Hocus-pocus

Half a century ago, E.R. Dodds, Oxford’s Regius professor of Greek, startled complacent Hellenophiles with a wake-up call in the form of a book titled “The Greeks and the Irrational.” For most people, the ancient Greeks were (and to a surprising extent still are) synonymous with reason, with what poet and classicist Louis MacNeice ironically termed “models of logic and lucidity, dignity, sanity,/the golden mean between opposing ills.” Look at Plato’s Socratic Dialogues, we are told. Look at the plays of Sophocles.

All true enough, but far from the whole picture. While philosophers and poets debated, hardball politics went on in the agora: Dirty deals were made, malicious lawsuits flourished, witnesses lied their heads off. A day when one Greek state wasn’t fighting another had to be counted a rarity, and Balkan atrocities were as common then as now. Superstition ran riot; atheists were persecuted. Magic turned up at all levels of society.

Dodds’ challenging view hasn’t entirely killed the old rose-tinted idealism in current classical scholarship--Greek democracy still wears its romantic halo--but at least we’re getting some gritty realism into the picture.

To this laudable process Matthew W. Dickie has made a landmark contribution. “Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World” is the fruit of prodigious reading and profound scholarship, yet never bogs down in its own accumulation of facts. Selection and organization are judged to a nicety. Dickie has a clear, astringent style, mercifully free of fly-by-night jargon and a narrative drive that makes the most of the story he has to tell, carrying the reader with him through page after crowded page. Refreshingly common-sensical (a welcome trait, given his subject), he treats today’s theoretical pundits with devastating irony (“What has immunized the critic against the false consciousness that afflicts everyone else is a mystery”), and illuminates his sorcerers with sunlight not moonshine.

Dickie begins, boldly, with the thesis (first developed by Swiss scholar Fritz Graf) that the magic the West is most familiar with was not a universal phenomenon, but something specific to Greece from the 5th century BC onward. This doesn’t mean that what we would regard as magic today was restricted to Greece or that it didn’t happen earlier: Think of Circe turning Odysseus’ comrades into swine with a wave of her wand. But this, Dickie argues, and such other games as necromancy or the use of incantations with herbal remedies, weren’t treated as “magic” by the Greeks until well into the Periclean age. In other words, unless the practitioner somewhere says it’s magic, it isn’t.

Such a principle can confuse. It also leads Dickie to underestimate the degree of native Italian or Roman, as opposed to imported Greek, magical practices. The early Roman Law of the XII Tables have some interesting stuff about bewitching your neighbor’s fields. Apuleius, a late Roman author who not only studied magic but had to defend himself in court on a charge of practicing it, took it for granted that what the XII Tables were talking about was magic, and most scholars since have agreed. But not Dickie.

This definitional quirk is about the only hold-up in a survey otherwise marked by clarity, common sense and scrupulous logic throughout. Dickie is also a pioneer in putting most emphasis not on the practices themselves, which since Dodds’ day have received increasingly serious attention, but on their practitioners. Were these magicians professional or amateur, educated or ignorant, male or female, native or foreign? The answer, not surprisingly, turns out to be just about all of the above, depending on circumstance. It was mostly elderly women from the lower classes who dealt in herbal medicine and the incantations associated with it, for anything from warts to puerperal fever: Where logic drew the line between medicine and magic was uncertain, and the Greek word pharmakon could, significantly, mean anything from a spell to a regular prescription.

But literate male professionals also produced handbooks and serviced a wide clientele anxious to succeed in love, read the future or, uncomfortably often, kill rivals. Intellectual control freaks made a pseudoscience out of magical power. Stoics played the numbers game with astrology (Romans referred to astrologers as mathematici). The clever, too, were tempted.

Magic, in short, after some early ups and downs, spread and flourished in the most remarkable way as the Greco-Roman world expanded its horizons. From about 400 BC onward, sorcerers, witches and magicians of every sort meet us in increasing numbers. Dickie deploys evidence from curse tablets, the magical papyri and a wide range of literary sources to build his picture: One unexpectedly fruitful source turns out to be the early patristic writings of the church fathers, who saw such practitioners as deadly rivals.

Not so surprising, when you come to think of it, since the magician’s central objective was to do an end-run around natural law for his own benefit, to control and reverse the normal order. This meant encroaching on the prerogatives of the gods, rather as a computer nerd hacks into an officially restricted institution. (Another parallel: To be effective, spells had to be accurate down to the last complex letter--one tiny error blew the whole thing.) In other words, instead of praying to some deity who might or might not respond, you controlled the “open-sesame” process yourself.

Dickie shows us these outsiders at work in the Greek classical and Hellenistic periods, in Republican Rome, on into the Empire and finally, after Constantine, fighting and losing a long rear-guard action against the new Christian regime. The powers they laid claim to ranged from averting hail to drawing the moon out of the sky, from nobbling racehorses to creating erotic desire, from ghost-raising to exotic murder (mix the victim’s hair or nail-clippings in a wax portrait-doll, spike it with nails, burn it with appropriate incantations and then wait for your enemy’s actual fever, agony, death).

This is social history as the dark side of the moon, the nasty aspirations of the meanly impotent, and Dickie tells it with chilling objectivity. Magic was also fatally easy to accept. When the limits of scientific logic were quite uncertain, anything became possible. Indeed, many of the ideas here presented still have a seductive, if spurious, credibility: If we believe in the principle of inoculation, why not assume that the part-for-the-whole has more general application? Why shouldn’t burning that doll work? After all, the astrologers are still in business.

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Peter Green is the author of “Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age.”