The double pupil: peoples of the evil eye in ancient authors

Among the curiosities that the ancients loved to collect about the edges of the known world was that of peoples able to do harm with their gaze. Not individual envious neighbours, but entire communities, placed in distant and somewhat fabulous regions, who were credited with a naturally lethal eye. Their distinctive mark, according to these reports, was the double pupil. The main source is Pliny the Elder, who in the first century AD gathered a vast catalogue of wonders in his Natural History.

Pliny's catalogue

In the seventh book of the Natural History, devoted to humankind, Pliny reports, quoting the Greek author Isigonus, that among the Triballi and the Illyrians there lived people who bewitched with their gaze and could kill those they stared at for long, especially when angry. They were said to have two pupils in each eye. On the authority of Apollonides he adds similar reports about women of Scythia, and recalls that the historian Phylarchus attributed a comparable power to the Thibii of Pontus.

Pliny even mentions Cicero, according to whom women with a double pupil had a harmful gaze everywhere. The tone is interesting: the writer records, accumulates, sometimes distances himself, but does not discard. For him nature was full of hidden forces, and the eye, a precious and fragile organ, could very well be their vehicle. In those pages geographical wonder is intertwined with an implicit theory of the gaze as a physical force.

From Gellius to Ovid

In the second century Aulus Gellius, in his Attic Nights, tells how, returning from Greece, he found at Brindisi a stall of old Greek books full of incredible stories. He bought them cheaply and copied out some of the tales, including precisely the one about men who kill with a look. Gellius, however, judges them with detachment, almost as light reading: a sign that, alongside belief, an educated scepticism already existed.

Poetry turned the motif into a feature of portraiture. Ovid, in the first book of the Amores, describes the old procuress Dipsas, skilled in magic arts, whose eyes hold a «pupula duplex» that «fulminat», a double pupil that flashes like lightning. Here the trait no longer marks a distant people, but the city witch, a figure both unsettling and comic, whom Latin literature loved to put on stage.

Why the pupil

Historians of belief have proposed various explanations for this detail. The double pupil marked a visible anomaly, and therefore an exception to the human norm, and exceptions were often associated with danger. Moreover, if the gaze was imagined as something that issues from the eye, doubling its source meant doubling its power. Some have thought of real ocular anomalies, observed and then exaggerated in the telling, but these are hypotheses that cannot be verified.

The theme of the bewitching peoples reveals a lesser-known side of the history of the evil eye: before it became a domestic fear, tied to the envious neighbour, it was also a category of the exotic, a way of thinking about the other and the faraway. The pages of Pliny and Gellius were read and copied throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and they went on nourishing the treatises on fascination written many centuries later.