'Ares indeed endured, when Otos and mighty Ephialtes [bound him].' An anger-restrainer: 'Will you dare to lift the monstrous spear against Zeus?' Toward friends: 'Let him take it, lest we become a joy to our enemies.'

The great rite of immortality ends not with thunder but with a little card-file of Homeric spells, each labeled by its use — and the labels are the revelation. A verse is given, then its function: this one is a Thymokátochon, an 'anger-restrainer'; this one is 'toward friends.' The Iliad has become a spell-book indexed by purpose, its lines filed like remedies in a cabinet. And the choices are exquisitely apt. To restrain a man's rage you write the verse where Ares himself — the war-god, anger incarnate — was overpowered and 'endured' being bound in a bronze jar by two giants (Iliad 5.385): if wrath's own god could be chained, so can your enemy's temper. The logic of the charm is the content of the line; Homer supplies a precedent, and the precedent does the binding. The last verse, 'lest we become a chárma to our foes' — a joy, a gloating-piece, to our enemies — is Homer's own plea for concord (a warning against feuding while enemies watch), here made a charm 'toward friends,' to keep peace in a circle. So the Papyri Graecae Magicae close on the most Greek note imaginable: the poems every child memorized, turned into working magic — the whole inheritance of Greek verse pressed into the service of a man who wants his anger stilled, his friendships kept, and, once, to stand at the pole of heaven and be born again. Here the frozen text ends.