Gender Roles in Greco-Roman Witchcraft - Magic in The Roman Era

Magic in The Roman Era

Much of the extant Roman literature dealing with magic are retellings of Greek myths. Virgils's (70-19 BCE) Book IV of the Aeneid for example describes a magical ceremony that the hero of the epic, Aeneas, who has landed on the coast of North Africa after fleeing from Troy, partakes in. Here Aeneas meets Queen Dido, who has just begun to build the city of Carthage. Dido falls in love with Aeneas, and wishes him to stay as her prince consort. One is reminded of the Circe episode in the Odyssey and of Jason and Medea in Apollonius' Argonautica. In these epics also, a traveling hero meets a beautiful female who is potentially dangerous, although kind and hospitable as long as her love for the hero lasts. Thus the clash is set when Fate decrees that Aeneas leave Dido to found a city of his own (in Italy). Perhaps inevitably Dido's love turns to hate. In her hate she seeks to use a complex magical ritual to bring her former lover back to her. She builds a gigantic pyre in the main courtyard of her palace and prepares an elaborate sacrifice to the powers of the underworld. However Dido soon comes to realize that the love magic is not powerful enough to bring Aeneas back to her, so she kills herself in her despair, which in fact adds to the power and thus backlash to her curse. Dido thus had sealed and extended her curse through her suicide. Aeneas was protected by his gods, but because of Dido's use of magic her curse lingered on leading, according to Virgil, to Rome's near crushing defeat by Carthage many centuries later. This seems to demonstrate quite clearly that the Romans shared the Greek's view of magic as being dangerous and untrustworthy.

The Romans in fact went further than the Greeks in the condemnation and the fearfulness that they generate around their concept of magic. Some vivid examples of this are found in the writings of Seneca, the philosopher and playwright (c. 5 BCE - 65CE), and his nephew, Lucan (39-65 CE). Seneca selects some of the most gruesome Greek myths for dramatic treatment and he greatly adds to the negative connotations already applied to the theme of magic, necromancy and the like - where it is given by the mythical tradition (such as Medea) and sometimes even where there is little negativity indicated towards magic (Hercules on Mount Oeta for example). From the dialogue in this incident, that is, between Deineira (the wife of Hercules) and her nurse we learn that it may well have been quite common for jealous wives to consult a witch; as it turns out, the nurse, very conveniently, is a witch herself. There is a suggestion in this passage that a great hero such as Hercules should not be able to be influenced by magical means, but in the end he is overcome by the deadly concoction that the evil magic user (the nurse) passes on to Hercules, through deceiving Deianira into the belief that she is giving Hercules a love charm.

So too Seneca's Medea, in his version her invocations and incantations are not left to the imagination, as they were when Apollonius of Rhodes wrote his epic three centuries previously. Here Medea's power of hating (crucial to her magic), which she can switch on and intensify at will is still the dominant theme, but Medea is now given a full cupboard of horrors from which to select the most efficient means of magical destruction. Her magic can even, apparently affect the cosmos, as she claims that she can force down the constellation of the Snake. Lucan in Book 6 of his work, the Pharsalia, seems to make an effort to surpass his uncle in portraying the horrors and powers of witchcraft. In his epic poem, just before the decisive battle of Pharsalus of 48 BCE, in which Julius Caesar defeats the forces of Pompey, the two armies are moving through Thessaly, the country of witchcraft in Lucan's work. Here one of Pompey's sons consults a famous witch called Erictho about the outcome of the upcoming confrontation. In Lucan's epic, Erictho is the most powerful of witches, and because she is so powerful she is presented as being quite loathsome and disgusting. Such are her powers that she can even compel some of the lesser gods to serve her and even cause them to shudder at her spells. As exaggerated as these plays are they demonstrate knowledge of magical practices found in the Greek magical papyri mentioned earlier and they demonstrate that the audience these works are aimed at must have easily understood the concept of magic in a negative sense but also in the sense of being a practice aimed at influencing or controlling the forces of the cosmos, even the gods themselves.