Fellowship Report
From 1 April to 30 September 2025, I held a MagEIA Fellowship within the DFG Centre for Advanced Studies MagEIA – Magic between Entanglement, Interaction, and Analogy. My stay was dedicated to a series of teaching, research, and academic activities connected both to my individual project on the lexicon of divine epithets in the Greek Magical Papyri and to the broader work carried out within the research group.
During the summer term, I contributed to teaching at the Lehrstuhl für vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft. Together with colleagues and students, I conducted weekly Homeric readings devoted to Iliad 9, which took place from 15 May until 17 July 2025. In addition, on 22 July 2025 I delivered a lecture in the Oberseminar, co-presented with Thiago Mendes Venturott, entitled “‘Pre-Greek’ and language contact,” where we discussed the linguistic, historical, and methodological issues surrounding the identification of non-Greek strata in the lexicon.
My research activities formed the core of my fellowship. In the framework of the MagEIA seminar series, I presented a three-part analysis of the ritual of “A ring consecration: PGM XII 201–69” on 26 May, 28 May, and 2 June 2025. On 8 May 2025, I also gave a SCIAS Lecture at the Welz-Haus on “Divine Epithets and the Language of the Greek Magical Papyri,” in which I outlined the preliminary results of my ongoing lexicographical work. Throughout the period from 5 May to 29 July, I actively participated in and contributed to the discussions of the MagEIA seminars, enriched by the continuous interdisciplinary exchange characteristic of the group. During the same period, I also held several private academic meetings with MagEIA Fellows and Principal Investigators, where we discussed specific aspects of my project and related materials.
A substantial part of my fellowship was devoted to the preparation of the Lexicon of the Divine Epithets in the Greek Magical Papyri, a book scheduled for publication in 2026 (possibly with Würzburg University Press). Between 1 April and 30 September 2025, I worked on the writing of the lemmata, including extensive cross-referencing and various appendices.
Below are some details of the research carried out during the period:
(a) I reread the Greek Magical Papyri and the Supplementum Magicum in their entirety, with the aim of thoroughly reviewing the previously collected data and ensuring that all epicleses are included in the annotated lexicon.
(b) I gathered all the divine epithets found in the Greek magical papyri and organized them in list form. For each lexical entry or onomastic sequence, I recorded the corresponding translation, the deity or divine force to which it refers, its location within the Greek Magical Papyri and the Supplementum Magicum, the reproduction of the passage in which it appears, stylistic and rhetorical observations (when applicable), a detailed commentary on the respective lemma and its parallels in literary, epigraphic, and lexicographical documents, as well as remarks on the structure of compound epithets and the word class to which they belong.
(c) I mapped the main references in the secondary literature to the characteristic epithets of the magical papyri, especially with regard to two major works on the topic, including a focused discussion of their argumentative hypotheses: Pachoumi 2017 (The Concepts of the Divine in the Greek Magical Papyri) and Bortolani 2016 (Magical Hymns from Roman Egypt: A Study of Greek and Egyptian Traditions of Divinity).
(d) I collected and analyzed all compounds found among the divine epithets of the Greek Magical Papyri and the Supplementum Magicum, with the goal of identifying their innovative and traditional features. I assessed and quantified (i) the hapax legomena, (ii) the epithets attested only in the magical papyri, (iii) the epithets attested for the first time in the magical papyri, (iv) the epithets attested as divine epithets only or for the first time in the magical papyri, (v) the epithets previously attested but referring to a different deity, and (vi) the traditional epithets attested earlier and referring to the same deity. The comparison between the latter group and the others shed new light (also in quantitative terms) on the constant interplay between innovative and traditional language employed by magicians when addressing or referring to deities.
(e) I compiled and classified the most frequent rhetorical strategies involved in the use of the divine epithets listed in the annotated lexicon, shedding light on the broader context of epithets and identifying recurring figures of speech in epithet sequences, such as (i) assonance and alliteration, (ii) parallelism, (iii) merism, (iv) sound and sense echoes, (v) synonymy and antithesis, (vi) homoeoteleuton, (vii) chiasmus, (viii) the law of increasing members (“Behaghel’s Law”), and above all (ix) the combination of these strategies within a single sequence of epithets referring to a deity.
Parallel to this lexicographical work, I completed an article co-authored with Prof. Daniel Kölligan, entitled “ΛΟΓΟΝ ΤΕΛΕΙΝ in GEMF 15,” which is forthcoming in the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik.
My fellowship also afforded the opportunity to present the results of my research at international conferences. On 20 June 2025, at the conference Poetry, Prosody & Pragmatics – Linguistic Insights from/on Verse in Indo-European Traditions (Trinity College Dublin), I delivered a paper titled “Word order and information structure in surprise echo questions in Classical Greek drama.” A week later, on 27 June 2025, at the 11th International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics (ICAGL, Université Côte d’Azur, Nice), I presented another aspect of my work with the paper “Echo questions in Aristophanes”. I also continued developing an article in preparation, dealing with the expression “περίμετρον in GEMF 4 ii 26–30 and the Egyptian prepositional phrase r Ꝫw ‘whole’,” which forms part of the broader inquiry into linguistic contact phenomena in magical texts.
In addition to these research activities, I regularly took part in the Oberseminar of the Lehrstuhl für vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft between 29 May and 22 July 2025, where I benefited greatly from the discussions on Indo-European linguistics and related topics. I also contributed to the academic life of the department by preparing a formal report (Gutachten) for Thiago Mendes Venturott’s dissertation Die ápa-√yaj-Konstruktion – Untersuchungen zum exozentrischen Resultativum im Indoiranischen, Griechischen und Lateinischen, which I submitted on 13 June 2025. Furthermore, although occurring shortly after the end of my official fellowship period, I served as a member of the examination committee for his doctoral Promotion on 4 November 2025.
Overall, my fellowship at MagEIA was marked by a rich combination of teaching, intensive research, international scholarly exchange, and collaborative engagement with colleagues at Würzburg. The supportive and stimulating environment provided by both the Welz-Haus and the MagEIA research group significantly advanced the progress of my project and opened up new perspectives for future cooperation
