Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World

Matthew W Dickie, Matthew W. Dickie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134533367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This study is the first to assemble the evidence for the existence of sorcerors in the ancient world; it also addresses the question of their identity and social origins. The resulting investigation takes us to the underside of Greek and Roman society, into a world of wandering holy men and women, conjurors and wonder-workers, and into the lives of prostitutes, procuresses, charioteers and theatrical performers.
This fascinating reconstruction of the careers of witches and sorcerors allows us to see into previously inaccessible areas of Greco-Roman life. Compelling for both its detail and clarity, and with an extraordinarily revealing breadth of evidence employed, it will be an essential resource for anyone studying ancient magic.

1

THE FORMATION AND NATURE OF THE GREEK CONCEPT OF MAGIC

To devote the first chapter of a book on magicians in the Greek and Roman worlds to a discussion of the concept of magic with which the Greeks operated and which the Romans inherited from them requires explanation and justification. There will be those who feel that such preliminaries can be dispensed with, since they are largely irrelevant to the real business in hand. These are feelings with which I can sympathize, since my own reactions on coming across yet another attempt at defining the notion of magic is dismay combined with a sense of foreboding.

Anxious examinations of the nature of magic and of its relationship to on the one hand religion and on the other to science abound in the literature of anthropology.¹ Discussions of the nature of magic have very often been motivated by the desire to provide a definition of the notion that will hold good for all cultures and that will at the same time explain what it is that all procedures thought of as magical have in common. Such enterprises are doomed to failure on two scores: firstly, they do not give sufficient recognition to the fact that the notion of magic is the product of a particular set of historical circumstances in Ancient Greece and that the concept of magic in Judaeo-Christian cultures is the direct offspring of that notion; secondly, all such attempts at capturing the peculiar nature of magic make the mistaken assumption that all concepts have at their heart a core or essence.

Let us begin with the assumption that magic is a universal notion and not one that is culturally specific.² In a general work on social anthropology written towards the end of his career, the distinguished anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach, confronted with the problem of applying the concepts of magic, religion and ritual to societies that seemed to him to lack these notions, was moved to write of magic:

As for magic, which readers of Fraser's The Golden Bough might suppose to lie at the very centre of the anthropologist's interests, after a lifetime's career as a professional anthropologist, I have almost reached the conclusion that the word has no meaning whatsoever.³

It was specifically the realization that the notion of magic is not a universal one and may, accordingly, have little or no place in the description of the conduct of societies lacking any such concept that prompted Leach to write in these terms.

The realization that the concept of magic as opposed to religion has no application in many non-Western societies has led some scholars to suggest that the notions should not be employed in the study of societies in whose thinking they play no part. Critics of this persuasion would argue that applying the notions of religion and magic to societies that lack these categories is tantamount to projecting our own parochial prejudices and attitudes onto these societies.⁴ What such critics are in essence proposing is that societies should be described in the categories that they themselves employ; alien notions should not be used to explain their thinking. That is a point of view with which many students of Greece and Rome will be sympathetic, since for a good many years now classicists have consciously attempted to understand the Greeks and the Romans in their own terms. In the study of Greek popular morality, for instance, there is now widespread agreement that it is necessary to understand Greek thinking from within and not to impose our own categories on it. What aroused admiration in a fifth-century Greek and what moved him to moral indignation would not provoke the same feelings in most modern Western men. The rather different moral outlook of the Greek is not to be captured if we do not attempt to look at the world in the way he did. What seemed important to him does not seem important to us, but it is nonetheless possible by paying careful attention to what he says to recreate some of his world.

There will be those who object that it is impossible for someone from an alien culture to look at a culture other than his own in quite the way that a person born within the culture does, since he will be unable to free himself from the presuppositions that he brings with him from his own culture.⁵ There is no doubt a good deal of truth in the objection, but it does not follow that it is by definition impossible, as has been suggested, for a stranger to understand an alien society from within. All that follows is that it is a difficult enterprise. There is no overwhelming reason, accordingly, to abandon the attempt to see the world through the eyes of the members of the society studied, even though our own preconceptions and prejudices may from time to time affect our judgment and understanding. That is to say, the emic approach to the study of culture should not be abandoned in favour of the etic.⁶ That said, it has to be granted that there are some situations in which it would be crippling to confine our descriptions of an alien culture to the categories that the culture examined has at its disposal. In discussing medical matters, it is necessary to translate, so far as that is possible, the understanding of the society studied into modern terms. Where there is no understanding, we have little choice but to use the distinctions and classifications modern Western medicine employs. That means that a student of birth control in the Roman Empire, while acknowledging that contraception was not distinguished from abortion, must use the notion of contraception in his study of practices and substances that in fact had a contraceptive effect.⁷ There are also some higher level concepts peculiar to modern Western society and of which the society studied knows nothing that nonetheless help explain features of that society. The Marxist notion of a false consciousness, whether in its original form or in its various recent transmogrifications, may be one of these. Magic and religion are not, however, scientific terms that help us better understand natural phenomena of whose meaning the alien culture studied has only a limited grasp, nor are they higher level concepts, consciously devised to illuminate the workings of society. They are rather categories constitutive of certain societies and not of others. Applying them to societies to which they mean nothing can only cause confusion.

The student of Greek and Roman magic is in a rather peculiar situation: he is not an anthropologist conducting researches into a culture in which magic as opposed to religion is a meaningless opposition; he studies societies in which the opposition existed, but which at an earlier stage in their existence did not make any such distinction. He is, furthermore, studying the societies that gave birth to the concept of magic with which modern Western man operates. He needs, however, to be sensitive to the differences that exist between what the ancients saw as magic and what he himself might be inclined to call magic. If he does not make that effort, he will fall into the trap of labelling as magic what in the eyes of those using them were perfectly legitimate and unobjectionable procedures.

Credit for recognizing that the concept of magic to which we are heir is the product of a very special set of circumstances and emerged at a particular time and place is due to a historian of Greek and Roman religion, Fritz Graf.⁸ In Graf's view, two factors gave rise to the hiving off of magic from religion, of which it had for Graf been an integral part: on the one side, self-conscious philosophical reflection on the nature of the divine had led to a purified conception of the gods completely at odds with the assumptions about the nature of the divine made by those who practised mageia; on the other side, natural science, especially in the form of medicine, had begun to look at nature as a closed system free from divine intervention within which changes were to be attributed to physical causes only. The combination of these two factors produced a radically altered conception of the relationship between the world of the gods and the world of men that marginalized the rôle traditionally played by certain religious specialists; their activities were now classified as mageia. The mageia of the religious specialists was not co-extensive with what magic is now understood to be, but embraced a much wider spectrum: private religious practices that were not part of civic cults, Bacchic mystery-cults, purificatory rites, black magic, rites connected with controlling the weather and conjuring up the dead.⁹ The conception of mageia, to which opposition on the part of doctors and of philosophers such as Plato, concerned to create gods purified of all moral blemish gave rise, did not at first affect the thinking of the mass of their contemporaries. It was basically the product of a debate between two groups of people who stood on the margins of society, the doctors and the philosophers on one side and the religious specialists on the other. Proof that this new conception of mageia as an enterprise, opposed on the one hand to religion and on the other to science, had made no impression on the civic authorities is to be seen in their failure to pass laws against it as such, although they were prepared to take action to deal with it to the extent that it threatened the physical wellbeing of the members of the community. The punishments that Plato in the Laws suggests should be exacted from those practising mageia reflect his own particular concerns about mageia, not those of the state. As Graf sees it, Plato campaigns against mageia; his contemporaries use it freely and unabashedly.¹⁰

If Graf is correct, the concept of mageia was at first very far from being coextensive with the notion of magic with which we operate; it was not much more than a way of distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable forms of religious behaviour to which only a few philosophers subscribed; at the same time it was a view of what was effective and what was not in medicine shared by some doctors (iatroi), although presumably by only a relatively small number of those who pursued that calling. The common ground between the two groups was that both condemned essentially the same religious experts, though from very different perspectives: the philosophers, because the religious experts treated the gods as corruptible by bribes; the doctors, mainly because the healing techniques employed by the religious experts assumed the intervention of the divine in natural processes. How these two rather different ways of condemning the motley crews of religious experts who stood apart from the official cults of the cities came together to make up the notion of mageia Graf does not explain. Nor is any explanation given of how and when this view of mageia, shared at first by only a few exalted spirits, came to be more widely adopted. Nor yet again are we told how and at what point the notion of mageia took on a much sparer aspect and was stripped of the private cults and Bacchic mysteries that it had previously embraced. When the latter process was completed, mageia would have become more or less co-extensive with the concept of magic with which the modern Western world operates.

First, a word about the wider implications of Graf's realization that magic as a discrete category of thought had its origins in the Greek world of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. It goes far beyond the study of Greek and Roman religion and affects not only our understanding of other ancient religions, but also the study of religion in general. It may be that notions analogous to the Greek concept of magic came into being in other cultures where tensions similar to those existing in Greece obtained. There is some reason to think that an idea akin to the Greco-Roman concept of magic was present in Ancient Israel. At any rate, in Deuteronomy 18.9–14 various forms of divination, spell-casting and consultation of the dead are declared to be the practices of the nations that will not enter the land of Israel and pronounced abominable.¹¹ The practices abominated are, accordingly, alien to the religion of Israel and for that reason occupy a position akin to that of magic in relation to religion. That is not quite enough to say that the practices abominated were thought of as magical. It would, on the other hand, be very difficult to demonstrate that the notion of magic had any part to play in the conceptual system of the Ancient Egyptians, at least until they were influenced by Greek ways of thinking.¹² It is true that in Coptic texts the term hik is identified and associated with loan-words from Greek such as the noun mageia and the participle mageuon and that hik is related to the divine personification of pharaonic times, Heka.¹³ But these identifications and relationships do not warrant the conclusion that Heka was the personification of what we would call magic. It can hardly be that, since Heka was quite openly worshipped and the force of which he is the personification is said in a text of the Tenth Dynasty to have been given by God for the protection of mankind. Heka is not a hidden and illicit force, but a force that is recognized as a boon to mankind.¹⁴

It is of the utmost importance for the present enterprise to come to terms with the Greco-Roman conception of magic. Without a description of the complex of ideas and practices that constituted magic in the eyes of the ancients the risk is always present that persons whom no ancient man or woman would ever have imagined to be magicians will be categorized as magicians. The need for definition is also necessary because many of the techniques and practices that were later held to constitute sorcery were in existence in the Greek-speaking world long before there is any sign of the emergence of magic as a distinct category of thought. Odysseus, for instance, in the Odyssey summons up the spirits of the dead from the Underworld.¹⁵ By the fourth century BC, if not earlier, those who professed to be able to conjure up the ghosts of the dead to consult them or to send them to haunt others are treated as magicians, but there is no suggestion in the Odyssey that Odysseus is acting as a sorcerer or that there is anything untoward about his conduct. Again in the Odyssey, the poet mentions a drug which Helen mixed with wine and which had the effect of making men forget their woes for the moment. He says that she obtained it from Polydamna, the wife of Thon, whose land Egypt provided drugs in profusion, some beneficial, some baneful.¹⁶ Later writers believed that the poet had in mind the fame of Egypt as a nursery of magicians, but what he goes on to say belies such an interpretation: ‘Each man there is a doctor of surpassing skill, since they are the descendants of Paion (the god of healing).’¹⁷ In other words, the skill that the Egyptians display in using the drugs in which their land is so rich is proof for the poet of their medical ability and not of their facility in sorcery. There are other incidents in the Odyssey that appear to have all the hallmarks of sorcery: Circe throws baneful drugs (pharmaka) into a concoction of cheese, barle...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The formation and nature of the Greek concept of magic
• 2 Sorcerers in the fifth and fourth centuries BC
• 3 Sorceresses in the Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries BC
• 4 Sorcerers in the Greek world of the Hellenistic period (300–1BC)
• 5 Magic as a distinctive category in Roman thought
• 6 Constraints on magicians in the Late Roman Republic and under the Empire
• 7 Sorcerers and sorceresses in Rome in the Middle and Late Republic and under the Early Empire
• 8 Witches and magicians in the provinces of the Roman Empire until the time of Constantine
• 9 Constraints on magicians under a Christian Empire
• 10 Sorcerers and sorceresses from Constantine to the end of the seventh century AD
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index