Text taken from La Lettre du Collège de France n° 34, Paris, Collège de France, p. 24, ISSN 1628-2329
In the third lecture ("When is an ornament an amulet? Four case studies of Heracles as protector in the ancient Greek world"), Prof. Faraone detailed four case studies of Heracles, a familiar guardian figure in the ancient Mediterranean, highlighting the difficulty of distinguishing amulets from ornaments. In the first case, he looked at the practice, known mainly from literary sources, of engraving a metrical incantation on private houses to avail oneself of the hero's presence as protector: a similar inscription on the back of an oscillum from Gela suggests that oscilla, even in the absence of an inscription, may have had value as an amulet, rather than an ornament. Prof. Faraone then evoked three mythological episodes from the life of Heracles: the famous episode in which he strangled the Nemean lion, a lesser-known episode from his childhood in which he overcame the snakes sent by Hera to kill him, and the episode involving Omphale, Queen of Lydia. In each case, Prof. Faraone has shown that, in the Roman period, the images depicting these episodes clearly had a protective or healing function for the sick. This raises a series of questions: where did this tradition originate? Was it an innovation of the imperial period? How do we know when such mythological scenes were used as amulets? Does the use of these scenes as amulets represent an idiosyncratic or parasitic appropriation of a familiar myth? Or can it be shown that these images had always been used as amulets, and assumed a certain apotropaic power? Although these questions are difficult to answer, Prof. Faraone has shown that, at least in the case of the strangulation scenes (of the lion and the snakes), they appear to be linked to much older models from the Near East and Egypt, some of which were indeed used as amulets, well before the period in which the Heraclitean stories are attested.
