The impression left by much modern work on Greek and Roman magic is that magicworking in classical antiquity consisted principally in the casting of spells intended to affect the behavior or the fortunes of the person at whom the spell was directed. We are told about spells designed to win the sexual favors of both men and women as well as spells aimed at impeding the sexual pleasure of rivals; we can read about spells meant to harm enemies, spells that left the other party to a law-suit speechless, and spells whose purpose it was to influence the result of chariot races. But we do not hear much about what springs to the minds of most people, when they hear the word ‘‘magic’’ mentioned, which is conjuring tricks and illusions; in other words, the stock-in-trade of the modern stage magician. Yet the creation of illusions and wonders is as much a part of Greek and Roman magic as is the casting of spells intended to alter the behavior or fortunes of oneself or others. The reason why so much attention has been devoted to spells cast against others is that just such spells survive from classical antiquity. They do so since they are written on lead or papyrus or on fragments of pottery and deposited in graves and wells or in the sanctuaries of certain deities such as Demeter, a goddess with connections to the underworld; they were also placed in locations frequented by their intended victims, so they may be hidden in a house or buried on a race-course.
The spells that have survived from the Greek world of the classical and hellenistic periods are all written on thin plates of lead that have been folded and rolled up and then pierced by a nail before being deposited with a body, which had probably been buried fairly recently, or placed in the sanctuary of a deity. They are generally known as curse tablets, although there are those who would prefer to call them binding spells. (‘‘Binding spell’’ is not an entirely satisfactory way of referring to the lead plates, since the term is too general. Verbs meaning ‘‘to bind’’ are used to characterize any sort of spell placed on another person, whether written on something or not.) The Latin term defixio is also used. The spell, if it is not just a list of names, as early ones tend to be, is invariably in the first person singular and declares that the person at whom it is directed is to be bound down or given over into the possession of the deities or spirits of the dead. Sometimes the victim is consigned to the power of the dead person in whose grave the lead tablet is placed. Although the spell is written in the first person, the identity of the speaker is almost invariably concealed, no doubt because the persons casting the spell thought it dangerous to reveal their identity.
It should always be kept in mind that there may have been more to putting a spell on an enemy or on a person whose sexual favors were desired than depositing a rolled-up lead tablet with a freshly buried body or secreting it in a sanctuary of Demeter. Rituals may also have been performed. Nor should it be assumed that depositing a lead tablet was a necessary element in putting a curse on someone. A poem by Theocritus, who was active in Alexandria in the first quarter of the third century BC, portrays a young woman, a courtesan trying through magical rituals to win back the affections of a lover (Idyll 2); lead tablets play no part in the binding spell she places on her erstwhile lover.
There is a quasi-sociological thesis that seeks to explain why some Greeks had recourse to the use of curse tablets that should be mentioned, since it has won a fair measure of acceptance. The thesis has it that such magic-working is not particularly sinister but is rather a reflection of the competitiveness or agonistic spirit that characterizes classical Greek cities (Faraone 1991a:20). Because few curse tablets that explicitly speak of killing the person cursed have survived, the conclusion drawn is that the persons who cast them played by the rules governing the give and take of competition in the Greek city-state. In fact, there are several spells that are meant to kill their victim. Maggidis (2000:98) collects instances of curse tablets that seem to call for the death of the victim, only to dismiss them. To his list should be added a curse tablet of the first half of the fourth century BC from Pella in Macedonia (SEG 43.434), in which a woman seeks to prevent the union of the man who is the object of her desires and a rival; she prays that the rival may perish wretchedly. For further discussion of the tablet, see Voutiras 1998. It is true that one of the striking features of life in certain Greek cities were the competitions in music, drama, and athletics that the city or a religious sanctuary connected with it organized. It does not follow that because there were organized competitions in certain fields, Greek society was any more or less competitive than other societies nor, more importantly, that the rules governing competition in athletics or music carried over into other walks of life. To extend the notion of an agonistic spirit to all walks of Greek life is to make it meaningless and to deprive it of explanatory force. A victory in the games won over opponents who have all been disabled by foul play is ultimately meaningless, whereas a courtesan or bronze-smith who eliminates a rival is the more likely to prosper. There are many possible explanations, besides the feeling that consigning a rival to death was not quite cricket, for the supposed unwillingness on the part of those who employed curse tablets to seek the death of their opponents.
If we return to the tract On the Sacred Disease, we encounter there a form of magic working, which may be designated meteorological magic. It encompasses bringing the moon down, making the sun disappear, causing calm and storm, rain and drought, making the sea unvoyageable, rendering land infertile, and other such feats (1.29-30).Virtually nothing further is heard about meteorological magic in our period apart from a joke in Aristophanes about purchasing a Thessalian woman to bring the moon down (Clouds 749-50) and a tantalizing reference in a poem composed by a mid-fifth-century Sicilian, Empedocles of Acragas, who is customarily treated as a philosopher, but who is as much a holy man as he is a philosopher (Kingsley 1995 does justice to Empedocles as holy man). In the poem, Empedocles promises an unknown addressee that he alone will be taught remedies against old age and sickness, he will learn how to check the power of the winds and make them blow again, he will learn to cause drought and bring a man back to life (D-K 31 B 111). The lines ultimately come from the hellenistic biographer Satyrus, who seems to have cited them in recounting a story about Empedocles’ having performed sorcery (golteuon) in the presence of one of the pioneers in the study of rhetoric, Gorgias (Diogenes Laertius 8.59). How Empedocles understood his promise is a complicated question, but what is not in doubt is the construction Satyrus, writing in the late third or early second century BC, put on the promise: Empedocles was boasting of his knowledge of sorcery (on Satyrus, see Gudeman 1923:228-35). It follows that in the second century BC the control of wind and rain as well as protection against old age and death and the bringing of the dead back to life were what a sorcerer might be expected to promise.
In later times one of the fields in which magicians are known to have professed expertise was the healing and prevention of sickness. It was here that the public in all likelihood came most frequently into contact with magic. So much was magical healing taken for granted that in AD 318 Constantine, shortly after he had officially espoused Christianity, in issuing an edict against those who used the arts of magic either against the well-being of others or to kindle sexual desire in the chaste, explicitly excepts from punishment those who use devices to protect their own health and to protect their crops from the effects of weather (Theodosian Code 9.16.3). We hear comparatively little in our period about magical healing, but it is to be presumed that it was an important aspect of magic. From the fifth century BC on, magicians appropriated as their special preserve incantations (epaoidai), so much so that one of the names given them was epaoidoi, or enchanters. Now incantations had long been used in healing sickness and wounds. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus’ maternal uncles perform an incantation over a wound inflicted by a wild boar to stanch the flow of blood (19.455-8). That form of healing became the province of the magician. The author of the tract On the Sacred Disease speaks of persons whom he calls magicians ( magoi), purifiers, begging priests and quacks employing incantations ( epaoidai) and purificatory rituals to cure epilepsy (1.10-12). These are not necessarily separate categories of person, but may well be the same persons referred to under different descriptions. A joke in a forensic speech from the second part of the fourth century BC suggests that healing epileptics was part of the repertoire of some magicians in Athens at that time: the accused is said to have inherited the drugs and incantations of a well-known sorceress, to have practiced magic and quackery, and to have boasted of being able to cure those subject to epileptic seizures, even though he was himself seized by villainy ([Demosthenes] 25.79).
There is another form of medicine that magicians increasingly took over, the cutting of roots, rhizotomia. In the Iliad, Patroclus applies the knowledge of soothing drugs in which Achilles has instructed him and which Achilles in his turn has learned from the Centaur Chiron: he scatters a bitter root that he has broken up by rubbing it in his hands over a wound; it checks the pain and dries up the flow of blood (11.828-48); in the Odyssey., the god Hermes comes to Odysseus’ aid and pulls out a root from the earth that mortals may only extract with difficulty; it will afford Odysseus protection against Circe (10.301-6). When the sorceress Medea in Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica cuts a root with which she will anoint Jason to render him invulnerable to the blows of weapons and to being burned by fire, she employs magical rituals to harvest it: she gathers it in a shell from the Caspian Sea, washes it seven times in ever-flowing water, and at dead of night, wearing dark garments, invokes Brimo seven times before cutting the root (3.844-66).
Later in classical antiquity, we hear a good deal about the use of magic to find out what lies hidden from human view, whether it be in the present, past, or future. That this was an important aspect of magic in the classical and hellenistic Greek world is more than likely. Indirect testimony to close ties between magic-working and divination is to be found in Plato’s conviction that seers were the only true experts in magic (Laws 933d7-e5). It should be acknowledged that Plato has nothing to say about seers employing magic in their divinatory endeavors. The universal historian Diodorus Siculus tells a story about the leader of the slave revolt in Sicily in the 130s BC, a man from Apamea in Syria called Eunus, that illustrates one of the ways in which magic-working and prophetic utterance could become intertwined (the source of the story is a contemporary of Eunus from Apamea, the Stoic philosopher, Posidonius). Eunus is introduced to us as a magician (magos) and wonder-worker (teratourgos) who professed to be able to predict future events, because of what a god had told him in dream; he went on from dream-prophecy to seeing gods when he was in a waking state and to hearing what they had to say about the future; his final trick was to utter prophecies in an inspired state while breathing fire; he accomplished the feat by putting into his mouth a walnut, containing glowing embers, that had been pierced at both ends; he then blew through the holes to cause flames to issue from his mouth (34/35.2.5-7).
A form of divination with strong associations with magic that was practiced in the period under review was necromancy. That is not to say there were not perfectly respectable oracular sites connected with the underworld ( nekuomanteia) where the dead were consulted. In a remarkable passage, the geographical writer of the early first century AD, Strabo, drawing on the philosopher Posidonius, compares the esteem Moses enjoyed as a prophet amongst the Jews with that of Amphiaraus, Trophonius, Orpheus, and Musaeus amongst the Greeks, of the magoi, the necromancers or nekuomanteis, the diviners from bowls or lekanomanteis, and the diviners in water or hudromanteis amongst the Persians, and of the Chaldaeans or astrologers amongst the Assyrians (16.2.39). That image of the Persians probably owes more to Greek ideas about the magic practiced in Persia than it does to any Persian reality; what it really tells us about are forms of magic practiced in the Greek-speaking hellenistic world. (In his description of a visit to the underworld, the satirical writer of the second half of the second century AD, Lucian, gives the man who conducts the visit the Persian name of Mithrobarzanes, although identifying him as a Chaldaean, and has him don magic garb that resembles the clothing worn by the Medes: Menippus 6-8.) Plato in the Laws takes it for granted that persons who are necromancers will at the same time profess to be able to bend the gods to their will by sacrifices, prayers, and the incantations of sorcery (909a8-b5); that is to say, necromancy is practiced by sorcerers. For such persons he reserves a particularly severe punishment, isolating them from the rest of the citizens in a prison for the rest of their lives and casting their bones beyond the boundaries of the state (909c1-6).
There is evidence that in the hellenistic period another of the forms of divination with which Strabo credits the Persians was practiced in the Greek-speaking world as a form of magic What happened in this form of magical divination was that a boy-medium gazed into a mirror, pool of water, or lamp, where he saw a vision that led him to utter a prophetic utterance. The boy was prepared for his vision by the magician who intoned an incantation over him. Apuleius of Madaura, who stood trial for magic-working at Sabrata in North Africa between AD 156 and 158 and was himself accused of having uttered incantations over a boy who was gazing into a lamp, cites a story told by Varro, a Roman polymath of the Late Republic, about a magical consultation; its subject was the outcome of the Mithridatic War and it had taken place in Tralles, a city in the Maeander valley; a boy had gazed at an image of Hermes in a pool of water and then uttered a prediction in verse of some one hundred and sixty lines (Apology 43.3-6).
We have already had occasion to look at the passage in Plato’s Symposium in which the prophetess Diotima posits a category of being that lies half-way between gods and men, and the members of which act as intermediaries between the human and the divine (202e1-203a2). The doctrine Diotima enunciates assumed a huge importance in later Platonism, which takes it for granted, almost certainly correctly, that Diotima is Plato’s mouthpiece. In the view of one Platonist, Apuleius of Madaura, what the doctrine meant for magic was that demons were the agents who created the wonders performed by magicians ( On the God of Socrates 6). Apuleius’ application of the theory to explain the wonder-working side of magic is an indication of how large that aspect of magic loomed in the minds of men. It is conspicuous that references to magicians in Plato are predominantly to persons engaged in the wonder-working, illusion-creating side of magic. Magicians or goltes are for Plato above all persons who create illusions; they are persons who practice wonder-working (thaumatopoiia); persons who can change their own appearance or the appearance of objects (goltes as creators of illusions: Republic 584a8-9, 602c10-d4; goltes able to change their form: Euthydemus 288b8, Republic 380d1-383a5; goltes and thaumatopoiia:. Sophist 234e7-235b6). Since Plato is interested in the relationship between appearance and reality, it is natural that he should appeal to the illusion-creating side of magic to illustrate the difference between appearance and reality. It would be wrong to conclude that the illusion-creating side of magic was more important than the spell-casting. What Plato’s references to magic-working do show is that a good deal of magic consisted in public performance. Magicians were not necessarily obscure figures, consulted only in back alleys; they might well be flamboyant theatrical personalities, eager to perform in front of an audience. Not all wonder-workers or thaumatopoioi would have been classified as magicians or goetes. Thaumatopoiia or thaumatourgia encompasses a wide range of activities, from the acts of the acrobat and juggler to the performance of conjuring tricks. It is the persons who create illusions, whether by mechanical means or by sleight of hand, who are the more likely to be called goeites. The settings in which wonder-workers and magicians performed will have ranged from drinking parties or symposia, to public crossroads, marketplaces, and even the theater. Eunus, the instigator of the First Sicilian Slave War, who is described as a magician (magos) and wonder-worker ( teratourgos), is said to have been brought by his master, who was quite taken in by his performances, to symposia, where he prophesied in response to questions put to him by those present (Diodorus Siculus 34/35.2.8). We hear of crowds of foolish persons forming a circle around wonder-workers (Isocrates, Antidosis 2).
The evidence for the classical and hellenistic periods throws very little light on what kind of tricks magicians-cum-wonder-workers performed and what apparatuses they employed. There is one tantalizing reference in Plato’s Republic in which Socrates, to illustrate the limited contact men have with reality, suggests their situation is like that ofpersons confined in a cave who can only see the shadows cast by light from a fire on figures borne along above a wall that lies behind the prisoners; that wall, Socrates suggests, is similar to the barrier or parapet that lies in front of the spectators above which wonder-workers show their wonders (514a1-b6). Magicians of a rather later date are known to have used just such tricks to throw the shadowy figures of gods and demons on ceilings (Hippolytus, Refutations of All Heresies 4.35.1-2).
An encyclopedic writer of the early Roman empire tells of performers who put their fingers into the mouths of poisonous snakes that had been drugged (Celsus, On Medicine 5.27.3c). There is some evidence that the practice of handling snakes goes back to the hellenistic period and was one of the tricks magicians performed. The hellenized Jew who goes under the name of Artapanus and who cannot have been active much later than 100 BC, in his retelling of the story in Exodus that portrays the wonders Moses performed in front ofthe Egyptian Pharaoh, has the Pharaoh call on the priests who lived beyond Memphis to create a wonder ( teratour-gein), on peril of being killed and having their temples razed. The priests were bidden do this, because the staff that Moses had thrown to the ground had been transformed into a snake and because Moses had caused the Nile to inundate the land by striking it with his staff. Their response was to use magical devices (manganai) and incantations ( epaoidai) to create a snake and to change the color of the Nile ( FGrH 726 fr. 3.27-31). For Artapanus the Egyptian priests are magicians who perform the tricks that were in all likelihood the stock-in-trade of the magicians of his day, snake-handling and effecting changes in the colors of liquids; an explanation of how wine could be made to change color from white to red was contained in a handbook of magical tricks that may belong to the late hellenistic period (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.7.1-2).
Some further information about the tricks magicians performed can be extracted from a story told by Diodorus Siculus about the spectacular entry into Iolcus in Thessaly that Medea devised. She did so by giving the impression that she was making her entry under the aegis of the goddess Artemis. First of all, she created a hollow statue of the goddess and concealed within it all manner of special substances; as for her own appearance, she used peculiar potencies to make her hair white and her skin wrinkled, so that she looked like an old woman. She entered the city as day broke; she herself behaved as one possessed; the crowds who gathered were told to receive the goddess with all due respect, since she had come from the land of the Hyperboreans for the benefit of the city and its king. Her next move was to enter the royal residence, where her arrival threw the king and his daughters into fearful consternation. They were told that Artemis had come through the air riding on serpents to establish herself in Iolcus, which she had chosen because of the piety of its people; she herself had been bidden by the goddess to strip the king of his old age and make him young again with the help of certain potencies. The king was persuaded of Medea’s powers when she emerged in her former appearance from the room to which she had retired; there, she had cleansed her body of the potencies that had been applied to it. She used further magical devices (pharmaka) to create the likenesses of the snakes that were supposed to have borne Artemis across the heavens to lolcus. To convince the daughters of the king that she was able to make their father young again by chopping him up and placing the parts in a cauldron of boiling water, she dismembered an elderly ram and put the parts into a cauldron, from which she then took out the likeness of a lamb, an effect achieved by employing magical devices (pharmaka) to deceive the daughters (4.51-52.2).
Medea’s first trick is with the statue of Artemis. We are not told what the statue did, but we should probably imagine that it moved or that it threw off a bright light. (Statues that moved were part of the repertoire of the tricks magicians had in their bag in later times; theurgists exploited the same trick: lamblichus, Mysteries 3.28-9; Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus 1.5; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical Histories 9.3; Rufinus, Ecclesiastical History 9.2-3, 11.23. The Neoplatonic philosopher Maximus is said to have made a statue of Hecate smile and then laugh and to have caused the torches she carried in her hands to burst into flame. The performance is described by a hostile witness as that of a thaumatopoios: Eunapius, Lives of the Sophists 7.2.7-10.) Next, there is Medea’s transformation into an aged hag and her return to her former self (for magicians effecting changes in their own appearance: Plato, Euthydemus 288b8; Republic 380d1-383a5). Then there is the creation of the images of the snakes that are supposed to have carried Artemis through the skies. Finally, there is the slaughter and dismemberment ofthe elderly ram and its reappearance in the form of a lamb pulled out of the cauldron in which it had been boiled. (A version of the same story is to be found at Ovid, Metamorphoses 7.297-323. To judge from Empedocles D-K31 B 111.1, magicians may have boasted of being able to restore youth.) These are all illusions attested at a later period. The presumption must be that they were practiced in the hellenistic period and that Diodorus’ source was a man who was familiar with them. He used that familiarity to explain how Medea succeeded in convincing the daughters of the king to allow her to kill and dismember their father. The author of the account does not imagine that Medea’s magic-working created a reality; twice he speaks of illusions { eidola) being created and once of an illusion and a deceit worked on the spectators by magical devices. He does not suppose, as we might, that Medea’s feats can be explained scientifically as illusions; he believes that she uses magic to create the illusion.
We would be better placed to understand something of the social dynamics of magic-working in our period if we knew what the relationship was between the public performance by magicians of magical tricks and the enactment of spells designed to affect the behavior and physical condition both ofparties other than the magician and the magician himself. Were the magicians who carried out what to our eyes are very different forms of magic one and the same person or did they belong to quite separate worlds? Did they, for instance, exploit the credence that their public performances won them to offer help in personal matters? Present-day itinerant Indian street magicians sell to the crowds who have witnessed them beheading a pigeon and restoring it to life gems or rings that they say gave them the power to perform the feat; the crowd is told that the same stones will bring their bearer back from death; their sale is the principal source of income for the magician {Siegel 1991:68-70, 90-2, 100, 117, 157). One suspects that something like this went on in classical antiquity. There is a considerable body of evidence from the high Roman empire that points to magicians both practicing wonder-working and casting spells designed to affect alterations in the behavior or fortunes of others. The chances are that in classical and hellenistic Greece wonder-working went hand in hand with the more lucrative business of personal magic.
World History
