By the latter part of the fifth century, accordingly, to refer to someone as a magician
carried the implication that the person in question engaged in a secretive fashion in
audacious acts of wickedness that were impious and displeasing to the gods and that
subverted the normal course of nature. Such persons might be referred to asmagoior
goe ̄tes, a word cognate with the Greek word for a cry of lamentation, orpharmakoi,
which meant someone expert in drugs or spells, or asepaoidoi, meaning persons
skilled in incantations,epaoidai. All of these terms tend to be used in a derogatory
fashion and are used metaphorically to decry someone as a fraud and trickster.
The emergence of the notion of magic seems to have led to the reclassification of a
whole range of activities that had long been practiced. How they were understood in
an earlier era is something of a mystery. In Homer’sOdyssey, for instance, the goddess
Circe entertains some members of Odysseus’ crew with food and drink in which she
has mixed baneful drugs (pharmaka) that cause them to forget their fatherland;
she then strikes them with a rod and herds them into a pig-pen, where they assume
the form of pigs, though their minds remain unimpaired (10.233–40). By the early
fourth century, Circe’s actions are seen as those of a sorceress. What earlier times
made of them is a puzzle.
The Greeks and the Romans never entirely lost the belief that Persia was the true
home of magic and that its founder was the Persian sage Zoroaster. The Roman
writer the Elder Pliny, who subscribed to the view that Zoroaster was the inventor of
magic, maintains that magic still dominates Persia (Natural Histories30.2–3). In the
hellenistic period there was a great deal of pseudepigraphical writing of magical
recipes; they were attributed to Persian sages. They clearly contributed to the con-
viction that true expertise in magic was to be sought in Persia. At some point, perhaps
in the second century BC, claims began to be advanced for Egyptian expertise in
magic. During the Roman empire it is principally to Egypt that would-be magicians
were supposed to have traveled to be instructed in the secrets of the magical craft by
Egyptian priests.
Not everybody was persuaded that magicians could accomplish what they boasted
of being able to do. The author of the tractOn the Sacred Diseasetakes the view that
the magicians, purifiers, beggar priests, and charlatans who treat epilepsy as a divinely
sent condition do so to ensure that their own ignorance will not be exposed and that,
if they are successful, they will be credited with the success, and, if unsuccessful, that
the gods will receive the blame (1.10–11). It is possible to take such a position
without subscribing to the view that all magic is a fraud. The skepticism of our
author, it turns out, is not confined to calling into question the ability of magicians
to cure epilepsy, but is wider-ranging: he suggests that the feats magicians boast of
being able to perform such as pulling the moon down, making the sun disappear, and
causing storm or calm are not real, but have been invented to provide them with
a source of livelihood (1.31–2). Even such an expression of disbelief does not quite
give us warrant to assert that the author did not believe in the efficacy of any form
of magic.
Plato, to judge from the stance taken by the principal interlocutor in theLaws, the
Athenian Stranger, in the preamble to the proposals he makes for legislation affecting
pharmakeia, a term that covers both using physical substances to poison and en-
gaging in magical practices, did not believe that men had anything to fear from most
of the persons who engaged in magic against them, although it would be virtually
360 Matthew W. Dickie