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Home , Pliny the Elder

CHAPTER TWO

MAGIC IN THE ROMAN HISTORIANS

Matthew W. Dickie

Th ere are a number of questions that can be asked about the part plays in the writings of historians of .1 One may ask what the feelings of a historian are about magic, whether he thinks it is eff ective and has a reality to it and then what he thinks of the people who practise it and of those who resort to them. A related and impor- tant question is how does the historian think the state should deal with magic-workers? Th e attitude of the historian to magic and magic-work- ers is one order of question. Th ere is another order of question: why does magic in some historians play no part, while in others it looms large? When magic does play a role in the writings of a historian, it is proper to examine the circumstances in which reference is made to it. One can then see whether a pattern emerges and whether the same pattern obtains in other historians who cover the same period. It goes without saying that the comparison will only be meaningful if the his- torians compared are independent of each other; that is to say, when one does not mechanically reproduce what the other has said or when both do not follow the same authority. So much for preliminaries. We may now turn our attention to which historians have something to say about magic and which do not. Th e list of those in whom magic goes unmentioned is at least as long as that of those who believe it merits attention. It is a remarkable fact that magic is never mentioned in what survives of ’s , bar a passing reference to it in the account of the suppres- sion of the Bacchanal cult.2 Nor is there any hint of it in the Periochae.

1 For the purposes of this paper ‘Roman historian’ means anyone who wrote a , whether in Greek or in . No account, therefore, will be taken of biographical writers such as and . Considerations of space have meant the exclusion of . 2 39.11.2: confestim mulier exclamat Hispalae concubitu carere eum decem noctes non posse; illius excetrae delenimentis et venenis imbutum nec parentis nec vitrici nec deorum verecundiam habere. 80 matthew w. dickie

It is less remarkable that magic receives no mention in Velleius Pater- culus, Dionysius of and ; the texture of the stories they tell does not obviously admit reference to magic. Mild surprise may be registered that magic is not one of the vices with which credits Catiline in his Catilinae Coniuratio. Magic is aft er all one of the charges employed in ancient invective. Th e absence of any mention of magic in Livy is something of a puzzle. One explanation for the absence might be that Romans in the time of Livy, let alone in earlier centuries, had no concept of magic, since it was not until Pliny the Elder that the concept was formulated. Whatever the explanation is, this is surely not it. Th ere is an over- whelming body of evidence that the Romans operated with a concept of magic long before the middle of the fi rst century CE and that magic was practised as such. A rather more plausible explanation is that since the concern of was with war and high politics, there was no occasion to mention magic, since it just so happened that in the period Livy dealt with magic never intersected with high poli- tics, although it most certainly did so later. As an explanation this has a lot to recommend it, but it is a little too neat. Other circumstances may to the mention of magic. We know that L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi (cos. 133 BCE), presumably in his , relates that a freed- man, Furius Chresimus, because his farm, though small, was so much more productive than the farms of his neighbours, was charged with having used spells (venefi cia) to entice the crops of his neighbours to desert them for him and that he was acquitted, aft er having pointed to his well-turned out slaves and the well-kept equipment that he had brought to the , which he declared were his spells, although he was not able to show the sweat that he had expended and the long hours of the night when he had stayed up to work.3 Th e chances are that Calpurnius Piso told the story to illustrate the virtues of hard work. Th ere was a strongly moralising strain to his writing: he dated the destruction of a sense of shame in Roman life to a prodigy that occurred in 154 BCE.4 Livy too might have told such a story. It may then be a matter of accident that no such story is to be found in what survives of Livy.

3 Pliny, HN 18.41–43: venefi cia mea, Quirites, haec sunt, nec possum vobis ostendere aut in forum adducere lucubrationes meas vigiliasque et sudores. 4 Pliny, HN 17.244: hac tempestatibus prostrata eodem loco fi cus enata est M. Mes- salae C. Cassii censorum lustro, a quo tempore pudicitiam subversam Piso gravis auctor prodidit.