father. The author of the account does not imagine that Medea’s magic-working
created a reality; twice he speaks of illusions (eido ̄la) being created and once of an
illusion and a deceit worked on the spectators by magical devices. He does not
suppose, as we might, that Medea’s feats can be explained scientifically as illusions;
he believes that she uses magic to create the illusion.
We would be better placed to understand something of the social dynamics of
magic-working in our period if we knew what the relationship was between the public
performance by magicians of magical tricks and the enactment of spells designed to
affect the behavior and physical condition both of parties other than the magician and
the magician himself. Were the magicians who carried out what to our eyes are very
different forms of magic one and the same person or did they belong to quite separate
worlds? Did they, for instance, exploit the credence that their public performances
won them to offer help in personal matters? Present-day itinerant Indian street
magicians sell to the crowds who have witnessed them beheading a pigeon and
restoring it to life gems or rings that they say gave them the power to perform the
feat; the crowd is told that the same stones will bring their bearer back from death;
their sale is the principal source of income for the magician (Siegel 1991:68–70,
90–2, 100, 117, 157). One suspects that something like this went on in classical
antiquity. There is a considerable body of evidence from the high Roman empire that
points to magicians both practicing wonder-working and casting spells designed to
affect alterations in the behavior or fortunes of others. The chances are that in
classical and hellenistic Greece wonder-working went hand in hand with the more
lucrative business of personal magic.
Practitioners
The identity of the persons to whom their fellows turned for help because they were
reputedly expert in magic is cloaked in obscurity. Part of the reason for our ignorance
is that such persons probably came in the main from reaches of society in which our
literary sources have no interest. Chance references afford us a few tantalizing
glimpses of this hidden world. In Plato’sRepublicwe hear of persons described as
begging priests (agurtai) and seers (manteis) making their way to the doors of rich
men and promising to free them from the effect of the misdeeds of their ancestors and
themselves. The cleansing was to be accomplished by initiating them into mysteries
and subjecting them to purificatory rituals. Not only did the itinerant beggar-priests-
cum-seers offer purification, they were also prepared, for a small consideration, to
harm someone’s enemy, no matter whether he deserved it or not, using hauntings
and bindings; the gods would be persuaded to serve them (364b5–c5). There is a
very real possibility that Plato has not given a wholly unprejudiced picture of the
activities of the itinerant beggar-priests. There will nonetheless be a kernel of truth to
it; there will in Athens in the fourth century BC and no doubt in other Greek cities
have been wandering holy men who professed to be able, because of an expertise in
rituals that enlisted the gods on their side, to cast spells that harmed enemies.
The precise origins of the beggar-priests-cum-seers is necessarily veiled in darkness,
but what can be said about them is that they are rootless figures from the margins
of society.
368 Matthew W. Dickie