religious fi gures whom the city found subversive or threaten-
ing. Many of the practices denounced as magic and therefore
foreign were, in fact, based on old Greek traditions, while
many elements of civic religion—such as the temple and ani-
mal sacrifi ce—had been borrowed from the Near East. Th e
point of using a loaded term like magic was ideological, not
historical. For all these same reasons Christians were also
later accused of magic.
Th e attack on these old-fashioned Greek practices as
magic was led by such philosophers as Heracleitus (ca. 540–
ca. 480 b.c.e.) and Plato (ca. 428–348 or 347 b.c.e.) and by the
Hippocratic physicians, who, beginning in the fi ft h century
b.c.e., wished to establish a new sort of medical practice based
on reason. Th ese groups were most hostile to magic precisely
because they were themselves trying to make the betterment
of the soul and the healing of the body a respectable part of
civic culture and felt they had to distinguish themselves from
what the city rejected. Other philosophers, however, like Py-
thagoras (ca. 580–ca. 500 b.c.e.) and Empedocles (ca. 490–
430 b.c.e.), embraced the image of the magician because of its
aura of mystery and subversive power.
Magic was a sort of phantom of religion, one that
worked for the individual against the city. Even members of
the elites who ruled cities found certain situations in which
their own interest confl icted with the interest of the city as
a whole. By the mid-fi ft h century, the very period that is of-
ten considered the golden age of Greece and the high point
of Greek rationalism, some people saw an advantage in ful-
fi lling the role of a magician who could use the mysterious
powers of secret rituals to advance private interests against
that of the city—in return for a fee. Th ey began to practice
new rituals, especially those involving so-called curse tab-
lets. Such a tablet consisted of a letter written on a sheet of
lead under the name of a god to the ghost of a dead man. Th e
tablet, deposited in the man’s grave or in a cave or well, com-
manded the ghost to carry out certain orders. For example,
it might tell the ghost to change the outcome of a lawsuit
(and so prevent the working of justice in the city). Another
common command was to make a woman want to commit
adultery with a certain man (which also attacked the city
because citizenship was tied to membership in certain clans
and thus the whole fabric of the city would be undermined
by uncertainty about the paternity of children). Other tab-
lets sought to damage the business of some businessmen in
favor of a rival (which would subvert the economic struc-
ture of the city). Still other tablets tried to “fi x” the outcome
of sporting events (which in Greece were religious festivals
and part of civic religion).
While we might think of this kind of “magic” as naive,
the archaeological discovery of thousands of curse tablets
from all over the Greek world (and later the whole Roman
Empire, which readily accepted this kind of ritual) shows that
it was very common. Th e formation of the Greek cities had
many benefi ts for their citizens, but at the price of limits on
individual freedom and subordination to the collective. Indi-
viduals trying to maintain a balance between duty to the city
and their personal desires released the emotional pressure
through agencies like magic and secret initiations, attacking
the city in a symbolic way, as they would not do in more di-
rect action. Magic was a protest against the city.MYTH
A myth is an attempt to explain something that is not under-
stood, using linguistic models such as metaphor or analogy.
Myths interpret the world in the way the mind most easily
understands, through the structure of language itself. An ex-
ample is to say that the world is like a human being with its
many interconnected parts ruled by a mind or that a storm
is like the anger of a great king. Th is might seem simplistic
compared with modern scientifi c explanations, but it is not
intended to be the same kind of answer to questions about
the world. Myth begins in oral tradition and ritual, but in
Greece it became the basis of one of the greatest world litera-
tures, especially in the Homeric epics and in the fi rst plays in
the modern sense, the dramas of Aeschylus (525–456 b.c.e.),
Sophocles (ca. 496–406 b.c.e.), and Euripides (ca. 484–406
b.c.e.) and the comedies of Aristophanes (448–385 b.c.e.),
and the fi rst poems in the modern sense, by Sappho (fl. ca.
610–580 b.c.e.), Pindar (ca. 522–ca. 438 b.c.e.), and others.
Th ese authors are among our best sources for understanding
Greek religion.
Perhaps the most important Greek myth is told by He-
siod in his Th eogony. Drawing on older Near Eastern my-
thology, Hesiod describes the creation of the world through
successive generations of the divine family. Th e Greek word
for world is cosmos, which means “order.” Th e universe moves
from an undiff erentiated state toward the order we see around
us today. Hesiod imagines fi rst an emptiness or gap (chaos).
Creation begins when love (Eros) binds together whatever is
separated by chaos. Th is calls into being the fi rst two gods,
Gaia (the earth) and Uranus (the sky). Th ey give birth to the
Titans, a race of wild and cruel gods. Th e chief of these is Kro-
nos, who is incited by his mother to castrate and dethrone his
father and become the ruler of the universe. He then marries
his sister Rhea but devours their children as they are born
so that he will not suff er the same fate as his father. Finally,
Rhea hides one of her children, Zeus, from Kronos. Once he
reaches adulthood, Zeus indeed attacks his father and frees
his brothers and sisters from their father’s belly. Th ese sib-
lings are the fi rst Olympian gods. Th ey defeat the Titans and
bind them under the earth. Zeus and the Olympians go on to
fi nish the process of creation, giving the world its fi nal form,
destroying various monsters, and creating humankind. Th is
myth explains the creation of the world in terms that any-
one can understand, as the genealogy of a family. With each
generation the gods (and therefore the world) become less ab-
stract, less terrible, and more human. At the same time, we
see that Greek gods were free to do the very things that were
most forbidden in Greek society, such as attacking their par-
ents or committing incest.856 religion and cosmology: Greece