handbook of magical tricks that may belong to the late hellenistic period (Irenaeus,
Against Heresies1.7.1–2).
Some further information about the tricks magicians performed can be extracted
from a story told by Diodorus Siculus about the spectacular entry into Iolcus in
Thessaly that Medea devised. She did so by giving the impression that she was making
her entry under the aegis of the goddess Artemis. First of all, she created a hollow
statue of the goddess and concealed within it all manner of special substances; as for
her own appearance, she used peculiar potencies to make her hair white and her skin
wrinkled, so that she looked like an old woman. She entered the city as day broke; she
herself behaved as one possessed; the crowds who gathered were told to receive the
goddess with all due respect, since she had come from the land of the Hyperboreans
for the benefit of the city and its king. Her next move was to enter the royal residence,
where her arrival threw the king and his daughters into fearful consternation. They
were told that Artemis had come through the air riding on serpents to establish
herself in Iolcus, which she had chosen because of the piety of its people; she herself
had been bidden by the goddess to strip the king of his old age and make him young
again with the help of certain potencies. The king was persuaded of Medea’s powers
when she emerged in her former appearance from the room to which she had retired;
there, she had cleansed her body of the potencies that had been applied to it. She used
further magical devices (pharmaka) to create the likenesses of the snakes that were
supposed to have borne Artemis across the heavens to Iolcus. To convince the
daughters of the king that she was able to make their father young again by chopping
him up and placing the parts in a cauldron of boiling water, she dismembered an
elderly ram and put the parts into a cauldron, from which she then took out the
likeness of a lamb, an effect achieved by employing magical devices (pharmaka)to
deceive the daughters (4.51–52.2).
Medea’s first trick is with the statue of Artemis. We are not told what the statue did,
but we should probably imagine that it moved or that it threw off a bright light.
(Statues that moved were part of the repertoire of the tricks magicians had in their
bag in later times; theurgists exploited the same trick: Iamblichus,Mysteries3.28–9;
Proclus,Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus1.5; Eusebius,Ecclesiastical Histories9.3;
Rufinus,Ecclesiastical History9.2–3, 11.23. The Neoplatonic philosopher Maximus
is said to have made a statue of Hecate smile and then laugh and to have caused the
torches she carried in her hands to burst into flame. The performance is described by
a hostile witness as that of athaumatopoios: Eunapius,Lives of the Sophists7.2.7–10.)
Next, there is Medea’s transformation into an aged hag and her return to her former
self (for magicians effecting changes in their own appearance: Plato,Euthydemus
288b8;Republic380d1–383a5). Then there is the creation of the images of the
snakes that are supposed to have carried Artemis through the skies. Finally, there is
the slaughter and dismemberment of the elderly ram and its reappearance in the form
of a lamb pulled out of the cauldron in which it had been boiled. (A version of
the same story is to be found at Ovid,Metamorphoses7.297–323. To judge from
Empedocles D-K 31 B 111.1, magicians may have boasted of being able to restore
youth.) These are all illusions attested at a later period. The presumption must be that
they were practiced in the hellenistic period and that Diodorus’ source was a man
who was familiar with them. He used that familiarity to explain how Medea succeeded
in convincing the daughters of the king to allow her to kill and dismember their
Magic in Classical and Hellenistic Greece 367