Magic in the Greco-Roman world

• 1. Introduction

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  Magic in the Greco-Roman world disturbed Augustus enough that in 13 BCE he ordered two thousand magical scrolls burned. The fire did not end the practice. It drove those who performed it to work in greater secrecy, and the texts they left behind carry repeated instructions to guard their contents. Private magic was practiced throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Greeks, Romans, Jews, and early Christians all took part, outside the oversight of any official priesthood or temple. The primary sources that survive include the Greek Magical Papyri, curse tablets, and literary discussions in works like Pliny the Elder's Natural History. Together they reveal a world where the line between prayer and spell was contested and unstable. What set magic apart from religion? Who were the magicians, and who did the authorities fear among them? Tracking those questions requires starting where the Greeks themselves started, with a chance encounter on an enchanted island in the age of heroes.

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• 2. Naming the Practice

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  The Greeks credited Zoroaster with inventing both astrology and magic, believing him to be the Chaldean founder of the Magi of Persia. From this association, the Greek word mágos spread through the ancient world. It gradually displaced goēs, the older native term for a magic practitioner. Where goēs had described a specific type of operator, mágos expanded to cover astrology, alchemy, and other forms of esoteric knowledge. Our modern words magic and magician trace directly to this Persian inheritance.

  William Swatos and Peter Kivisto defined magic as any attempt to control one's environment through untested or untestable means, such as charms or spells. Yet ancient authors found it difficult to draw a clean line between magic and ordinary religion. Robert Parker put the difficulty precisely: "magic differs from religion as weeds differ from flowers, merely by negative social evaluation." Magic was seen as manipulative of the gods rather than merely supplicatory. It was practiced in secret, often for a paying client, and aimed at personal ends. Religion, in contrast, sought communal goods, operated openly, and asked rather than compelled. The distinction between the two was one made mainly by a small circle of intellectuals. Most people treated the difference as a matter of social judgment rather than firm principle. In Plato's Symposium (at 202e), magicians were called maleficent, though Plato allowed them some efficacy as a function of the god Eros.

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• 3. The Odyssey and Origins

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  Book X of the Odyssey reaches back to the early 8th century BCE. It contains what scholars consider the earliest example of magic in Greek literature. At the center is the encounter between Odysseus and the enchantress Circe on the island of Aeaea. The poem introduces Circe as "she who is sister to the wizard Aeetes, both being children of the Sun." Their mother, the text adds, was "Perse the daughter of the Ocean." Circe strikes Odysseus's companions with a wand and transforms them into swine. Odysseus defends himself with a secret herb called moly, revealed to him by Hermes, described in the poem as "god of the golden wand."

  Circe's wand, the moly herb, and the god Hermes all appear together in this episode. Between them, they establish three elements that would define magic across the Greco-Roman period. The first is a mysterious tool endowed with special power. The second is a rare herb with magical properties. The third is a divine figure who reveals the secret of the act. Circe's magic also carries a darker implication. She appears in beautiful female form, and her power works against the natural order. A companion of Odysseus calls her a witch. She is aligned with the Titans, the older divine powers that the younger Olympian gods, including Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, had conquered. The 6th century BCE would bring the first historical figures in Greece credited with comparable powers, among them Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Empedocles.

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• 4. Divine Men of Classical Greece

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  Orpheus is said to have lived in Thrace "a generation before Homer," though he appears on 5th-century ceramics in contemporary Greek costume. His most celebrated act was descending to the underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice. The Greek playwright Aeschylus described him as one who "haled all things by the rapture of his voice." This line hints at an ancient conviction that song and voice carried genuine magical force. Unlike many practitioners discussed negatively in ancient texts, Orpheus was usually spoken of without censure. The special term applied to him was theios aner, meaning "divine man," used to set him apart from magicians of ill repute. His association with the Orphic Mysteries linked him to both Pythagoras and Empedocles.

  Pythagoras, who lived from roughly 570 to 495 BCE, attracted a remarkable catalog of supernatural stories by the time of Aristotle. Among the acts attributed to him was being seen in two cities at the same hour. A white eagle allowed him to stroke it. A river greeted him with the words "Hail, Pythagoras!" He predicted that a dead man would be found on a ship entering harbor. He also announced the death of a white bear before the messenger arrived with the news. He reportedly bit a venomous snake to death. These stories share a common thread: commanding animals and transcending space and time. Each suggested that Pythagoras had been touched by the divine.

  Empedocles, who lived from roughly 490 to 430 BCE, was credited with an even broader range of powers. He reportedly healed the sick, rejuvenated the old, controlled the weather, and summoned the dead. In his 1951 book The Greeks and the Irrational, scholar E.R. Dodds described Empedocles as a combination of poet, magus, teacher, and scientist. After Empedocles, the scale of magical gifts attributed to any single individual began to shrink. Plato's Laws (933a-e) reflects this shift: healers, prophets, and sorcerers were acknowledged to exist and to need control by law. Plato called them a "rather low order of humanity" but did not deny their powers were real. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, written in the 1st century CE, addressed a parallel concept. It explored the idea that spiritual gifts might be limited and varied, just as magical gifts were said to be.

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• 5. Papyri, Tablets, and Amulets

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  "Take the eyes of a bat" reads one instruction in the Greek Magical Papyri. The texts are written in the style of recipes, specifying ingredients and procedures for each ritual. Appropriate gestures were required at particular moments; different gestures were believed to produce different effects. A ritual performed correctly could guarantee the revelation of dreams and the ability to interpret them accurately. Other spells were designed to send daemons against an enemy, or to break up a marriage.

  Curse tablets, known by the Latin term tabellae defixionum, took their name from defigere, meaning "to pin down." The process involved inscribing a victim's name on a thin sheet of lead together with magical formulas or symbols. The tablet was then buried near a tomb, a place of execution, or a battlefield, giving spirits of the dead power over the victim. Some tablets were transfixed with nails, believed to add to the curse's potency. The sheer number of curse tablets that have been found suggests that this form of magic was considered more reliable than a spoken curse.

  Thousands of carved gems have been found that clearly had a magical rather than an ornamental function. Amulets were the most widespread form of protection, used against curses and the evil eye that most people considered very real threats. Many were made of cheap materials, but precious stones were believed to have special efficacy. Organic materials were also used, including beetles. The formulas recorded in amulets were often abbreviated versions of the longer texts in the papyri, combining Babylonian, Egyptian, and Greek elements.

  Magical formulas in the papyri were sometimes called teletai, literally "celebration of mysteries," a term borrowed from the mystery cults. The magician himself might be titled mystagogos, the priest who guides candidates for initiation. Jewish names for God appear throughout the texts as well: Iao for Yahweh, Sabaoth, and Adonai recur frequently. Jewish magical books also circulated in antiquity under famous names. The Testament of Solomon and the Eighth Book of Moses were attributed to Solomon and Moses respectively. The Wisdom of Solomon, probably from the 1st century BCE, presented God as giving Solomon knowledge of astrology, plant magic, daemonology, divination, and physika. The Jewish historian Josephus added that Solomon had been given knowledge of the art used against daemons "in order to heal and benefit men." Scholar Albrecht Dieterich identified the papyri as among the most important surviving sources for ancient religion. His reason was that they cannot be reduced to any single tradition.

  A magician's kit found in the ancient city of Pergamon in Anatolia dates from roughly the third century CE. The find consisted of a bronze table and base covered with symbols, a dish also decorated with symbols, and a large bronze nail with letters inscribed on its flat sides. It also included two bronze rings and three black polished stones bearing the names of supernatural powers. By the 3rd century CE, practitioners had developed formal terms to distinguish high magic from low, a distinction that Plotinus himself would theorize.

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• 6. High Magic and Low

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  Proclus defined theurgy as "a power higher than all human wisdom." His full definition embraced divination, initiation, and "all operations of divine possession." Theurgy was the Greek term for high magic, carrying a specific ritual structure. In a typical theurgical rite, the practitioner's soul left the body and ascended to heaven, where the divine was perceived directly. Alternatively, a deity descended to earth in a vision or a dream, drawn down by appropriate symbols or magical formulas. The philosopher Plotinus (205-270 CE) described theurgy as an effort to bring all things in the universe into sympathy. The goal was to connect each human being with the forces that flow through the cosmos.

  E.R. Dodds identified a useful distinction between theurgy and goetia. Where theurgy was associated with philosophical aspiration, goetia implied specious or fraudulent practice. Vulgar magic used names and formulas of religious origin for profane ends; theurgy applied the same procedures to a religious goal. The word goetia shared a curious quality with the English word charm: it meant both magic and the power to attract sexually. Philosophers seeking to distance themselves from lower practitioners adopted the language of theurgy to signal their respectability. The góētes, or lower-class practitioners, were those they wished not to be confused with. The question of whether a healer worked through divine grace or through illicit technique would become urgently political by the 1st century CE.

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• 7. Three Figures of the Empire

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  Jesus of Nazareth, Simon Magus, and Apollonius of Tyana each carried the literary profile earlier reserved for the Greek "divine men." Seen from an outsider's perspective, Jesus performed precisely the acts that defined the older tradition. He exorcised daemons, healed the sick, made prophecies, and raised the dead. The Gospel of Matthew states that Jesus was taken to Egypt as an infant. Hostile ancient sources used this to explain his later knowledge of magic. One rabbinical account held that he returned from Egypt tattooed with spells. Rabbinical tradition also associated Jesus with madness, a quality that ancient thinking sometimes linked to extraordinary power. Morton Smith, in his book Jesus the Magician, drew a comparison. The Gospels' phrase "descent of the spirit," he argued, describes the same phenomenon that pagan texts call "possession by a daemon." Barry Crawford, in a 1979 review, credited Smith with "an intricate knowledge of the magical papyri." But Crawford added that "his ignorance of current Gospel research is abysmal" and concluded that the book had traits of a conspiracy theory.

  Simon Magus appears in the canonical Acts of the Apostles (8:9). Witnessing Peter's cures and exorcisms, Simon was baptized. He then asked the apostles to sell him the gift of conferring the Spirit, treating it as a purchasable skill. The apostles' rejection was emphatic. Justin Martyr later claimed Simon was a magus from Samaria whose followers committed blasphemy by worshiping him as God.

  Apollonius of Tyana (c. 40 CE) was the subject of a lengthy biography written by Flavius Philostratus between 217 and 238 CE. Philostratus was a protégé of the empress Julia Domna, mother of the emperor Caracalla. She reportedly gave him the memoirs of Damis, an alleged disciple of Apollonius, to use as raw material. Many scholars believe the memoirs of Damis were either invented by Philostratus or forged by someone else. What emerges from the biography is an ascetic traveling teacher, usually described as a new Pythagoras. Philostratus claims Apollonius traveled as far as India; most scholars think he never left the Greek East of the Roman Empire. In late antiquity, talismans attributed to Apollonius appeared in several Greek cities of the Eastern Roman Empire. They took the form of magical figures and columns erected in public places to protect the cities from plagues and afflictions. Roman law had been outlawing harmful magic since at least 157 BCE, producing rulings that would eventually decide where religion ended and sorcery began.

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• 8. Pliny, Plutarch, and the Law

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  In 157 BCE, a trial for alleged violations of Rome's anti-magic laws was held before Spurius Albinus. Cornelius Hispanus expelled the Chaldean astrologers from Rome in 139 BCE on the grounds that they were magicians. Astrologers and magicians were driven from Rome again in 33 BCE, and from Italy entirely in 16 CE. Vespasian renewed the expulsion in 69 CE; Domitian reinstated it in 89 CE. The emperor Constantine I, in the 4th century CE, issued a ruling that covered all charges of magic. He distinguished between helpful charms, which were not punishable, and antagonistic spells. One Roman law also forbade anyone from enticing a neighbor's crops into their own fields by magic.

  Pliny the Elder (23/24-79 CE) produced his Natural History as a voluminous survey grounded in roughly a hundred earlier authorities. Pliny was convinced that the gods had revealed to humanity the powers of certain herbs and roots. He argued that the divine wished to bring humanity gradually closer to divine knowledge. He also concluded that magic, despite the exaggerated or false claims of professional practitioners, contained "shadows of truth," particularly in the arts of poison-making. Pliny connected Roman magic directly to the emperor Nero. He claimed Nero had studied with the best teachers and possessed the best books on magic, yet had been unable to do anything extraordinary. Pliny's final stance was one of cautious neutrality. He neither condemned nor endorsed the amulets and charms people wore as preventive medicine. "There is no one who is not afraid of spells," he wrote, apparently including himself. He added that a new kind of magic, one that truly worked, might be developed at any time.

  Plutarch, in his treatise On Superstition, defined superstition as "fear of the gods." He argued that this fear led people to resort to magical rites, the consultation of sorcerers and witches, amulets, and unintelligible language in prayers. Plutarch took dreams and omens seriously himself, reserving the label "superstition" for those with excessive faith in such phenomena. He believed in daemons as intermediaries between gods and human beings. In his view, a daemon rather than Apollo himself was the everyday power behind the Pythia at Delphi.

  Apuleius, born around 125 CE, found himself accused of practicing magic under Roman law. Around 160 CE he delivered the Apologia, the speech of his own defense, which has survived. The text reveals how easily a philosopher could be accused of magical practice in that period. His novel Metamorphoses, also known as The Golden Ass, follows a hero named Lucius who dabbles in magic and gets into trouble. Rescued by the goddess Isis, Lucius finds true knowledge in her mysteries. Whether Apuleius drew on personal experience, scholars note that the novel may have autobiographical elements.

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