Magic in the Graeco-Roman World

Korshi Dosoo, University of Strasbourg

https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.696
Published online: 28 June 2021

Summary
Magic in the Graeco-Roman world is a disputed concept among modern historians, whose
interpretation has changed significantly over the last 200 years of study. In studying it we
may either focus on terms from ancient languages translatable as “magic,” or examine
materials and practices that may be classified as “magic” according to modern
definitions. Ancient terminology centers around terms such as the Greek word mageia,
and its Latin cognate magia, referring to superhuman practices that often involved the
manipulation of the natural and divine worlds through secret knowledge and ritual.
Objects identified by modern scholars as magical include curse tablets, written objects
intended to injure, bind, or render harmless their victims, magical handbooks written on
papyrus, providing instructions for rituals, and amulets, often in the form of semiprecious
stones inscribed with images of deities and short texts. While some of these practices are
reflected in ancient literary sources discussing magic, literary texts also show an
exaggerated discourse, in which magic-users may be stereotyped according to their
ethnicity (exotic magicians from Egypt, Syria, or Judaea) or gender (lurid images of
witches), and practices are depicted as fantastical and extreme, involving acts such as
human sacrifice. Popular images of magic and actual practice come together in laws and
regulations against magic and its users, primarily from the period of the Roman Empire.
These may be in the form of imperial law, or else Christian and non-Christian cultic rules,
which prescribe social exclusion or even death, so that accusations of magic could be a
potent tool in social conflicts.

Keywords: magic, papyri, curses, defixiones, amulets, gems, witches, witchcraft

Subjects: Ancient Religion, Biblical Studies, Mysticism and Spirituality, Myth and Legend

Introduction

This article provides an overview of evidence for “magic” in the Graeco-Roman world,
understood broadly as the territory contained by the Roman Empire at its largest extent, from
approximately the 8th century BCE to the 4th century CE. Within this scope, it focuses on
material written in Greek and Latin, introducing and describing the various kinds of evidence
for practices usually classified by modern scholars as “magical” and discussing how these
relate to ancient discourses of magic, as reflected by literary sources.

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Defining Magic
1
Within the field of ancient history, the term “magic” refers to two distinct objects of study.
The first of these is the ideas of ancient people about marvelous abilities that could be
accessed through knowledge of the secret properties of the hidden world, and/or through
special relationships with superhuman beings such as gods and the dead. These abilities are
often referred to by ancient terms that can be translated as “magic,” and so this first object of
study may be called ancient conceptions of magic. This would include, for example,
discussions of mythical magic-users such as Circe in Homer’s Iliad, and Roman laws against
magic. The second object of study is the range of ancient practices, and objects used in these
practices, that modern scholars define as “magical” because of certain features of their form
and content (see “Features of the Graeco-Egyptian Magical Papyri”). These include objects
such as lead curse tablets, amuletic gems, and magical recipes written on papyri. There is
considerable overlap in these two concepts: mythical magicians of the past might be
mentioned as sources of authority in real magical recipe books, while Roman officials who
implemented laws against magic would likely have identified as magical many of the same
practices as modern scholars. In this article, however, the two will be kept as far as possible
distinct, while noting where evidence for one type of “magic” may influence our
understanding of the other. One of the reasons for this is that magic is often an “outsider
term”: those who carried out what modern scholars define as “magical” rituals may not have
thought of themselves as practicing magic, and ancient terms for “magic” were regularly used
as derogatory terms by those who did not practice them. This conceptual division is
complicated, however, by the fact that modern Western understandings of magic are often
informed by ancient Graeco-Roman ideas and their reception by Christian authors, so that
there is often considerable overlap between modern and ancient understandings of magic,
although these must always be demonstrated rather than assumed.

The Terminology of Magic

The earliest Greek terms for “magic” center around the concept of the pharmakon, a physical
object, often an herb, which had certain powerful properties, either harmful or beneficial. In a
famous scene from Homer’s (8th–7th century BCE) Odyssey, for example, the sorceress Circe
uses a pharmakon hidden in food to turn Odysseus’ men into pigs, while Odysseus is saved
from the same fate by another pharmakon given to him by the god Hermes (see figure 1); his
son Telemachus is given yet another pharmakon in wine by Helen, queen of Sparta, to help
2
him forget his cares. In the Iliad the word pharmakon is used almost exclusively to refer to
medicine used to heal or soothe injured warriors, knowledge of which is often taught by the
3
gods. Pharmaka are therefore ambivalent, and the word may be translated as either “magical
object/potion” or “drug/medicine” depending on the context. Pharmakon has several derived
nouns, such as pharmakeia, “the art of producing or using pharmaka,” which took on several
meanings—it could refer either to the therapeutic use of ingested plants and minerals, or else
to dangerous rituals with the power to harm or control others.

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Figure 1. A terracotta wine-mixing bowl painted on the upper register with a scene from
Odysseus’ encounter with Circe, recounted in Homer’s Odyssey; in the middle Odysseus
lunges, sword drawn, for Circe, who has dropped her wand and bowl of pharmaka. On the left
are two of his men, half-transformed into animals, one with the head of a horse or mule, the
other with that of a boar (c. 400 BCE, Attica).
Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art <https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/253627>
(CC0 1.0 Universal [CC0 1.0 <https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/>]).

The verb goaō, meaning “to sing a wailing song of grief,” appears in Homer to describe a
simple lament, but by the 5th century BCE Aeschylus (c. 525/4–456/5 BCE) uses the word in his
play The Persians to describe songs that call upon the souls of the dead to appear to the
4
living. Of the nouns derived from this verb, two are important here: goēs (plural goētes),
which came to refer to an individual whose rituals and songs could manipulate the dead
through ritual; and goēteia, “the art of the goēs.” Herodotus (c. 484–424 BCE) uses the term
twice in his Histories, to refer to nations with strange powers; the Neuri of Central Europe,
5
for example, are goētes said to turn into wolves for a few days each year. Euripides uses it
twice in his extant plays as an insult—Hippolytus is called a goēs by his father Theseus when

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he attempts to control him through his clever speech, while Pentheus describes the god
6
Dionysus, who has come to Thebes to spread his cult, of being a goēs. Plato (c. 428/7–348/7
BCE) and his contemporaries linked goēteia to the wandering practitioners who claimed the
ability to summon the spirits of the dead and to persuade the gods, perhaps referring to the
practice of binding curses, which called upon both the dead and the gods (see “Curse Tablets”).
The goēs also possessed—or claimed to possess—broader powers, linked to divination,
healing, controlling the weather, and initiating others into rituals that guaranteed a happy
7
afterlife. Already in Plato, however, goēs was a highly negative word, a ritual specialist with
dangerous knowledge and powers, often relating to the dead, or else a fraud who was able to
trick others into believing that he had such skills through techniques such as sleight of hand.
The goēs was regularly linked to other figures, such as the epō(i)dos, the singer of epōdē,
8
songs that possessed supernatural powers.

The central term in studies of Greek concepts of magic, mageia, is the youngest of the three
clusters discussed in depth here, but through its adjectival form magikos, it is the origin of the
English word “magic.” The basic meaning of mageia is “the art of the magoi,” with the magoi
(Latin magi) being the Median priestly class who played an important role as ritual experts
9
within the Achaemenid Persian Empire (c. 530–330 BCE). The earliest extended discussions of
the magoi occur in Herodotus, in his account of the attempted Persian invasions of mainland
Greece (499–493 and 480–479 BCE). Although he does not clearly attribute what may be
considered “magical” powers to the magoi, he does describe them as carrying out strange
rituals, such as human sacrifice, and he suggests that they may have been able to control the
10
weather. How closely early Greek concepts of mageia were related to actual magoi remains
debated; the Greek-speaking inhabitants of Asia Minor were part of the Persian Empire and
may have had meaningful contact with them, while the population in mainland Greece and the
colonies further west may have encountered them in the period following the invasion, when
11
Persia was a major cultural force in the Mediterranean. Literary texts from the 5th century
onward use the term magos to describe ritual specialists unrelated to civic cults, who might
carry out initiations into private cults and offer other ritual services, such as purification,
12
divination, cursing, or exorcism. In this context, the term magos overlaps considerably with
other terms such as goēs, epō(i)dos, pharmakos, and agyrtēs (“mendicant priest”), but
alongside this largely derogatory use we find discussions into the Roman period of magoi as
13
exotic wise men with deep knowledge of religious practices.

The range of activities that mageia seems to cover—love spells, curses, healing and exorcising,
using the secret properties of material objects and of spoken words, and certain kinds of
divination—is very broad and not clearly related to the activities of the original Persian magoi.
It seems that mageia became, over the course of the late 6th or early 5th century BCE, a way
for Greeks to bring together and designate a range of indigenous and imported practices that
14
had not previously been explicitly connected. Because of this ambiguity, magos may be
translated by modern scholars as either “magus” (using the Latin equivalent), to refer to the
Persian priests, or “magician,” invoking more directly the connection to magic; in Greek,
however, both concepts may be expressed by the same word, and the extent to which the two
15
were distinguished is not clear.

It is also unclear to what extent individuals designated by others as magoi or as practicing

mageia would have accepted these labels. There do not seem to be any clear recorded
examples of ancient individuals in the Greek-speaking world who would have identified

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 16
themselves as magoi. Both Jesus of Nazareth (died c. 27–34 CE) and Apollonius of Tyana
(died c. 96–98 CE), miracle-workers of the early centuries CE, were called magoi by their
opponents, but they do not seem to have understood themselves as such, and their followers
17
certainly rejected this label. For this reason, scholars have highlighted the fact that mageia
and its cognates are often outsider terms used to stigmatize the ritual practices of social or
18
ethnic Others. At the same time, it seems that many of the written works produced in the
Hellenistic period that modern scholars would characterize as magical were written under the
assumed names of famous Persian magoi (see “Books of Magic”), and this habit of attributing
such ritual texts to magoi, among other ancient wise men, continues into the handbooks of the
19
Roman period. These handbooks, the Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri, do occasionally use
mageia and its cognates to refer to their own practices, even if it is not the primary
designation; technical terms for particular practices, or more generic religious terminology
20
such as teletē (“ritual, initiation”) and praxis (“practice”), are more common. This implies
either that some individuals who used rituals that modern scholars define as “magical” had
accepted the outsider definition of their practices as mageia, or else that the negative and
21
positive connotations of mageia coexisted in the ancient Graeco-Roman world.

Many of the Greek terms discussed here had partial or complete equivalents in other major
Mediterranean languages. In Latin, the word mageia was borrowed as magia, with a very
22
similar meaning. The indigenous Latin term venenum had a similar range to pharmakon,
referring to the use of both “poisons” and “magical material,” although it is rarely attested
23
with the positive connotation of “medicine.” In Egyptian, the word ḥkꜣ (pronounced hik in the
Graeco-Roman period) referred to the divine power to enact change in the world through such
ritual means as the spoken word, embodied by the god of the same name, and this was the
term used by the translators of the Coptic Egyptian Bible to translate the Greek mageia and
its cognates; before the Christianization of Egypt, it seems to have lacked the negative
connotations of its Greek equivalent and was rather a neutral force that could be used equally
24
to help or to harm. In Hebrew, the term kishuph was a negative term, often translated as
“witchcraft,” referring to illegitimate practices often associated with non-Jewish ritual
practitioners; this word therefore captures many of the negative connotations of the Greek
words for “magic” and was generally translated into Greek as either pharmakeia, mageia, or
25
synonyms. Although Jewish communities certainly practiced rituals that modern scholars
describe as “magical” during the period discussed here, they do not seem to have had a
positive or neutral term that clearly brought these together while distinguishing them from
26
kishuph.

Artifacts of Magic

Ancient artifacts, discovered in either controlled or informal archaeological excavations, must

always be interpreted by scholars, and so designating any artifact as “magical” is always an
act of interpretation, which may change according to particular definitions, or as our
understanding of these artifacts improves. The following sections will discuss three groups of
objects usually understood by scholars as “magical”—curse tablets, books of magic, and
amulets. In many cases, these would likely have been described by many ancient individuals
as belonging to the categories covered by the words translatable in English as “magic,” and in
some cases we have reason to believe they were understood, at least at certain points in
history, as different aspects of a coherent “magical” practice—rituals for producing both curse

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tablets and amulets are often contained in the same books of “magic,” for example. Modern
scholars typically identify artifacts as magical based on a range of material and textual
features, as well as based on their relationship to certain ritual practices associated with
“magic” (these criteria are discussed more fully in “Features of the Graeco-Egyptian Magical
Papyri”). This creates a set with fuzzy edges, since, for example, magical spells were often
understood by their users as prayers, and they may have similar formal features to private
27
prayers not usually classified as magical. This should probably be understood as reflecting
the fact that “magic” in the ancient world was not a completely distinct sphere unto itself, but
rather a range of practices whose relationship to one another was partially arbitrary, partially
based on shared ritual mechanisms, but overlapping with other, nonmagical ritual and social
practices.

Curse Tablets
The earliest artifacts from the Greek-speaking world usually treated by scholars as magical
are curse tablets, frequently known by their Greek name katadesmoi (“binders-down”) or its
28
Latin translation defixiones (“fasteners-down”). These artifacts represent attempts to ritually
attack others—harming them, often by “binding” their victims in order to render them
helpless, or to force them to submit sexually to the curse’s user (see figure 2).

The earliest examples have been found in late 6th- and early 5th-century BCE Sicily, in the
29
cities of Selinus and Palermo. These examples consist of lists of the names of the intended
victims written on lead tablets, which have been placed in graves. This basic practice survived
until at least the 6th century CE and spread throughout and then beyond the rest of the Greek-
speaking world, with examples found in Europe as far west as England and as far east as
modern Ukraine, with significant numbers also found in North Africa, including Egypt, and
the Levant. Examples from western Africa and Europe are often in Latin rather than Greek,
and in the later centuries of the Roman Empire we also find curses written in local languages,
30
such as Aramaic, the Celtic languages, Coptic Egyptian, and Oscan.

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Figure 2. A Greek-language binding tablet from Carthage or Hadrumetum in modern Tunisia
written on lead. Calling upon the Egyptian Osiris, the Greek Aphrodite, and the spirit of the
dead person with whom it was buried, it is intended to force four women, Postuma, Tertullina,
Perpetua, and Candida, to fall violently in love with one man, named Gaius (3rd century CE).
Photo courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection <http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/10455/
unknown-maker-greek-inscription-greek-3rd-century-ad/> (CC0 4.0 International [CC BY 4.0 <https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>]).

Physically, lead, or its alloys, seems to have been the favored material for the production of
curse tablets. Originally, this was probably because it was a cheap material, easily acquired,
inscribed, and folded; it was also used by Greek speakers to write more mundane texts, such
31
as letters, from the 6th to 2nd century BCE. Users may have produced the tablets by
pounding out cold lead, poured molten lead, or else scavenged pieces from sites where objects
32
such as pipes were being produced. Alongside lead, we know from literary attestations that
other materials, such as wax tablets, wood, and papyrus, were also used, although almost all
examples written on these less durable materials have been lost, with the exception of some
33
examples on papyrus that survive from Roman Egypt. A significant exception is found in the
use of selenite, a brittle crystal formed from gypsum, used to write curse tablets in 3rd-
34
century CE Amathous in Cyprus alongside the more common lead.

The production of curse tablets likely derived from purely oral practices, in which specific
3
spoken phrases, perhaps composed in Greek hexameter, were pronounced against an enemy.
5
This oral component likely remained important even in the later rituals that involved the

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