blood (19.455–8). That form of healing became the province of the magician. The
author of the tractOn the Sacred Diseasespeaks of persons whom he calls magicians
(magoi), purifiers, begging priests and quacks employing incantations (epaoidai) and
purificatory rituals to cure epilepsy (1.10–12). These are not necessarily separate
categories of person, but may well be the same persons referred to under different
descriptions. A joke in a forensic speech from the second part of the fourth century
BC suggests that healing epileptics was part of the repertoire of some magicians in
Athens at that time: the accused is said to have inherited the drugs and incantations of
a well-known sorceress, to have practiced magic and quackery, and to have boasted of
being able to cure those subject to epileptic seizures, even though he was himself
seized by villainy ([Demosthenes] 25.79).
There is another form of medicine that magicians increasingly took over, the
cutting of roots,rhizotomia. In theIliad, Patroclus applies the knowledge of sooth-
ing drugs in which Achilles has instructed him and which Achilles in his turn has
learned from the Centaur Chiron: he scatters a bitter root that he has broken up by
rubbing it in his hands over a wound; it checks the pain and dries up the flow of blood
(11.828–48); in theOdyssey, the god Hermes comes to Odysseus’ aid and pulls out a
root from the earth that mortals may only extract with difficulty; it will afford
Odysseus protection against Circe (10.301–6). When the sorceress Medea in Apol-
lonius Rhodius’Argonauticacuts a root with which she will anoint Jason to render
him invulnerable to the blows of weapons and to being burned by fire, she employs
magical rituals to harvest it: she gathers it in a shell from the Caspian Sea, washes it
seven times in ever-flowing water, and at dead of night, wearing dark garments,
invokes Brimo seven times before cutting the root (3.844–66).
Later in classical antiquity, we hear a good deal about the use of magic to find out
what lies hidden from human view, whether it be in the present, past, or future. That
this was an important aspect of magic in the classical and hellenistic Greek world is
more than likely. Indirect testimony to close ties between magic-working and divin-
ation is to be found in Plato’s conviction that seers were the only true experts in
magic (Laws933d7–e5). It should be acknowledged that Plato has nothing to say
about seers employing magic in their divinatory endeavors. The universal historian
Diodorus Siculus tells a story about the leader of the slave revolt in Sicily in the 130s
BC, a man from Apamea in Syria called Eunus, that illustrates one of the ways in
which magic-working and prophetic utterance could become intertwined (the source
of the story is a contemporary of Eunus from Apamea, the Stoic philosopher,
Posidonius). Eunus is introduced to us as a magician (magos) and wonder-worker
(teratourgos) who professed to be able to predict future events, because of what a god
had told him in dream; he went on from dream-prophecy to seeing gods when he was
in a waking state and to hearing what they had to say about the future; his final trick
was to utter prophecies in an inspired state while breathing fire; he accomplished the
feat by putting into his mouth a walnut, containing glowing embers, that had been
pierced at both ends; he then blew through the holes to cause flames to issue from his
mouth (34/35.2.5–7).
A form of divination with strong associations with magic that was practiced in the
period under review was necromancy. That is not to say there were not perfectly
respectable oracular sites connected with the underworld (nekuomanteia) where the
dead were consulted. In a remarkable passage, the geographical writer of the early first
364 Matthew W. Dickie