THE PUPULA DUPLEX AND OTHER TOKENS OF AN "EVIL EYE" IN THE LIGHT OF OPHTHALMOLOGY

BY WALTON BROOKS MCDANIEL

In the volume of Studies in Honor of Basil L. Gildersleeve, Dr. Kirby Flower Smith published an article1 on the pupula duplex which exhibits that combination of acumen, erudition, and literary skill which we have learned to expect from his pen. Since the superstition of the evil eye is perhaps second to none in importance, not only to classical scholars but to many workers in modern fields of study, the problems he attacked deserved his lengthy treatment, and if he failed to solve them other attempts are highly desirable.

Commenting upon Ovid Amores i. 8. 15-16:

oculis quoque pupula duplex

fulminat et gemino lumen ab orbe venit,

Dr. Smith essayed to determine the poet's definition of a pupula duplex, or double pupil, and the reason why this peculiarity was thought to be a sign of the evil eye. Accepting what I hope to show is a misleading, if not an unsound, conclusion of Riess2 concerning Pliny's reference to persons who have a double pupil in one eye and the figure of a horse in the other, that the presence of the latter phenomenon, as an ailment of the eye, "was ascribed to a horseshaped demon," he has resorted to a similar demonological explanation of the double pupil. He supposes that the primitive man as he gazed into another's eyes identified the pupillary image of himself that he saw therein as the other person's soul. As is well known,

1 At a time when I was persuaded by its arguments that the pupula duplex merely referred to a bicoloration, I foolishly remarked to a class that one of our university officials illustrated this phenomenon of the evil eye. One of the women, prospered, I suppose, by the felix curiositas-or was it the curiosa felicitas of her sex ?-soon found a victim. The hunt for what I now consider the pupula duplex to have been, would not have been so easily successful. The rarer the type of evil eye, the more it was to be dreaded. Similarly, the location of the more wonderful sorcerers tends to be toward the ends of the earth. Cf. Dr. Smith, op. cit., p. 289.

2 E. Riess, "Superstitions and Popular Beliefs in Greek Comedy," AJP, XVIII (1897), 195. Dr. Smith, op. cit., pp. 289, 290, and 299.

I might note that the reversal of the image eventually was regarded as a token of the person's being a witch (Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, p. 903); the soul was standing on its head.

[CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY XIII, October, 1918] 335

2

many languages derive their word for pupil from this image, but without taking any account of the gender of the person mirrored.1 It was natural to think of the pupil itself as a sort of window or door of exit for the soul, an idea that led the relatives of a dead man to close his eyelids in order to prevent him from returning by that opening for some evil purpose. By way of illustration Dr. Smith repeats3 the Chinese story of a man who had been blinded but finally regained his vision when a pair of manikins who represented the sight of his two eyes passed out through his nose and later, cracking the film that obscured the left eye, entered and abode therein. The result was that the man now had two pupils in that eye and, according to the Chinese narrator, could actually see better than when they were properly distributed. Turning then to the classical superstition, our author argues that the person with the double pupil is merely one who houses in his eye a demon manikin along with its legitimate occupant, and that the intruder betrays his presence by a difference in the color of his eyes or by a bicoloration of one of the irises. A person with the pupula duplex would therefore be, according to his hypothesis, somebody who had, for instance, a brown eye and a blue, or who united both of these colors in either of his irises.

Ingenious, not to say fascinating, as this theory must seem to anybody, it involves troublous elements and depends upon certain assumptions that I believe are unjustifiable. While I should be the last to try to force folklore or primitive superstition to conform to the tyrannical laws of mathematics or physics, yet objection might be made that a female gazer was bound to produce a female image in the pupil and a male a male, and furthermore that, according to the evidence alike of the Chinese story and of our own senses, each individual would normally have two manikins, so that the intrusion of a demon would give him a third unless an ejectment took place.

1 Dr. Smith (pp. 295–96) refers to кópŋ; pupa, pupula, pupilla; Old Span. pupila, New Span. niña; Germ. Männlein; and the Elizabethan "babies." I might add that old German books hedge on the gender by using the neuter Kindlein. In Hebrew we have bat'ayin and ishon. Liddell and Scott's Greek lex. has failed to note the use of Taudiov in Aristotle De generatione animal. (Bekker), p. 147, with the meaning "pupil." 2 Cf. Dr. Smith's exposition, pp. 295-96, with his references.

3 Op. cit., pp. 297-98, from H. A. Giles, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, I, 8. 4 Smith, p. 299.

Would piebald eyes then indicate that each pupil had a demon along with its legitimate tenant, one representing, shall we say, the blue of the iris, the other the brown? But speaking more seriously, are we warranted any way in using the demonology of a later age to explain passages which do not even hint at a demoniacal possession but which on the contrary permit, as I shall show, a physical and psychological interpretation which writers who are nearly contemporary have provided and which is consistent with certain pertinent facts of modern medical science? The misinterpretations in Dr. Smith's article are ultimately due, I think, to a wrong treatment of the adjective dikopos, and so with that we must begin.

Johannes Malalas,' writing at the earliest in the middle of the sixth century, gives it as a surname of Anastasius I. Zonaras,2 living in the first half of the twelfth century, explains that this emperor was called Aikopos, "because he had the pupils of his eyes unlike each other; one had a blacker hue while the color of the left verged rather on the gray." Such an effect on a pupil, the ophthalmologist tells us, can be produced by a cataract. Suidas,1 in the middle of the tenth century, also says that Anastasius was called Aikopos, but he offers no definition of the word, and like the last writer, Zonaras, he may be merely following Malalas. So far as the irises of the imperial eyes are concerned, we cannot ignore the evidence which we find in the description of him by the eleventh-century historian Cedrenus" that they were alike; for he describes Anastasius 23 ὀφθαλμοὺς ἔχων χαροποὺς καὶ γλαυκοὺς μετρίως, which Bekker translates: oculis trucibus ac mediocriter caesiis. Although both the adjectives may have referred originally to brightness, they appear already in Aristotle's Hist. animal. (Bekker, p. 13): used of the μέλαν or iris: τοῖς μὲν γάρ ἐστι μέλαν, τοῖς δὲ σφόδρα γλαυκόν, τοῖς δὲ χαροπόν, ἐνίοις δ' αἰγωπόν, to denote certain of the lighter shades 1 Ρ. 392: Αναστάσιος ὁ Δίκορος.

1 Epi. XIV. 3. 1, p. 53: ἡ ̓Αριάδνη τὸν Δίκορον ̓Αναστάσιον

λείαν ἀνήγαγε.

εἰς τὴν βασι

Δίκορος δ ̓ ἐκαλεῖτο ὁ ̓Αναστάσιος ὅτι ἀνομοίας ἀλλήλαις τὰς κόρας εἶχε τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν· τῇ μὲν γὰρ ἦν τὸ χρῶμα μελάντεραν, ἡ δὲ λαιὰ πρὸς τὸ γλαυκότερον ἐχρωμάτιστο.

'De Schweinitz, Diseases of the Eye (ed. of 1913), p. 529.

• Suidas: δίκορος· ὅτι ̓Αναστάσιος ὁ τῶν Ῥωμαίων βασιλεὺς δίκορος ἐλέγετο.

P. 375.

that an iris may have. In the twelfth century Eustathius1 reports a tradition that Thamyris was dikopos, "having one of his eyes gray and the other black." Since κópη, the basic element of dikopos, means pupil, one might argue even here that it was the pupils that displayed the difference in coloring,2 or, on the other hand, an ophthalmologist could use the Greek to show that even in antiquity it was recognized that heterochromia of the irises was often associated with a disparity in the size of the pupils.3 Syntactically, however, the close of the Greek sentence seems to be intended as a definition of the term Sikopos. Apparently, therefore, in Suidas' time this adjective could be loosely used of the irises, and he was attributing to Thamyris a heterochromia of those diaphragms. This would make it further possible that the lexicographer's older contemporary, Zonaras, had in mind a difference in the pigmentation of Anastasius' irises and not in the color of his pupils, although upon the fact itself we have, of course, that counterevidence of Cedrenus which I have given. One other passage raises similar uncertainties. A Byzantine writer on physiognomy says: ὀφθαλμοὶ μέλανες ἀγαθοῦ σημεῖον εἰ μείζους εἰσίν. ὀφθαλμοὶ δίκοροι ἀστάτου, γνώρισμα καὶ ἀνυποστάτου, εἰ μάλιστ ̓ ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ ὀφθαλμῷ εἰσιν. Here again the universal meaning of κόρη would lead a scholar with no preconceived theory to translate as follows: "Eyes that have unlike pupils betoken a person who lacks stability and steadfastness. This is especially the case if the unlike pupils (a case of double pupils) are in the same eye." But the Byzantine was probably referring in a rather elliptical manner to heterochromia of the irises and in the second case to persons who displayed two colors in the same iris.5 A writer who is both a Byzantine and a physiognomist is doubly entitled to express crazy ideas in a crazy way. And yet we should note that there were ample ways of denoting

1 Com. on the Iliad (Β 597), p. 298, 1. 44: ἱστοροῦσι δὲ αὐτὸν καὶ δίκορον εἶναι, τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν τὸν μὲν γλαυκὸν ἔχοντα, τὸν δὲ μέλανα. φασὶ δέ τινες καὶ μὴ τοὺς δύο αὐτὸν, τὸν ἕτερον δὲ ἀπολέσαι τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν.

2 De Schweinitz, op. cit., p. 529.

3 Ibid., p. 64. But anisocoria is rarely observed in healthy eyes. Foerster, Scriptores physiognomonici Graeci et Latini, II, 225.

De

5 One can only guess at what the writer meant to express in his el-clause. Schweinitz, op. cit., p. 64, says of piebald irises: "Instead of uniform pigmentation a single triangular patch or several irregular spots of dark color may appear upon one or both irides."

a difference in the color of the eyes without misusing dixopos; Greek affords, for instance, such adjectives as èrepóyλAUKOS, ÉTEPÓXPOOs, and δίχροος.

Presumably the consideration that led Dr. Smith to ignore linguistic difficulties and interpret all these passages as referring to chromatic asymmetry of the iris is the well-known fact that this, like other optical abnormalities, has in recent ages at least given its possessor the reputation of having the evil eye.1

Unfortunately, even though we grant that Byzantines might pervert dikopos to the meaning "having irises of different colors," this meaning cannot be established for the period to which the really important passages quoted by Dr. Smith and discussed below belong. It is indeed only if we keep dikopos true to its etymology that we have any right to parallel it with Ovid's term pupula duplex,2 which his own expression gemino orbe in the next verse accurately defines.

We should next note that while kópη started with the meanings "maiden," "doll," "image," another word for pupil yλývŋ seems3 to have reversed the process; for eventually it came to be used for a "doll" also. Now the compound diyλnvos as a parallel to diκopos is certainly not to be ignored in our investigation. As Theocritus1 shows, it refers to the number of the pupils, not in any way to the coloring of the irises. The Bucolic poet has indeed used his dɩyλńvws ώπας much as Vergil geminas acies. Δίκορος should therefore be compared with such contrasted words as μονόκροτος and δίκροτος, the latter being a ship that has two banks of oars on each side." Note also such an adjective as díkovduλos, which signifies "double knuckled," that is to say, "having two knuckles in each digit." So primarily

1 Compare, for instance, R. C. Maclagan, Evil Eye in the Western Highlands (i.e., of Scotland), p. 25, and Smith, op. cit., p. 293, n. 1.

Smith, op. cit., p. 300, proffers a suspicion that the Latin is an unintelligent attempt at a translation of the Greek. My explanation vindicates the Romans from either stupidity or ignorance.

* For Iliad viii. 164 Ebeling, Lex. Hom. 8.v. yλývŋ, translates it puella, but according to Leaf's note it means "you pretty toy."

Epigr. 6:

Aen. vi. 788.

ὦ δειλαῖε τὸ Θύρσι, τί τοι πλέον, εἰ καταταξεις

δάκρυσι διγλήνως ὦπας ὀδυρόμενος ;

6 Xenophon Hell. ii. 1. 28.

7 Aristotle Hist. anim. i. 15. 3.