Lapham’s Quarterly
The ancients were sure that some kind of effluence streams out of the eyes, and wondered how this hypothetical gushing forth could affect us. The superstition of the “evil eye” falls entirely within this manner of thinking, and it is a matter of no small historical interest.
Plutarch recounts an interesting discussion on this topic. It took place at a banquet given by his friend Mestrius Florus, a Roman consul under Emperor Vespasian and a comrade-in-arms of Plutarch during the battle of Betriacum. Mestrius Florus starts off saying that there exist many reports about people who are believed to have the evil eye, but such accounts tend to be rejected right away as mere superstitions of the silly and uneducated. Yet, he says, it is not right to so treat things that lack a logical explanation, because, if we are honest, we shall have to acknowledge that there are thousands of indisputable facts all around us for which we have no logical explanation. The man who demands an explanation for everything is incapable of experiencing wonder, and this is the antiphilosophical attitude par excellence.
The banqueters go on to examine some of the numerous reports about people purported to cause harm to others through the gaze. The historian Phylarchus claimed that among the Thibaeans (members of a tribe that inhabited the shores of the Pontus Sea in Asia Minor), there were individuals who could seriously hurt children by simply looking at them. Children were especially susceptible to gaze-induced harm, but some adults were also injured; and not only the gaze but the breath or speech of the nefarious agents also made the victims waste away and fall ill. (Survivors of the 2020–2021 coronavirus pandemic cannot help but wonder whether the ancient chroniclers witnessed some form of aerosol-transmitted infectious disease.) All this was attested by some human traffickers, in particular the half-Greeks who used to buy slaves from that area. Hence, one had to conclude that, for reasons no one understood, more than one kind of bodily emanation could cause damage in some highly susceptible individuals. At this point, it is important to note that some contemporary scholars believe that in the times of the Roman Empire, just about anyone could, given the right conditions, cast the evil eye. Anger and envy could channel their nefarious energies through the gaze, so that a person could cast the evil eye without specific intent to do so. In that case, the doer of the vision-mediated misdeed could go unrecognized. But soon a correlation was found between ocular abnormalities and malefic gaze, and it became possible to construct a typology of the evil eye casters.
