Baskania: the evil eye in ancient Greece
From the baskania debated by Plutarch to Theocritus' Polyphemus spitting three times: how the ancient Greeks understood the envious gaze and its remedies.
The Greeks had a precise word for the harmful power of the gaze: baskania. The term meant both envy and the ability to do harm with the eyes, and the baskanos was the person who, by looking with spite or with excessive admiration, could make a child fall ill, wither a harvest or ruin someone's fortune. This was no marginal superstition: poets, physicians and philosophers discussed it, and the Greek vocabulary also preserved the word baskanion, the object meant to ward off that danger.
A belief debated at the dinner table
The fullest testimony comes from Plutarch, who in the fifth book of his Table Talk imagines a dinner conversation about those who are said to cast the evil eye. Some guests laugh at the idea, others defend it with physical arguments. The prevailing reasoning is that subtle emanations issue from the eyes and can strike the person being looked at, just as certain smells or the contagion of some diseases pass from one body to another without any need for contact.
Plutarch also reports a case that was already proverbial in his time: a certain Eutelidas, admiring his own reflection in the water of a river, supposedly struck himself and fell ill. The anecdote showed that baskania did not require ill will: even a complacent gaze directed at oneself could become dangerous. It is an idea that runs through the centuries, and we will meet it again in the modern distinction between conscious envy and involuntary influence.
Poets, novelists and protective gestures
In poetry the evil eye appears quite naturally. Theocritus, in his sixth Idyll, has the Cyclops Polyphemus say that he spat three times into his breast after praising his own beauty, precisely so as not to attract baskania. Spitting, repeated a ritual number of times, was among the most common defences, and it went together with words that softened the praise, almost as if to apologise to fate for one's own good luck.
Much later, in Heliodorus' novel the Aethiopica, dated between the third and fourth centuries AD, the priest Calasiris explains how the air, saturated by the envious gaze, carries harm through the eyes all the way to the soul of the person being looked at. The passage, in the third book, is a small theory of visual contagion and shows how deeply rooted these ideas were even among the educated readers of the imperial age.
The baskanion and protective images
Against the harmful gaze the Greeks used objects and images. The name baskanion could refer to amulets hung around children's necks, to grotesque or phallic figures placed in front of shops and forges, or to Gorgon faces painted on shields and vases. The principle, according to scholars, was one of distraction and reversal: a ridiculous, obscene or terrifying image caught the first glance and dispersed its force before it could reach what truly mattered.
Greek baskania left a long legacy. The Latin fascinum, Neapolitan jettatura and the mati still given to newborn babies in Greece today all belong to the same family of ideas. Reading Plutarch or Theocritus shows that the fear of the envious gaze was not born in some isolated village, but at the heart of classical culture, discussed with irony and seriousness at once by authors who set its terms for Europe.