Amulet Atlas

peopleChristopher A. Faraone

also: Christopher Faraone

peopleGreece and the AegeanRome and ItalyAncient EgyptNorth AmericaUnited States of AmericaGreeceItalyconfidence mediumneeds checking

American classicist, born 1955, Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor in Classics at the University of Chicago. He works on Greek poetry, religion and magic, and wrote "The transformation of Greek amulets in Roman imperial times" in 2018 — a study of how the Greek protective object changed shape, material and claim once Rome was running the Mediterranean.

cited

When

born 1955 still carried cited

PeriodLiving
How the date is knowntextual — a dated text describes it
NoteBirth year only. This project does not estimate anything else about a living person.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The story

Faraone's first book, "Talismans and Trojan horses: guardian statues in ancient Greek myth and ritual", 1992, took the largest protective objects the Greeks made: statues buried or set up to guard a city. "Ancient Greek Love Magic" followed in 2001, on the other end of the same practice — the spells and objects aimed at one person rather than a wall.

The 2018 book is the one an amulet record reaches for. Inference — its subject is change rather than origin, and that is the useful move: the Greek amulet did not simply persist into the Roman empire, it acquired new stones, new inscriptions and new customers, and a record that dates an object by its shape alone will get it wrong.

He founded and directed the University of Chicago's Center for the Study of Ancient Religions from 2008 to 2018, and co-edited "Masks of Dionysius" with Thomas H. Carpenter in 1993 and "Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World" with Laura K. McClure in 2006.

cited

Now

He holds the Edward Olson chair from the 2021–22 school year. His honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 2013, a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2021, and the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the Society for Classical Studies in 2024.

cited

What this is near

kinMagical gemthe Roman-period object his 2018 book tracks the Greek amulet turning intotraditionGreek and Roman protective magicthe tradition he studies, and the one he argues was remade rather than simply continued under RomecontrastCurse tabletthe other half of the Greek magical record — the tablet aimed at somebody, beside the amulet aimed at nobodykinGorgoneionthe guardian face; his first book took the guardian statue, of which this is the portable endparallelCampbell Bonnerthe scholar who first made the late Greek amulets a corpus he is now reading for change over timestoryAmulet or talisman?the long read on the two words; his 1992 title puts the talisman question in the Greek material directly

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

personCurse tabletthe scholar who split these spells into passion-inducing and affection-encouraging, and found men and women using different halvespersonGreek and Roman protective magicthe scholar of Greek binding spells and love magic, and the reason the curse tablets can be read as a systempersonLeadthe scholar who sorted the erotic tablets into passion spells and affection spells, and found men and women using different onesparallelCampbell Bonnerthe classicist working the same Greek material two generations on, and asking how the amulets changed under Rome

Where this came from

Elsewhere

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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