Practitioners

The identity of the persons to whom their fellows turned for help because they were reputedly expert in magic is cloaked in obscurity. Part of the reason for our ignorance is that such persons probably came in the main from reaches of society in which our literary sources have no interest. Chance references afford us a few tantalizing glimpses of this hidden world. In Plato’s Republic we hear of persons described as begging priests {agurtai) and seers { manteis) making their way to the doors of rich men and promising to free them from the effect of the misdeeds of their ancestors and themselves. The cleansing was to be accomplished by initiating them into mysteries and subjecting them to purificatory rituals. Not only did the itinerant beggar-priests-cum-seers offer purification, they were also prepared, for a small consideration, to harm someone’s enemy, no matter whether he deserved it or not, using hauntings and bindings; the gods would be persuaded to serve them {364b5-c5). There is a very real possibility that Plato has not given a wholly unprejudiced picture of the activities of the itinerant beggar-priests. There will nonetheless be a kernel of truth to it; there will in Athens in the fourth century BC and no doubt in other Greek cities have been wandering holy men who professed to be able, because of an expertise in rituals that enlisted the gods on their side, to cast spells that harmed enemies. The precise origins of the beggar-priests-cum-seers is necessarily veiled in darkness, but what can be said about them is that they are rootless figures from the margins of society.

Theocritus sheds light on other forms of magic-worker in his portrayal of a courtesan deserted by her lover attempting to bring him back by means of magic, to which we referred above. The setting of the poem is likely to be the island of Kos in the southeastern Aegean. In the course of performing her magical rituals, the woman recalls how, after seeing her lover for the first time, she had approached old women who performed incantations, to seek their help in bringing him to her {Idyll2.90-1). Later she threatens to kill the errant lover, if the spells with which she is currently trying to ensnare him have no effect; she will employ the spells/drugs {pharmaka) she has obtained from a foreigner, a Syrian, and which she keeps in a chest (2.159-62). The poem, accordingly, presents us with a courtesan adept at performing a binding spell, old women to whom courtesans turn for their expertise in incantations and a Syrian, knowledgeable about spells and drugs that kill. It conjures up a demi-monde in which prostitutes are themselves expert in magical rituals, in which there are old women skilled in incantations with whom prostitutes consort and in which are to be found persons from the eastern reaches of the now greatly extended Greek world who enjoy a certain cachet for their knowledge of magic.