The Ephesia Grammata: Six Protective Words of Ancient Greece

In the Greek world protection could also rely on obscure words, ancient in sound and uncertain in meaning. The most famous were the so-called Ephesia grammata, the “Ephesian letters”, a group of six terms that the sources connect with the city of Ephesus and the cult of Artemis. Their use as a protective formula is documented from at least the fourth century BC, and their fame lasted throughout antiquity, down to the Christian writers.

Ancient testimonies

The Athenian comic poet Anaxilas, active in the fourth century BC, mocks a character who carries the Ephesian letters written on small sheets and sewn into leather pouches. The passage shows that these were portable amulets, common enough to be the object of theatrical satire. Some later lexicographers claim that the words were inscribed on the statue of Artemis at Ephesus, a report that cannot be verified with the available sources.

A tradition reported by late authors tells that the Lydian king Croesus recited them on the pyre, and that an Ephesian wrestler at Olympia repeatedly defeated an opponent from Miletus as long as he wore them tied to his ankle. These anecdotes reveal the fame of the words rather than established historical facts, but they show clearly what power was attributed to them.

Six mysterious words

Clement of Alexandria, a Christian writer who lived between the second and third centuries AD, lists the six words in the Stromata: askion, kataskion, lix, tetrax, damnameneus, aision. He also reports the interpretation of a certain Androcydes, a Pythagorean author, who read them as allegories of darkness, light, earth, year, sun and true voice. This philosophical explanation is clearly later and reflects an attempt to give rational sense to terms that, in common use, mattered above all for their sound.

The lead tablets

The Ephesia grammata also appear in texts inscribed on lead tablets. One of the best known comes from Phalasarna, on Crete, and dates to the fourth century BC: it contains protective verses in hexameters that include some of the Ephesian words. A related text is known from a tablet found at Selinous, in Sicily. These documents show that the words were set within longer compositions, probably recited or worn on the body, and that their spread reached across the whole Greek world. They provide valuable information on the language and metre of these texts.

Words and power

The idea that certain sounds had a force of their own, independent of their meaning, had a long life in the Mediterranean. In the Greek magical papyri of the Roman period there appear sequences of vowels and incomprehensible names, the so-called voces magicae, which continue the same tradition. Christian authors such as Clement viewed these practices with suspicion, but they preserved their memory, allowing us to know them today.

The Ephesian letters are a valuable case study for understanding the relationship between writing and protection in ancient Greece. Six almost incomprehensible words, sewn into a leather pouch, were enough to reassure those who carried them and, at the same time, to make an Athenian theatre audience laugh: a sign that belief and irony could coexist in the same city.