2017) was supported by a Egrant from the Andrew W.

Mellon Foundation.

Also in the series:

Number 1: Leslie Kurke,

Εe TraΘc in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy 2013

Number 2: Edward Courtney,

A Commentary on the Satires of Juvenal

, 2013

Number 3: Mark Gri?th,

Greek Satyr Play: Five Studies

, 2015

Number 4: Mirjam Kotwick,

Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Text of Aristotleὓs Meta physics, 2016

Number 5: Joey Williams,

Εe Archaeology of Roman Surveillance in the Central Alentejo

Portugal, 2017

Number 6: Donald J. Mastronarde,

Preliminary Studies on the Scholia to Euripides

, 2017

Early Greek Alchemy,

Patronage and Innovation

in Late Antiquity

Olivier Dufault

CALIFORNIA

CLASSICAL

STUDIES

Berkeley, California

© 2019 by Olivier Dufault.

?is work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International LicenEse.

California Classical Studies

c/o Department of Classics

University of California

Berkeley, California 94720-2520

USA http://calclassicalstudies.org email: ccseditorial@berkeley.edu

ISBN 9781939926128 (paperback)

9781939926135 (PDF)

Library of Congress Control Number: 20199346E42

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

Abbreviations

viii

Introduction 1

1. Client Scholars 9

1.1 Illiberal Scholars 10

1.2 ?e Scholar and the Magos 19

1.3 Client Scholars in Late Antiquity 23

2.

Mageia and Paideia 26

2.1 ?e Term Magos and Cognates in Early Greek Texts 27

2.2 ?e Later History of Mageia 37

3. Representations of Scholars as Learned Sorcerers 51

3.1 Anaxilaus of Larissa 52

3.2 Apion 59

3.3 Simon 63

3.4 Pancrates 66

4. Patrons, Scholars and the Limits of Paideia 70

4.1 Plutarch 70

4.2 Heliodorus' Ethiopica 79

4.3 Julius Africanus 84

5. Zosimus of Panopolis and Ancient Greek Alchemy 93

5.1 References to Alchemy in Late Antique Literature 94

5.2 Gold Transmutation in the Non-Alchemical Literature 100

5.3 ?e Soteriology of Zosimus of Panopolis 108

6. Zosimus, Client and Scholar 118

6.1 ?eosebeia's Household 119

6.2 Rivals and Scholars 122

6.3

Mageia and ChΝmeia 138

Conclusion

142

Bibliography

145

Index of Passages

159

General Index

166

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to Coralie Arntz, Peter Brown, Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, MaEry Hancock, Cornelia Hartmann, Donald J. Mastronarde, Christine ?omas, CEhris topher Waß and anonymous referees for commenting on previous versionsE of this book or individual chapters. I have also greatly bene?ted from discusEsions with Renaud Gagné, Heidi Marx, Paul-Hubert Poirier, Joseph Sanzo and Jay SEtemmle. I would also like to give special thanks to Michèle Mertens and MatteEo Martel li, whose e?orts provided a very useful basis for my research. Many tEhanks to Cal ifornia Classical Studies for a?ording the opportunity to publish peeEr-reviewed books in open access and more particularly to Donald J. Mastronarde for Ehis ini tiative and generosity. Work for this book would not have been possible without the ?nancial Ehelp of the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, Culture et Société, the UCSB History A?l iates and the Graduate School Distant Worlds at the Ludwig-Maximilians-UEni

Olivier Dufault

Montreal, February ἡἢΔἹ

vii viii

Abbreviations

A

Parisinus graecus 2327.

B

Parisinus graecus 2325.

CAAG Charles-Émile Ruelle and Marcellin Berthelot. 1887-1E888. Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs , 3 vols. Paris. DK Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz. 1974. Die Fragmente der Vorsokra- tiker , 3 vols. Berlin. FGrH Felix Jacoby et al. 1923-1999. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker,

5 parts. Berlin and Leiden.

Lampe G. W. H. Lampe. 1961. Patristic Greek Lexicon. Oxford. L

Laurentianus graecus plut. 86.16.

LSJ Henry George Liddell et al. 1940. A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford. M

Marcianus graecus 299.

MA Michèle Mertens. 1995. Les alchimistes grecs, Tome ἕ.Δ: Zosime de

Panopolis. Mémoires authentiques

. Paris. PGM Karl Preisendanz et al. 1973. Papyri Graecae Magicae, 2 vols. Teubner.

P.Holm.

Papyrus Holmiensis. In Robert Halleux 1981. Les alchimistes grecs, Tome Papyrus de Leyde. Papyrus de Stockholm. Fragments de recettes. Paris.

P.Leid.

Papyrus Leidensis X. In Robert Halleux 1981. Les alchimistes grecs, Tome Δ: Papyrus de Leyde. Papyrus de Stockholm. Fragments de recettes . Paris. PLRE Arnold H. M. Jones et al. 1971-1992. Εe Prosopography of the Later

Roman Empire

, 3 vols. Cambridge. SH Stobaei Hermetica. In Arthur D. Nock and André-Jean Festugière 1954.

Corpus Hermeticum

, vol. 3-4. Paris

Early Greek Alchemy, Patronage and

Innovation in Late Antiquity

Introduction

?e appearance of alchemical commentaries between the ?rst and the Efourth cen tury CE provides us with an opportunity to study a striking example of iEnnovation in ancient Greek scholarship. 1

Contextualizing the alchemical commentaries of

Zosimus of Panopolis (c. 300 CE) - the oldest extant alchemiEcal author - can help us understand how this form of scholarship came to be considered worth sEtudying and copying by ancient scholars, i.e. by professionals of paideia. ?e term will be taken here to mean the sum of social interactions that lead at any givenE time to the production and reproduction of scholarly works written in Greek and of the legitimate dispositions toward these works. As I show in this book, the Elegitima tion of alchemical commentaries can be partly explained by the fact thatE Zosimus was a client scholar, i.e. a person who was informally hired by a patronE to teach or expand upon Greek or Latin literature and/or to produce new works.

Greek, or Greco-Egyptian alchemy, spelled

chΝ -, chu-, chi- or cheim(e)ia, can be succinctly de?ned as the art and science of "tinctorial processes" ( baphai ) meant to color metals into gold or silver, to give stones or glass the appearaEnce of pre cious stones and to dye textiles. ?is fourfold division, found in the fourth-centu ry CE papyri Leidensis X and Holmiensis, was already present in the ?rst-century CE books of alchemical recipes attributed to Democritus. 2

Some commentators

presented alchemy as the art of "producing" ( argurou or chrusou poiΝsis/arguro-, chrusopoiia ) or "preparing" ( kataskeuἧ ) gold and silver. Zosimus also described processes of transformation (including the making of gold) as a "tuErning" of mat ter "inside out." It is still unclear what Zosimus exactly meant bEy this but - to anticipate the argument developed in chapter 5 - it can brie?y beE said that this 1 For overviews of ancient Greek alchemy, see Berthelot 1885, ELippmann 1919, Lindsay 1970. For

introductions to alchemy, see Schütt 2000, Principe 20E13, Joly 2013. Ruelle and Berthelot (1887E-1888

= CAAG) is dated and incomplete but is still the best edition for many Ealchemical works. See also

Letrouit 1995: 11-93.

2

See Mertens 1995, Martelli 2013: 13-1E8.

1

2 Early Greek Alchemy, PEatronage and InnovatEion

formulation was relevant to the soteriology he adopted, which he describEed as the extraction of the "luminous pneuma" from one's body. 3 Zosimus is the ?rst known commentator of alchemy and the most famous E name in the Greek alchemical corpus, a group of codices dated c. 10E00 to 1500 CE containing the vast majority of Greek alchemical texts. 4

Authors of alchemical

texts can be divided into three groups. ?e ?rst comprises the so-cEalled "ancient authors" of recipes. All of these appear to be pseudepigraphic (e.g.E Hermes, Ag athodaimon, Chumēs, Maria, Moses, Democritus, etc.). Except for the Eremaining fragments of the

Four Books

attributed to Democritus,

P.Holm. and P.Leid., rec-

ipes attributed to the ancient alchemical authors are known only from citations found in the work of the second group of authors, the commentators (ZosEimus,

Olympiodorus, Stephanus et al

). ?is second group includes many di?erent texts dating from the third century CE to the tenth century CE - the point at which the oldest alchemical compilation was written (thequotesdbs_dbs28.pdfusesText_34

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