The Caretaker

GRECO-ROMAN MAGIC - 8/26/2022 (Patreon)

Published:

2022-08-26 18:58:59

Imported:

2026-06

Content

GRECO ROMAN MAGIC

INTRODUCTION

Intro

We know basically nothing
We have to pull what we can from literary sources
Scant mentions from philosophers and historians
We do have historical evidence though
Public records of questions asked of the oracle
Defixiones
Its not much
It would be fatuous to doubt that there were in most communities of any size in the Greek and Roman worlds people who practiced magic.
Theocritus is probably fairly accurate
Basically, we gotta divorce the modern perception of witchcraft from the realities

Terms For practicioners

Etymologies of wizardry
“Magic-working was very often practised in conjunction with some related calling.”
“Witches are persons possessed of an inherent but disordered power; sorcerers are persons who engage in magical manipulations to achieve their ends”
What did greek practicioners call themselves

Terms for what magicians did

The most general term in Greek for the procedures pursued by magicians is manganeia or manganeuma. The term does not seem to be related to the words
magos and mageia, but there is reason to suspect that most Greeks will have believed that manganeumata

TERMINOLOGY

In Greek, they may be called, if male, epodoi or epaoidoi (sing. epodos), goetes (sing. goes), magoi (sing. magos) and pharmakeis (sing. pharmakeus), and, when female, pharmakides (sing. pharmakis) or pharmakeutriai (sing. pharmakeutria) and less commonly goetides (sing. goetis). Sometimes also the masculine forms goetes and magoi are used for female practitioners. The craft practised by goetes is known as goeteia, while the transitive verb used to refer to the effect of that activity is goeteuein or in an intensive form, ekgoeteuein. The craft practised by magoi is mageia or mageutike (techne) and the verb used to refer to their actions mageuein. As for pharmakeis the craft they follow is pharmakeia; the transitive verb used to refer to the effects of their activities is pharmakeuein. In Latin, sorcerers are magi (sing. magus) or venefici (sing. veneficus) when male, and cantatrices (sing. cantatrix), sagae (sing. saga) or veneficae (sing. venefica) when female. Although these terms have very different origins, they come to be used interchangeably to refer to the same people.

TECHNE

Means craft

GOETES

Epodoi / epaoidoi

Goetes / Goes

Katharmoi

mageia or mageutike,

metragyrtai or menagyrtai

pharmakeis (sing. pharmakeus), and, when female, pharmakides (sing. pharmakis) or pharmakeutriai (sing. pharmakeutria

mantike

Kathartai

Alazones

GOES / GOETES

(12) goetes (sing. goes),

(12) goetides (sing. goetis)

(12) The craft practised by goetes is

known as goeteia, while the transitive verb used to refer to the effect of that activity

is goeteuein or in an intensive form, ekgoeteuein.

(12) It has indeed

been argued that goetes were originally shamans, who in an ecstatic state

conveyed the spirits of the dead on their perilous journey to the other side. That

hypothesis rests on the etymological link between the masculine noun goes and

the verb goan, ‘to utter a cry of lamentation over the dead’.16 That the

substantive goes does derive from the verb goan can hardly be doubted. 17 If goes

originally designated a shaman who conveyed the souls of the dead to the great

beyond, it has to be said that very little trace of the original meaning is to be

found in the way in which the word is used in the literature of Classical Greece,

although some of those called goetes undoubtedly did induce in themselves the

trances characteristic of shamans.

(13) There are indeed simpler explanations of the derivation of goes from goan.

The most straightforward of these is that magicians came to be called goetes

because of the cries and incantations they characteristically uttered.

(13) Support for that suggestion has been found in the Byzantine lexicon dating to the

end of the tenth century AD called the Suda, where the practice of being a goes,

goeteia is defined as the summoning up of corpses. The trouble with that

explanation is there is no evidence that goetes originally specialized in

summoning up the dead. As for the entry in the Suda, it can be used neither as

testimony to the original function of the goes nor to actual Greek usage. It has to

be looked at in its context, which is an attempt at making a distinction amongst

mageia, goeteia and pharmakeia by showing that they refer to different kinds of

Magic-working. The distinction is artificial and runs contrary to Greek usage and

in the case of goeteia rests on the etymological link with the word used of

lamentations for the dead. The testimony of the Suda has, accordingly, no

independent authority. It has also been suggested that goetes have the name they

do since the ill they inflicted on others caused those unfortunates to lament.

**(14) To sum up, although there are indications that goetes, epodoi, magoi and

pharmakeis originally pursued quite distinct callings, there is no indication when

the terms are first encountered in the fifth century that they refer to specialized

forms of magic.

(14) Those who specialized in creating illusions tend to be called

Goetes.

(15) Similarly, the

creators of illusions or conjurors, who in Greek are called planoi and

thaumatopoioi, will very often have been indistinguishable from goetes. There

were no very strict lines of demarcation here.

(15) The terms magician, magic-worker, sorcerer

and wizard will be used indifferently to refer to the persons whom the ancients

called goetes, magoi or venefici.

(26) It

would almost certainly be too simple-minded a solution to the problem to treat

the growth of the notion of magic as the product of a conflict between new and

old, although that is how the matter may have seemed to those who wished to

exclude and condemn the body of practices they grouped under the heading of

mageia, pharmakeia or goeteia.

(27) At this point men

are to be found placing a variety of quite disparate procedures under the single

heading of mageia, goeteia or pharmakeia and expressing abhorrence for a form

of conduct that is at the same time mysterious, secretive, audaciously wicked,

irreligious, that seeks to upset the due course of nature and that does not accord

the gods their proper dignity, but treats them as creatures to be manipulated at

Will.

(29) There is, however, an episode in Aeschylus’ Persians which raises the suspicion

that necromancy is presented there as a form of goeteia peculiar to the Persians.

(29) It is, however, unclear exactly what the force of the word goeteia will have been

at this point. Persians was produced in Athens in March 472 BC, some seven

years after the Persian navy was routed at the Battle of Salamis and some six

years after the defeat of the Persian army at Plataea.

(29) There can be nothing approaching a conclusive demonstration that Aeschylus

thinks of the necromancy of the Persian Elders, aided and abetted by the Persian

queen-mother, as goeteia, let alone as sorcery. Yet there is in the speech with

which the ghost of Darius addresses the Council of Elders when he first rises up

above his tomb something that suggests goeteia has been performed: Darius

speaks of the Elders standing near his tomb uttering a lament (threnein) and

calling on him in piteous fashion, raising their voice in spirit-drawing cries of

woe (psychagogoi gooi)

(30) A play

on the etymological link between goos and goes or goeteia implying that what a

goes does is utter gooi summoning the dead from their rest below would explain

the emphasis that is placed on the song as a lament or goos.

(30) If so, it means that by the 470s there was in Athens, if not a

developed, at any rate a developing consciousness of goeteia as a discrete entity

and, in addition, a tendency to imagine that Persians were particularly adept at its

Practice.

(30) There is a further indication that Aeschylus associated necromancy and

goeteia: Phrynichus, a lexicographer of the late second century AD, says

that men in times past had used psychagogia to mean bringing up the spirits of

the dead by means of certain forms of sorcery (goeteia) and that Aeschylus’ play

Psychagogoi was on that theme.

(31) In a fragment of the poem the figures known as the Idaean Dactyls are credited with

having invented metal-working in the glens of Phrygian Mount Ida and are called Goetes.

(31) The context does not

make clear what the author of the poem had in mind in calling the Dactyls goetes

and it will not do to argue from the later associations of smiths and sorcery that

sorcery was precisely what was at issue for him.

(31) The historian Ephorus, who

belongs to the early fourth century BC and who takes the same view of the

origins of the Idaean Dactyls as the Phoronis, says that they were goetes who

practised incantations (epodai) and mystery-rites.

(31) The tradition followed by

Ephorus that the Idaean Dactyls were goetes will go back to the Phoronis, but we

cannot be absolutely confident that the activities attributed to them as goetes by

Ephorus were also to be found in the Phoronis and were not the invention of

Ephorus or some intermediary source.

(31) It is very likely, accordingly, that goetes were in Pherecydes’ view associated

with some of the activities later attributed to sorcerers and were maleficent and

sinister figures. We may further infer that the spells that bound men down were

thought to be the province of goetes.

(32) Satyrus had said that Empedocles was a

doctor and an orator and that Gorgias of Leontini, the expert in rhetoric, had been

his pupil and that, furthermore, Gorgias had been present when Empedocles had

engaged in sorcery (goeteuein)

(32) By the end of the fifth century BC, the existence in the Greek

world of a developed consciousness of magic as a discrete activity is to be

inferred. If we put together what is said and implied about magic-working on the

one hand, and about magoi, goetes and pharmakeis or pharmakides on the other,

the conclusion to be drawn is that people were by the end of the century

operating with a concept tallying in large measure, but not entirely, with the

notion of magic which we employ.

MAGOS / MAGOI

(12) Sometimes also the masculine forms goetes and magoi are used for female practitioners

(12) The craft practised by magoi is mageia or mageutike (techne) and the verb used to refer to their actions Mageuein.

(12) It is natural and tempting to suppose that there was originally a distinction in meaning between goes and magos, and goes and magos as against pharmakeus, and that these were names for different kinds of magical specialists.

(13) In the case of the word magos it might be expected, because it is a loanword from Persian, where it is employed to refer to a fire-priest, that it would be used in a sense reflecting its origins.

(13-14) This is an interesting and attractive hypothesis, but there is unfortunately no secure evidence to sustain it. It is nonetheless the case that a hypothesis along these lines is needed to explain the adoption by the Greeks of the Persian term magos to mean not a fire-priest but a magician, often with the implication that the credentials of the person referred to were not entirely trustworthy and that his good faith was in doubt.

(14) To sum up, although there are indications that goetes, epodoi, magoi and

pharmakeis originally pursued quite distinct callings, there is no indication when

the terms are first encountered in the fifth century that they refer to specialized

forms of magic.

(14) It may well be that there is some difference in the emotional charge associated with these words and that to call someone a goes is more insulting than to call him a magos and that goes carries a stronger suggestion of fraudulent Behaviour. The assertion of the lexicographer of the second century AD, Phrynichus, that goes is more Attic than magos, is worth noting at this point.

(14) The observation is to some extent borne out by the frequency with which goes is used in contrast to magos, but it tells us nothing about the meaning of the terms, and it may be that all that lies behind the comment is an awareness on the part of Phrynichus or his source that magos is a loan-word from the Persian and not properly Greek. It nonetheless looks as if Phrynichus assumed that goes and magos were synonyms.

(15) Not all of those on whom the appellations goes, magos, pharmakis, saga or venefica were bestowed will have been given these names because they offered their expertise in sorcery to others.

(15) The terms magician, magic-worker, sorcerer and wizard will be used indifferently to refer to the persons whom the ancients called goetes, magoi or venefici.

(16) The term does not seem to be related to the words magos and mageia, but there is reason to suspect that most Greeks will have believed that manganeumata took their name from their being performed by magoi.

(27) That there is no one word for a magician, but that it is possible to refer to him as a goes, an epodos, a magos and a pharmakeus, points to the absorbing and homogenizing of quite separate forms of expertise.

(27) He is reported by a Christian writer of the early third century AD, Clement of Alexandria, to have prophesied that a fiery punishment after death awaited those who wander by night (nyktipoloi), magoi, bacchoi, lenai and initiates in the mysteries (mystai), on the ground that such persons practised unholy initiations into the mysteries.

(27) Were we certain that we had Heraclitus’ own words or an accurate paraphrase of them, what is said would shed light on the process by which sorcery came to be associated with the persons called magoi.

(28) As for magoi, although there is not a scrap of evidence for their appearance either in Western Asia Minor or in the wider Greek world in the latter part of the sixth century BC, it is a fair guess that men claiming to be Iranian fire-priests turned up in the Greek cities of Asia Minor in the aftermath of Persia’s expansion into Ionia and Aeolia at the beginning of the second half of the sixth century BC. Ephesus, when Heraclitus was writing, had been under Persian suzerainty for some forty years. There is then a fair degree of probability that Heraclitus will have met or known of wandering mendicants who pretended to be magoi.

(28) The possibility remains that the word magoi has at some stage been interpolated into the fragment and that the rest of the passage is genuine.

(28) The picture that Heraclitus sketches suggests at first glance a world in which holy men who characterized themselves as acolytes of Dionysus or as Iranian magoi offered initiation into mysteries that were suspect in the eyes of Heraclitus and no doubt of others.

(28) What that was we cannot say. Caution is called for, however, in identifying the magoi of whom Heraclitus speaks with persons representing themselves as Iranian fire-priests.

(28) Heraclitus could have meant by magoi a number of different things.

(28) What may be cautiously asserted is that by the end of the sixth century in the world of the East Greeks, persons who could be referred to as magoi offered initiation into private mystery-cults.

(28) There is nothing in the fragment to support the idea that magoi had any connection with what we would call magic. It is nonetheless extremely significant that persons called magoi

should at this stage be found alongside figures from the cult of Dionysus offering initiation into the mysteries, since the associations that magic had with mystery-cult played, as we shall see, an important part in the form that magic was to take.

(29) That there was thought to be something impious about the mystery-rites practised by the magoi, bacchoi and lenai of whom Heraclitus complains is a precursor of the later suspicion that magicians adopted or mimicked the ceremonies of mystery-cult for impious purposes.

(29) Heraclitus, accordingly, in all likelihood illuminates an early stage in the formation of the concept of magic in which magoi are associated with impious Mystery-rites.

(29) There is no warrant for inferring that the real burden of Heraclitus’ attack on magoi, bacchoi and lenai was that they were engaging in sorcery under the guise of conducting initiations. In fact, there is no sure indication of an association between practices that came later to be thought of magical and magoi until well into the second half of the fifth century BC.

(30) It cannot be confidently asserted that Aeschylus, in the scene in which the Persian Elders summon up the ghost of Darius, exploits the association of necromancy with Persian magoi and the etymological link between goos, a funerary lament, and goes, the possibility nonetheless exists that this is what is he is doing.

(32) If we put together what is said and implied about magic-working on the one hand, and about magoi, goetes and pharmakeis or pharmakides on the other, the conclusion to be drawn is that people were by the end of the century operating with a concept tallying in large measure, but not entirely, with the notion of magic which we employ.

(32) It is best to begin with the activities associated with the persons known as magoi, goetes, pharmakeis, epodoi and their female counterparts, pharmakides and epodoi.

(33) Magoi hold out the promise of prolonging life.

(33) Magoi are able through the techniques they employ to bring about the disappearance of persons.

(33) Further light on the activities pursued by magoi in the Greek-speaking world is shed by the rituals that Herodotus credits the magoi of Persia with performing.

(33) One explanation for Herodotus’ portraying them in such a way is that his picture of them has been coloured by the activities in which the magoi known in the Greek-speaking world were believed to engage.

(33) For instance, he describes the song intoned by a magos when a sacrifice takes

place in such a way as to suggest that it was first and foremost an incantation (epaoide): When the man who has performed the sacrifice has laid out the meat, a magos, who takes up his stance beside him, chants (epaeidei) a theogony— that is what they say the incantation (epaoide) is. Then there is the sacrifice of white horses that the magoi accompanying Xerxes’

advancing army performed in Thrace at the River Strymon.

(33) To get the storm to cease, the magoi performed placatory sacrifices, perhaps using human victims, and sang incantations (kataeidontes) to the wind.

(33) If we can argue back from Herodotus’ portrait of the magoi of the Persians to the magoi he knew in the Greek world, by the historian’s time magoi had come to be associated with incantation, the casting of spells and human sacrifice.

(33) The range of activities in which the persons denoted as magoi, goetes,

pharmakeis and pharmakides and epodoi engage corresponds roughly with what

we would expect of a sorcerer.

(33) It is in general fair to say that magoi, goetes, and pharmakeis have as their province the reversal of the normal order of nature.

(33) There is little to show that magoi, goetes and pharmakeis have specialized spheres of activity; they are all credited with performing the same types of feat.

(35) To call a man a magos, goes or epodos is to speak abusively. It is to suggest that he is dishonest and engages in questionable activities.

(35) Oedipus, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, for instance, calls the seer Teiresias a scheming magos and a devious begging-priest who has only an eye for his own material advantage but is blind in his craft.

(35) It does not follow from magos’ or goes’ being a term of abuse that the activities which defined a man as a magos or goes were in themselves suspect, only that some of the activities pursued by such men were thought questionable.

(35) From Oedipus Rex it is to be inferred that magoi are associated with deviousness and greed, while quite what negative associations goes epodos carries in Bacchae is unclear. It is theoretically possible, though not very likely, that the magical activities in which magoi and goetes engaged were considered perfectly reputable and that it was only the greed and deviousness of some of those who passed themselves off as magoi and goetes which gave the whole group a bad name.

(37) Before we jump to the conclusion that the feelings about love-spells to which Deianeira and Phaedra give expression constitute proof that the doings of magoi and goetes were universally condemned in late fifth-century Athens, a number of points need to be made about what can legitimately and safely be inferred from what the two women say.

(38) Secondly, a certain degree of caution is called for in extrapolating from what may be granted were widely-held misgivings about the morality of casting erotic spells to a general abhorrence of everything magoi, goetes and pharmakeis did.

(40) It looks at first sight as if the obvious place to begin the quest is with the term magos and with the presumed though unattested emergence, in the Greek world, of either genuine Iranian fire-priests or persons passing themselves off as such.

(40) It is an open question, however, in whose imagination it is that the magoi of Persia are the ultimate experts in magic: are we to suppose that they occupied such a rôle in the popular imagination or was it a learned conceit contrived by those who knew where the word magos had come from?

(40) By the time—and this is at a very early date—we encounter in a Greek setting persons who are referred to as magoi there is no trace left of Zoroastrianism.

(40) That is puzzling. The puzzle is compounded by the knowledge that offering initiation into the mysteries is hardly the exclusive possession of magoi: Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae says he has been told that there is a stranger in his land, who is a goes epodos, who pretends to do just that, so that he may consort with young women by day and night.

(40) Yet it is not to be doubted that persons either calling themselves magoi or who were thought to be magoi must have appeared in the Greek world.

(41) The theory that the magoi were bearers of Eastern wisdom should not be

abandoned quite yet.

(41) That raises the possibility that persons claiming to be magoi brought them with them.

(41) If there is any substance to the hypothesis that the magoi who appeared in the Greek world from the late sixth century on did bring magical techniques that had their origin in Mesopotamia with them, and that, furthermore, these persons made much of their eastern origins, then we would expect to find indications that magic was in the eyes of the Greeks an eastern craft.

(42) We may never be able to explain how it came about that persons calling themselves magoi presented themselves as experts in magic and at the same timeoffered initiations into the mysteries.

(42) The criticism that Heraclitus levels at bacchoi, lenai, magoi and mystai is precisely that they perform initiations in an unholy fashion into rites that do have a proper form.

(45) While it is entirely appropriate to speak of magicians and sorcerers in the fifth century BC, at the same time care has to be taken not to imagine that the range of activities in which the persons variously referred to as magoi, goetes and pharmakeis engaged coincided with what magicians in Early Modern Europe were imagined to do.

(50) One of Aesop’s fables tells the story of a female magician (magos) who boasted in the older recension of the fables of expertise in incantations (epodai) and in the laying to rest (katathesis) of divine wrath and in a more recent version of averting divine wrath, and who made a considerable living from performing these services; she was indicted for making innovations in matters concerned with the divine (kainotomein) or in the more recent recension of impiety (asebeia), brought to trial and condemned to death; as she was being led away from the law court, someone said to her: ‘How was it that you were not able to persuade men, although you profess to be able to avert the anger of gods?

(59) The earliest instance of a man being characterized as a mantis and agyrtes as well as a magos is in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex of about 430 BC.

(60) The implication of the passage is that there was a class of persons who presented themselves as manteis but who were also magoi and agyrtai and that the last category of person was prepared to turn its hand to all sorts of underhand schemes, provided it made a profit from it. There is nothing in the context that makes it certain that a magos is for Sophocles a magician, but it is hard to see what other rôle the unscrupulous mantis who doubles as a magos can have.

(60) It sounds then as if the magos-cum-agyrtes who represented himself as a

mantis would have been a familiar figure for Sophocles’ audience. That to some

extent is confirmed by the author of the treatise On the Sacred Disease, who

hypothesizes that the first persons to treat epilepsy as a divinely-sent condition

must have been men of the kind who are now magoi, purifiers (kathartai),

agyrtai and charlatans (alazones), but who present themselves as being

especially punctilious in their worship of the gods and at the same as the

possessors of a superior understanding. There is little doubt in this case that the

persons referred to under this composite description are called magoi because

they practise magic; the author asserts that these same people profess to be able

by their mageia and sacrifices to pull the moon down from the sky, make the sun

disappear and create storm or calm.

(73) There are indications that already in the fifth century magoi and goetes

claimed to be able to effect miracles, which is to say, they performed conjuring

Tricks. A Phrygian slave in Euripides’ Orestes, trying to account for the

disappearance of his mistress Helen, has three explanations to offer: spells

(pharmaka) were involved; the craft of magoi: was responsible; she was spirited

away by the gods. It may be that magoi promised to make persons vanish

without actually doing so in front of spectators, but it does rather sound as if the

slave is referring to what we would call a conjuring-trick.

(89) Women who purify those who have had disturbing dreams or visions are not said

to perform magic, but the author of the Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred

Disease certainly takes the katharmoi, intended to cure epilepsy, performed by

the persons he refers to as magoi, kathartai and agyrtai as acts of mageia.

(114) The treatise on the art

of magic of which Pliny speaks is presumably the work to which Diogenes

Laertius gives the title On the Magoi and in whose first book he says the magoi are

credited with believing in a good divine element and an evil divine element,

known respectively as Zeus or Oromandes and Hades or Areimanius.

(115) Whether Hermippus attributed magical recipes to the magoi in his book on

them must be a moot point. Pliny certainly says that Hermippus discoursed on

the whole art of magic, but it is to be doubted whether Pliny had himself seen the

book. His information will have come from some intermediate source, perhaps

the Alexandrian grammarian Apion, who was active under Tiberius, Caligula and

Claudius and who wrote a work entitled On the Magoi. Although Pliny may

not have been terribly well informed about the contents of Hermippus’ writings,

it is difficult to believe that Hermippus can have found enough material to fill up

a whole book on the magoi without including magical lore in it. Whatever sort of

book it was on which Hermippus wrote his exegetical commentary and whatever

it was that was contained in his treatise On the Magoi, the writings of Hermippus

do testify to an interest on the part of Alexandrian intellectuals and scholars with

the wisdom of the Persian magoi.

(115) It purported to be a treatise composed by Pythagoras on the basis of what that sage had

learned from the magoi of the East, whom he was supposed to have visited. Whether all of the magical lore attributed to Democritus and the Magi in the Natural Histories comes from the Cheiromecta is uncertain. It is possible that Pliny had recourse to pseudepigraphical works attributed to Democritus written by an author or authors other than Bolus in which the

authority of the magoi was invoked.

(116) One of the fictions of the Cheiromecta was that Democritus had sought out

magical lore not only from the magoi of Persia and Babylon, but also from

magoi in Arabia, Ethiopia and Egypt.

(116) We may imagine that Bolus

adduced an Egyptian or Ethiopian magos as the source from which Democritus

acquired this knowledge.

(116) It would be most surprising if Bolus did

indeed have the authority of the Persian magoi for any of the lore that he

published under Democritus’ name

(119) He is Zachalias of Babylon,

who wrote a work on magical gem-stones, which he dedicated to King

Mithridates. He too invoked the authority of the magoi for what he had to say.

(121) It cannot on that score be confidently

concluded that the category of magic had any meaning for him and that he had

made it part of his thinking, but he must at least have been aware that there were

persons called magoi to be found in the East who had in their possession secret

information about substances capable of effecting miraculous transformations.

(121) What, however, matters more is not whether the members of senatorial class

possessed a passive knowledge of certain Greek concepts, but to what extent had

the ways in which Romans thought about the world been moulded by Greek

ideas. It may well be that Cato the Elder knew in a certain sense what a magos

was in Greek and what goeteia was, but these were not necessarily ideas that

governed his own thinking about the world.

(131) The distinction in Greek in this period

between a magos in the sense of an Iranian fire-priest and a magos who is an

expert on magic is not clear-cut, since the former is often imagined to be identical

to the latter.

(142) It is the case of a magician (magos) who had

approached a father asking for the hand of his daughter and had been rejected;

the girl had then conceived a passion for a ghostly image (eidolon), which had

led to the prosecution of the magician for sorcery (pharmaka).

(143) Hadrian’s credentials in

matters of sorcery were not insignificant: he himself had the reputation of being

a goes, a reputation that Philostratus in his Lives of the Sophists surmises came

from Hadrian’s having dealt in a spectacular way in his rhetorical exercises with

the conduct of magicians (magoi).

(202) He says at

the beginning of the work that some men thought Apollonius was a magos, since

he had consorted with the magoi of Babylon, the Indian Brahmins and the Naked

Ones of Egypt, and that these same men had slanderously put it about that the

wisdom Apollonius possessed was of the kind which employed force in its

Application.

(217) The astral

configuration that produces ochlagogoi also gives birth to magoi, planoi, persons

who perform sacrifices for the purpose of divination (thytai), doctors, astrologers,

bankers, counterfeiters and forgers.

(217) In the later text, the Constitutiones apostolorum, the ochlagogos is

found in the immediate company of the magician (magos), the utterer of

incantations (epaoidos), the astrologer, the diviner (mantis), the snake-charmer

(therepodos),84 the agyrtes, the maker of amulets and the purifier.

(248) In Book 8 of the later document, the

Constitutiones apostolorum, the exclusions of the Traditio have been elaborated

and amended: one who engages in unmentionable practices, one who is a

sodomite, a fool (blax), a magician (magos), an utterer of incantations

(epaoidos), an astrologer, a diviner (mantis), a snake-charmer (therepodos), a

gatherer of crowds about himself (ochlagogos), a maker of amulets, a purifier

(perikathairon), an interpreter of birds, an expert on signs, an interpreter of

palpitations, one who is on the look out for distortions of the face or feet and for

weasels, chance utterances, or words overheard of meaningful significance is to

be subject to long scrutiny, since his vice is hard to eradicate, but if he desists is

to be accepted into the catechumenate.

(251) It is likely that in the Greek original the term for a magician was a magos.

(251) What it says is that a priest or a cleric ought not to

be a magos or one who performs incantations or an astrologer or one who makes

Phylacteries.

(272) Chrysostom

brings this line of reasoning to a close by observing that even an intelligent

Hellene would not tolerate the use of amulets; there is after all the story of the

Athenian demagogue who put on amulets, only to be mocked and excoriated by a

philosopher who was a teacher of his.

(302) The story told by Zacariah about vagabond-magicians descending on Beirut at

the end of the 480s to prey on the gullible by putting it about that they had

learned from the magoi and the Persians of treasure that Dareius had buried there

suggests that by that date wandering sorcerers had adapted their techniques to the

new conditions and used churches and the tombs in and around them as a

suitable location for their magic-working and necromancy

CHRESMOLOGOS - (SOOTHSAYER)

(59) Very often the magician is a soothsayer (mantis or

chresmologos) or an interpreter of prodigies (teratoskopos); he may also offer

ritual purifications (katharmoi); he may provide initiations into mystery-rites;

and finally, he may be a mendicant holy man (agyrtes).

(66) He is the chresmologos. In the

second half of the fifth century, the chresmologos is in our sources the most

conspicuous of the religious entrepreneurs who professed to be able to mediate

between the human and the divine.

(66) He is variously described as a chresmologos or a

mantis. The stock-in-trade of the successful soothsayer of the entrepreneurial

type was characteristically his possession of a book or books of oracles, that is to

say, of a papyrus-roll or-rolls.

(67) In Peace, a chresmologos

called Hierocles, who is known from an inscription to have been a real person,

turns up just when a character called Trygaeus is about to perform a sacrifice to

consecrate the peace he has engineered. When Pisthetairos questions whether the oracle pronounced by the chresmologos could really have contained the provisions for gifts to the seer, the man repeatedly bids Pisthetairos take the papyrus-roll and see for himself.

(67) The chresmologos does not believe this and

Pisthetairos bids him take the papyrus-roll and see for himself.

(67) There are three occasions that the historian mentions in

which chresmologoi seized the psychological opportunity afforded by

momentous events in the offing to insert themselves into the public eye: just

before the outbreak of war between Athens and Sparta in 431 BC, when the

whole Greek world was in a high state of excitement, oracles were recited by

chresmologoi both in the cities that were going to participate in the war and in

those that would have no part in it; 91 later in the same year, when the Spartan

king, Pleistoanax, and his army had come within sixty stades of the city of Athens

and there was debate in Athens over what should be done, chresmologoi were

again at work reciting oracles, which people interpreted as their inclinations took

them;92 finally, in 415 BC chresmologoi and manteis again inserted themselves

into events, encouraging the Athenians to think that they would conquer Sicily;

on this occasion, news of the calamitous failure of the expedition led the

Athenians to be angry with those who had invoked an understanding of the

divine to mislead them.

(68) Thucydides, for instance, clearly did not approve of the opportunism of chresmologoi.

(68) Herodotus tells a story about an Athenian chresmologos and organizer of the

oracles of Musaeus called Onomacritus, who was expelled from Athens by

Hipparchus, a son of the tyrant Peisistratus, after he was caught by the lyric poet,

Lasus of Hermione, in the act of inserting a prophecy that foretold the

disappearance into the sea of the islets in the vicinity of Lemnos into the oracles

of Musaeus.

(68) Where we do find a man with roots in the community acting as a

chresmologos it may be that this was an inherited calling and one that he pursued

only intermittently when called upon by the state or a prince.

(300) From the warning that Chrysostom issues against giving heed to

diviners (manteis), oracle-mongers (chresmologoi) and finally, agyrtai it is

apparent that mendicant holy men were still present in Antioch at the end of the

fourth century.

TERATOSKOPOS - (Plato’s word for Seer)

(44) Despite the dismissive tone he takes to the threat presented by magic, Plato

still wishes to punish with death those seers (manteis) and interpreters of

wonders (teratoskopoi) who direct sorcery at others and who employ the craft of

the seer in practising magic.

(59) Very often the magician is a soothsayer (mantis or

chresmologos) or an interpreter of prodigies (teratoskopos); he may also offer

ritual purifications (katharmoi); he may provide initiations into mystery-rites;

and finally, he may be a mendicant holy man (agyrtes).

(62) In both cases

there is to be a distinction in the penalties imposed on those who practise

pharmakeia, between those who are professionals and those who are not: the court

is to assess the penalty to be paid by a non-professional who does not understand

what he is doing, whereas if a doctor or a seer (mantis) or interpreter of prodigies

(teratoskopos) is convicted of engaging in their respective forms of pharmakeia,

there is a mandatory penalty of death

AGYRTAI / AGYRTES

(59) The impression to be gained from our sources is that magicians were more

likely than not to be seers or manteis and that some of the seers who performed

magic could also be described as agyrtai, a term used to refer to mendicants. The

earliest instance of a man being characterized as a mantis and agyrtes as well as

a magos is in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex of about 430 BC.

(60) He assumes that Teiresias must have been

put up to doing this by his brother-in-law Creon to deprive him of his throne by

subterfuge and that Creon had suborned Teiresias, whom he characterizes as a

magos, cunning in his scheming, a devious and underhand agyrtes, who can only

see where there is profit to be made, but who is blind in his own craft (techne)

(60) The implication of the passage is that there was a class of persons who presented

themselves as manteis but who were also magoi and agyrtai and that the last

category of person was prepared to turn its hand to all sorts of underhand

schemes, provided it made a profit from it.

(60) It sounds then as if the magos-cum-agyrtes who represented himself as a

mantis would have been a familiar figure for Sophocles’ audience.

(60) That to some

extent is confirmed by the author of the treatise On the Sacred Disease, who

hypothesizes that the first persons to treat epilepsy as a divinely-sent condition

must have been men of the kind who are now magoi, purifiers (kathartai),

agyrtai and charlatans (alazones), but who present themselves as being

especially punctilious in their worship of the gods and at the same as the

possessors of a superior understanding.

(60) The figure of the agyrtes-cum-mantis is next encountered in Plato’s Republic

in a speech in which Adeimantus challenges Socrates to present a case for living

a morally upright life, if it is possible by assuaging the anger of the gods to be

cleansed of the consequences of any wrongdoing.

(60) According to Adeimantus,

there are persons who claim to be able to perform this service: they are the

agyrtai and manteis who come to the doors of the rich and seek to persuade them

that they have acquired the capacity from the gods through sacrifices and

incantations (epodai) to heal in a pleasurable and festive form not only any

crimes the party approached may have committed but also any crimes his

ancestors may have committed; the agyrtai and manteis also let it be known that

if anyone wishes to harm an enemy, he will be able to do so at no great expense,

whether by conjuring up a ghost (epagoge) or by employing a binding-spell

(katadesis), as they will persuade the gods to serve them.

(61) That is not all that

Adeimantus has to say about the agyrtai and manteis who come to the doors of

the rich; he also maintains that they cite lines from Homer to support the view

that the gods can be bought off by prayer and sacrifice and that they provide what

he calls a hubbub of books by Musaeus and Orpheus that lay down the rules for

the sacrifices they perform and, furthermore, that they seek to persuade not only

individuals but whole cities that releases and purifications (katharmoi) can be

procured for men while they are still living by means of sacrifices conducted in a

pleasant and joyous manner and that they are good also for death, in which event

the ceremony is called teletai; what it does is free men from the ills in the

afterlife that would otherwise affect them.

(61) Plato in the Laws makes mention of persons whose conduct bears a marked

resemblance to the agyrtai and manteis of the Republic, although he does not

refer to them under such a description, but only as asebeis or impious persons.

(61) Since the actions

of the asebeis of the Laws are virtually identical with those that the agyrtai and

manteis of the Republic promise to perform for the rich men to whose doors they

come, namely, to cure the effect of wrongs committed through a power acquired

from the gods by sacrifices and incantations, and since the persons who

commission the asebeis seem to be persons of the same social standing as the

rich men whose doors are besieged by agyrtai and manteis, there are grounds for

thinking that the asebeis of the Laws and the agyrtai and manteis of the Republic

are either the same people under different descriptions or persons who have a

good deal in common.

(63) Our quest into the identity of the holy man who performs magic will begin

with a figure with whom he is on several occasions associated, the agyrtes. When Plato speaks about agyrtai and manteis making their way around the doors of the rich he almost certainly does not have separate categories of person in mind, but a single category. He is thinking of manteis who were at the same time agyrtai. The term agyrtes means basically ‘someone who collects a living by begging’.

(63) Men will have given to agyrtai for a variety of reasons: sometimes it will have been in return for services rendered; on other occasions, they will have imagined that in supporting a beggar-priest they were winning the favour of his god.

(63) The figure of the agyrtes is to be encountered first in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon:

the Trojan princess, Cassandra, who has been given the gift of prophetic vision

by Apollo, asks the Chorus of Argive elders, when she sees revealed before her

what turns out to be the feast of Thyestes, whether she has hit on the truth or

whether she is a false mantis of the sort who knocks on doors and babbles

nonsense;69 when at a later stage in the series of visions that roll before her eyes

she sees a two-footed lioness who will kill her lying in bed with a wolf in the

absence of the lion, she throws off the insignia of the seer’s (mantis) craft that

she wears and complains of having to endure being called a wandering agyrtes, a

wretched beggar half-dead from starvation. There are a number of lessons to be

drawn from the episode: one is that by 458 BC, when the play was performed,

agyrtai were so well-established a feature of Athenian life that Aeschylus is not

conscious of the anachronism involved in introducing them into a drama set in the

Heroic Age; secondly, some agyrtai presented themselves as manteis and

specifically as the kind of mantis whose prophetic gift consisted in ecstatic

visions; thirdly, some of them made their way from door to door; and finally,

those who pursued the calling were often destitute and were greatly despised.

(64) The agyrtai about whom we hear most are the acolytes of the Mother Goddess,

Cybele.

(64) They were known as metragyrtai or menagyrtai Such persons were

probably already a presence in the Greek world early in the fifth century; the

ecstatic ravings of metragyrtai may be what Aeschylus has in mind when he

makes Cassandra complain that she is treated as an agyrtes; and Pindar knows of

the drums (tympana) and the castanets that were a feature of the worship of

Cybele.

(65) Confirmation that metragyrtai were a familiar feature of the religious

landscape is not to be found until later in the century: the comic poet Cratinus,

who was a somewhat older contemporary of Aristophanes, alluding to the

eunuch-acolytes of the Mother Goddess, the Galloi, calls the famous seer

Lampon a Cybele-collectress (agersikybelis);73 and there is a play by Sophocles

called Tympanistai, the chorus of which, to judge from its title, must have been

made up of the drummers who played a part in the cult of Cybele. Lampon was

not the only religious expert to be subject to such insults:74 in the 380s or shortly

thereafter the Athenian military man Iphicrates called a member of the family

who provided the torch-bearer in the Eleusinian Mysteries a metragyrtes

(65) Metragyrtai will generally have moved around in bands with different persons in

the band performing different rôles That is implicit in the story told by the

Peripatetic philosopher Clearchus, who was active in the latter part of fourth

century and in the early third century, about the ultimate fate of Dionysius the

Younger, who had once upon a time been tyrant of Syracuse: he brought his life

to a miserable close in Corinth as a metragyrtes and drum-bearer

(64) The moral standing of metragyrtai was also low:

they served as a touchstone for turpitude.

(65) The persons called agyrtai will have been a heterogeneous group and will

have come from very different backgrounds. It would be natural to assume that

metragyrtai had their roots in the north-western part of Anatolia, in Phrygia, and

that they had emerged from there to spread the cult of the Mother Goddess.

(64) Had they been, Clearchus could not have told a story about Dionysius the

Younger ending his days as a metragyrtes.

(65) That agyrtai were vagabonds, persons of no fixed abode who made their way

from city to city begging for a living, may be a largely correct assumption, but it

is not one that can easily be proved.

(65) Plutarch, in his life of the early Spartan

lawgiver, Lycurgus, does say that Lycurgus allowed no sophist nor mendicant

soothsayer (mantis agyrtikos) nor keeper of courtesans to set foot in Laconia.The

implication of the anecdote is that manteis agyrtikoi wandered from place to

place. Plutarch’s source is probably Hellenistic. The passage has certainly

nothing to tell us about conditions in Sparta in the seventh century BC, but will

be testimony to the wanderings of agyrtai in the period from which it comes.

(65) Not

all agyrtai will necessarily have spent their lives wandering from place to place;

some of them may well have been rooted in a city and confined themselves to

making their way around it begging

(65) The mother of Epicurus is a case in point.

There is some reason to think that she would have been called an agyrtria if she

had really, as an opponent of Epicureanism maintained, made the rounds of

humble dwellings in Athens accompanied by her son, who read out purifications

(katharmoi) for her. While there may well have been persons who could be

called agyrtai who were permanently, if not necessarily legally, resident in a

community, the suspicion must be that many agyrtai did wander from city to city. It is likely, therefore, that agyrtai will for the most part have lacked legal

standing in the communities in which they sought their livelihood.

(65) We are still a long way from being able to pin down who agyrtai actually

Were. It is virtually certain that anyone who owned enough land to live off or

who had a craft to make a living from would not have gone out on the road as an

Agyrtes. Agyrtai by their nature are basically persons who are destitute, although

some of them may eventually become sufficiently successful to settle down and

establish themselves in a community.

(65) Although destitute and essentially beggars, agyrtai were not

necessarily utterly obscure and nameless individuals.

(65) It is possible to get a little closer to who the wandering mendicant religious

experts were by looking at a kind of religious expert who has a good deal in

common with the agyrtes, but about whom we are rather better informed. He

may very well have been called an agyrtes.

(70) Those who undertook to perform

purificatory ceremonies that were part of an initiation-rite will have required the

texts to whose authority Plato says the agyrtai and manteis who came to the

doors of rich men appealed.

(78) Cassandra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon

exemplifies the former type: she feels that as an inspired seer (mantis) reduced to

slavery she suffers the indignities endured by mendicant holy women (agyrtriai)

who wander hither and thither.

(89) The indications, such as they are, suggest that introducing

incantations into these ceremonies was one of the factors that caused trouble. It

will suffice to point to the mention of incantation in the Aesopic fable and to the

three references in Plato to incantation, in one instance characterized as goeteia,

in the purificatory rituals enacted by agyrtai and manteis and by impious persons

of a beast-like character

(89) They are to be read about in Plutarch’s tract On

Superstition, a work that probably derives from a Hellenistic work on the same

topic, where we learn that mendicant holy men (agyrtai) and sorcerers (goetes)

tell someone troubled by a dream that he has to employ an old woman expert in

purifications or a perimaktria, literally a woman who kneads a substance all

around something, to cleanse him of the effects of the dream.

(90) Women who purify those who have had disturbing dreams or visions are not said

to perform magic, but the author of the Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred

Disease certainly takes the katharmoi, intended to cure epilepsy, performed by

the persons he refers to as magoi, kathartai and agyrtai as acts of mageia.

(92) Plato’s use of the masculine gender in

describing the magic-working of agyrtai and manteis proves that he believed

men practised black magic, but does not mean that he was not speaking generally

and not also thinking of women.

(95) It is also likely that magic-working was portrayed in New

Comedy: Menander had a play, the Thettalae, in which witches played a part and

more intriguingly he wrote a Menagyrtes, which must have had something to do

with one of the begging-priests of the Mother Goddess.

(113) The argument is based on the interesting assumption that

those whose authority is invoked in spells and incantations will be magicians and

secondly that there is an intrinsic relationship between the mystery-rites practised

by agyrtai and magic-working. The latter assumption also underlies the

euhemeristic account that Strabo, who relies here on some earlier Hellenistic

source, gives of the career of Orpheus: he was at first a sorcerer (goes) who made

a living as a mendicant (agyrtes) from music, the seer’s craft (mantike) and

mystery-rites, before he became more ambitious and went on to attempt greater

Things.

(113) The rationalization he offers for the stories told about the

journeys through the mountains the Idaean Dactyls undertook and for their

ecstatic possession by the divine (enthousiasmos) is that their mountain-walking

signifies their concern with mining and hunting and in general with acquiring the

necessities of life, while a mendicant way of life (agyrtikon) and sorcery

(goeteia) are closely related to divine possession, the performance of religious

ritual and the craft of the seer (mantike).

(148) A Greek would have called them agyrtai.

(149) It is entirely possible then that the praetor took the action out of a

desire to defend what he saw as traditional Roman religious practice from the

inroads that foreign cults were making and out of a concern to keep agyrtai from

profiting from the ignorance of the masses.

(150) Hispalis in banning astrologers from

Rome and Italy was to protect traditional Roman religious observance. At the

same time, it is also very likely that his edict was motivated by a genuine dislike

of priests making a living from selling their expertise, which is to say, acting as

Agyrtai.

(158) A Greek-speaker asked to find a general term that covered all of the forms of

seer and priest described in the preceding paragraphs would have called them

agyrtai or perhaps would have used the hendiadys agyrtai kai manteis to

characterize them.

(216) To begin with the terminology used in speaking of itinerant magicians: in

Greek they continue to be classified as agyrtai or begging holy men, although

sometimes they are also called ageirontes, a participle from the same root as

agyrtes that means ‘those taking up a collection’, and sometimes yet again as

planetai, ‘wanderers or vagabonds’, or planoi, the deeply ambiguous term that

means primarily ‘one who creates delusions in the minds of other men’, then

‘sorcerer’, but that may also have connotations of vagabond or wandering

beggar;77 the term laoplanos, ‘one who deludes the masses’, is also found; 78 in

Latin there is no term that is the exact equivalent of agyrtes, but in practice a

circulator was what in Greek would have been called an agyrtes. In Late Latin

glossaries, agyrtes is given as an equivalent of circulator. A circulator gets his

name from his gathering a circle (circulus) of onlookers about himself and this is

precisely what most circulatores will have done

(217) In the later text, the Constitutiones apostolorum, the ochlagogos is

found in the immediate company of the magician (magos), the utterer of

incantations (epaoidos), the astrologer, the diviner (mantis), the snake-charmer

(therepodos),84 the agyrtes, the maker of amulets and the purifier.

(217) Not all agyrtai, ageirontes and circulatores were magicians. In fact the

majority of them will have had different, though related, accomplishments.

(226) A speaker in a dialogue by Plutarch in which the decline of oracles uttered in

verse is discussed explains the passing of such oracles by the disrepute that the

hucksterish, mendicant (agyrtikon), altar-besieging and vagabond element to be

found at shrines of the Great Mother and Serapis had brought oracles delivered in

verse; some of them made up their own verse-oracles, others chose them by lot

from tablets; slaves and women were entranced by the metre of the oracles and

by their poetic diction.

(226) Philo Judaeus, writing in

Alexandria two generations at least before Plutarch, speaks of a magike coined in

a false form that is pursued by begging-priests of the Mother Goddess

(Menagyrtai), by those who frequent altars (bomolochoi) and the basest of

women and slaves.

(230) Artemidorus, the author of a work on the interpretation of dreams written in

the second half of the second century AD, tells us a little more about the

diviners, most of whom must have been agyrtai and some of whom will have

combined that calling with being a sorcerer, to be found in the agora and

wherever great crowds of people congregated.

(231) Since

Artemidorus was interested in what diviners from dreams had to say and

naturally thought that oneiromancy was a legitimate technique, he was inclined

to give this class of diviner the benefit of the doubt and not label them as agyrtai,

goetes and bomolochoi in the way that supercilious people did.

(237) Plutarch, in the essay in which

he treats of excessive fear of the divine, says that those who suffer from it when

they have frightening visions in sleep do not laugh off the vision on waking up

or rejoice at its only having been a dream, as others would, but get into a state of

upset and take themselves to mendicant holy men (agyrtai) and sorcerers

(goetes), on whom they spend money; these persons then advise them to find

some old woman to cleanse them of the demonic visitation that they have

experienced, to wash themselves in the sea and spend the day sitting on the

Ground.

(237) It is first of all to be remarked that Plutarch is in all likelihood not

speaking about two separate categories of person, agyrtai and goetes, but that

there is a hendiadys and that the persons really intended are mendicant holy men

who turn their hand to sorcery.

(237) The old women carry out the rituals. The

implication of the passage is that the old women who perform the ritual of

purification are mere technicians, while the agyrtai are the true experts.

(240) The last category of female magic-worker to be examined is the mendicant holy

woman. That such women were more of a presence than our sources reveal

seems likely. For one thing it is possible that some references to agyrtai are

generic and encompass both men and women. The one reference that there is to a

female mendicant, an agyrtria, is in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana.

(240) It is to be

found in a comparison that Damis, the companion of Apollonius, makes of his

meagre prophetic gifts with those of an old mendicant woman (agyrtria) who

prophesies about little sheep and such like things.

(300) The mendicant holy men (agyrtai) who in the pagan period were to be

encountered at the crossroads of a town, in its marketplace or in the vicinity of

the temples of the Mother Goddess or Isis did not disappear with the

Christianization of the Roman Empire.

(300) The Fathers of the Church certainly still continue to speak of agyrtai

(300) Epiphanius

invariably refers to the founders of the various heresies that he catalogues as

agyrtai, because of the similarity they bear in his eyes at any rate to wandering

Mendicants

(300) From the warning that Chrysostom issues against giving heed to

diviners (manteis), oracle-mongers (chresmologoi) and finally, agyrtai it is

apparent that mendicant holy men were still present in Antioch at the end of the

fourth century.

(300) Not much information is to be gleaned from John Chrysostom on what these

people did and who they were, although he does say that ambiguous prophetic

utterances of the kind given Croesus by the Pythia at Delphi were characteristic

of the forecasts made by agyrtai at crossroads.

(300) While Epiphanius’ traduction

of the various heresiarchs as agyrtai may do these persons less than justice, it

does throw a good deal of light on who the agyrtai of his time were, where they

came from in the world and how they behaved.

(300) His description of the life and

career of Mani or Cubricus, the founder of Manichaeism, may not be of much

help to those who wish to reconstruct the origins of Manichaeism, but it does

provide an insight into the agyrtai of Late Antiquity and their social

Circumstances.

(300) Epiphanius speaks disparagingly of Mani as a sorcerer (goes) and a mendicant

(agyrtes) in recounting Mani’s unsuccessful attempt to cure the son of the

Persian king.

MANTIS

(15) Magic-working was very often practised in conjunction with some related

calling. Persons who presented themselves as expert in one or the other of the

sub-specialities of the craft of the seer, for whom the most general term in Greek

is a mantis, frequently turned their hand to magic-working.

(49) Demosthenes in the speech Against Aristogeiton and that she

was a seer (mantis) who was condemned for impiety (asebeia) and executed for

the offence according to the account given by Philochorus in the sixth book of

his history;9

(59)(Seers as holy men) Very often the magician is a soothsayer (mantis or

chresmologos) or an interpreter of prodigies (teratoskopos); he may also offer

ritual purifications (katharmoi); he may provide initiations into mystery-rites;

and finally, he may be a mendicant holy man (agyrtes).

(59) The earliest instance of a man being characterized as a mantis and agyrtes as well as a magos is in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex of about 430 BC. There Oedipus, searching to find the killer of his predecessor as ruler of Thebes, Laius, is dumbfounded to be told by the mantis Teiresias, whose advice and help he has sought, that he himself is Laius’ killer.

(60) These reflections on the prophet’s craft lead Oedipus to address Teiresias directly

and to ask him when had he ever shown himself to be a clear-sighted mantis.49

The implication of the passage is that there was a class of persons who presented

themselves as manteis but who were also magoi and agyrtai and that the last

category of person was prepared to turn its hand to all sorts of underhand

schemes, provided it made a profit from it.

(60) There is nothing in the context that makes it certain that a magos is for Sophocles a magician, but it is hard to see what other rôle the unscrupulous mantis who doubles as a magos can have.

(60) It sounds then as if the magos-cum-agyrtes who represented himself as a

mantis would have been a familiar figure for Sophocles’ audience.

(60) Although the author of the treatise does not

call the persons he attacks manteis, what he describes is undoubtedly a form of

mantis: they interpret the sounds made by epileptics while having a convulsion

and the form the convulsion takes as signs of possession by particular deities.

(62) In both cases

there is to be a distinction in the penalties imposed on those who practise

pharmakeia, between those who are professionals and those who are not: the court

is to assess the penalty to be paid by a non-professional who does not understand

what he is doing, whereas if a doctor or a seer (mantis) or interpreter of prodigies

(teratoskopos) is convicted of engaging in their respective forms of pharmakeia,

there is a mandatory penalty of death.

(63) there is after all the conviction and execution

for asebeia of a mantis who was notorious as a sorceress, the Lemnian sorceress,

Theoris, whom the historian Philochorus described as a mantis condemned for

Asebeia.

(63-64) Who then were the manteis who practised magic and in what kind of religious

environment did they operate? The question is a difficult one to answer, not least

because there is reason to believe that considerable differences existed amongst

the manteis who practised magic: different kinds of mantis will have served very

different clienteles and will have offered somewhat different services.