traditionsGreek and Roman protective magicἀποτρόπαιος

said apotrópaios, 'turning away'; the Greeks also said probaskania, periammata, periapta, phylaktiria, alexikaka

also: apotropaic magic · Graeco-Roman amulet practice

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A practice organised around one idea: harm arrives through a look, so the answer is to catch the look. The Greek word for it is apotrépō, to turn away. The objects are the ones that do the catching — a Gorgon face, a phallus, a bead, a crescent, a locket on a child — and the argument in the sources is about what makes a glance stop, not about what a charm contains.

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Ancient Greek ἀποτρέπω, apotrépō, 'to turn away' — the whole theory of the practice in one verb
The Greeks had a shelf of words for these objects: apotropaia, probaskania, periammata, periapta, profylaktika, phylaktiria, antipharmaca, alexicaca, alexipharmaca, alexima pharmaca. They also gave gods the epithet Alexicacus, 'averter of evil' — Zeus, Apollo, Heracles and Leucothea among them. cited

When

7th century BCE to late antiquity inference

Period	Archaic Greek to late Roman
How the date is known	art-historical — dated by style
Note	The floor is the earliest gorgoneia and the Tiryns and Sparta masks, seventh century BCE. The ceiling is late antiquity, by which point the practice has been absorbed into Byzantine Christian amulets. Neither end is given as a date in the cited articles; both are this project's reading.

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.

What its carriers say it stops

Reported, attributed, not tested here. Each row below is somebody's claim, with their name on it.

The evil eye — harm carried by a look, often an admiring one citedsaid by Greeks and Romans alike; the cited account names the Gorgon as the most widely used image among the Greeks for averting evil
Envy — a neighbour's ill will, named as such citedsaid by Pliny, on the fascinus as a medicus invidiae, and Roman hosts who set out laughter-provoking images against invidia
Harm to a child — harm to an infant or a small child; common across the atlas, though not the largest class in it — see /story/most-of-them-are-for-children/ citedsaid by Greek parents, who hung amulets on infants and committed them to child-nurturing deities; and Roman parents, who gave a boy a bulla on his ninth day and a girl a lunula
Harm to a house or a field citedsaid by Greek builders, who carved bearded satyr-like faces over the doors of ovens and kilns to protect the work from fire and mishap
Illness — sickness in general, where no cause is named citedsaid by the wearers of carved gems, which the cited account describes as worn to take on the associated powers of a god rather than out of piety

The story

The Greeks committed the child to kourotrophic deities and hung amulets on it. They put charms in houses and wore them against the evil eye, and hung them on their animals too. Peisistratus hung the figure of a kind of grasshopper before the Acropolis of Athens. They spat into the folds of their clothes. They dressed boys as girls to avert the eye, and told the story of Achilles dressed as a girl at the court of Lycomedes as a case of it. Exaggerated eyes were painted on the drinking cups called kylikes from the sixth century BCE to the end of the classical period, perhaps to stop anything entering the mouth while drinking; fishing boats in parts of the Mediterranean still have eyes on the bows.

Rome added laughter to terror. In Roman art, envy was thought to bring bad luck to the person envied, so hosts set out images meant to make guests laugh: outsized phalluses, deformities, hunchbacks, pygmies. Pliny called the phallus a medicus invidiae, a remedy for envy. The mechanism the sources describe is not power but interruption — in most cases what turns the eye is the shame or the laughter the obscenity produces.

The literate end of the practice is the gemstones and the lead. Carved gems, many thousands of them, pair a stone with a god so the wearer takes on the associated powers; one gold amulet box from the Thetford treasure in Norfolk was found to contain sulphur, for its evil-repelling qualities. And the same hands that cut gems scratched curse tablets, which run the machinery backwards and aim it at a named person.

Inference — the substitutions are the argument. Illyrians used the phallus, the hand, the leg and animal teeth against the same harm the eye was used against; Romans used a winged phallus; southern Italy still cuts a horn. Nothing about a horn resembles an eye. What they share is that each of them takes a glance.

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