CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Magic in Classical and
Hellenistic Greece
Matthew W. Dickie
Introduction
It is very much to be doubted whether many of the readers of thisCompanion to
Greek Religionwill be surprised to find magic amongst the subjects treated and will
feel that its inclusion calls for justification. Why this should be so is not hard to
explain: in the minds of most people the notion of magic is bound up with that of
religion. There is a feeling that there is an opposition between true religion and
magic; magic is after all supposed to be the province of the opponent of God, the
Devil. There may even be an awareness that in early modern Europe the confessions
extracted from those accused of witchcraft often enough spoke of a Witches’ Sabbath
in which the rituals of Christian worship were turned upside down. It does not follow
that, because we intuitively connect religion and magic, an essay on magic has any
place in a set of essays on Greek religion. We cannot just take it for granted that the
Greek understanding of religion and of magic coincides with our own.
Religion is a more problematic notion than magic. It is notoriously difficult to give
an adequate rendering of the English word ‘‘religion’’ in either Greek or Latin; there
is no single word in either ancient language that fits the bill. That is not to say that it is
impossible to put into Greek or Latin whatever is meant by the use of the English
word ‘‘religion’’ in any given context. That it is always possible to render what is
meant by ‘‘religion’’ in Greek or Latin gives the lie to those who assert that the
Greeks and the Romans had no concept of religion. A more accurate, though less
dramatic, statement of the true state of affairs would be that the Greeks and the
Romans have no one word that covers everything comprehended in the English word
‘‘religion’’.
For what it is worth, it is possible to render the English word ‘‘magic’’ more or less
adequately with a single Greek term,mageiaorgoe ̄teia. There is a very simple reason:
it is that speakers of English are heir to the Greek concept of magic. The same could
be said of those who use a romance language. It is possible to trace the history of the