The Two Senses of Plinthion as a Technical Term in the Greek Magical Handbooks

Abstract

The Greek noun πλινθίον appears four times in magical recipes in instructions about how to inscribe a series of magical words and there is a consensus that it refers to the “rectangle” produced when words are stacked in a column, and that the use of plinthion was similar to the use of two other technical terms to describe the outer dimensions of complicated word-designs, especially the kardia (“heart”) and the pterugma (“wing”), which both describe triangular formations of words or letters. In this article I argue that πλινθίον describes two different kinds of design: (i) “as a little brick” indicating that a word should be repeated row upon row “like a single brick”; or (ii) “as a hollow rectangle” describing how a string of magical words should be written along the edges of a rectangular curse-tablet “like a hollow frame” into which a curse is placed.