Cover of the “Magica Levantina”
In April 2025, Hellenic Studies Chair Alexander Hollmann published the book, “Magica Levantina,” a collection of magical texts in late-antique Greek from Caesarea and Antioch. The texts, mainly curses against rival charioteers and horses in the hippodrome and against rival business-owners and legal opponents, draw on a mix of pagan Greek, Egyptian, and Near Eastern underworld gods and Jewish angel names. Co-authored with Robert Daniel of the University of Cologne, this is Hollmann’s second book after 2011’s “The Master of Signs: Signs and the Interpretation of Signs in Herodotus’ Histories.”