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 tractOn 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 (Clouds749–50) 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
(goe ̄teuo ̄n) 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 Code9.16.3). 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 wasepaoidoi, or enchanters. Now incantations had long been
used in healing sickness and wounds. In Homer’sOdyssey, Odysseus’ maternal uncles
perform an incantation over a wound inflicted by a wild boar to stanch the flow of
Magic in Classical and Hellenistic Greece 363