Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology and Stereotype in the Ancient World (review)

Kimberly Stratton's Naming the Witch, a revised version of her doctoral dissertation, examines the social context that gave rise to specific stereotypes of magic by exploring four different periods and cultures in the ancient Mediterranean: classical Greece, early imperial Rome, second- and third-century Christianity, and Rabbinic Judaism. Stratton argues that magic functions as a form of discourse, the origins of which can be traced in classical Athens, where after the Persian wars the concept of otherness first emerged and then passed to Roman society and the Hellenized world. The book is divided into five chapters. The first is an introductory chapter on "Magic, Discourse and Ideology," followed by four chapters in which Stratton explores representations of magic in Greek, Roman, Christian, and Jewish literature. The book ends with the short epilogue, "Some Thoughts on Gender, Magic, and Stereotyping."

In the first chapter, Stratton introduces the objectives of her book, focusing on how various magical representations and stereotypes were shaped and how magic emerged depending on different social and historical factors. Stratton traces the history of scholarly debate from Tylor and Frazer's distinction between magic, religion, and science, to Mauss and Evans-Pritchard's contribution to this opposition, to Versnel and Hoffman's polythetic typology of magic. She adopts Foucault's definition of magic as a discourse, concentrating on the role of cultural and historical context, the local conception of magic, and its agonistic characteristics. Stratton views magic as a discursive practice drawing on social reality and regulating power. The end of this chapter provides a useful reference to ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew terms of magic.

In the second chapter Stratton explores magic's discursive formation in fifth-century Athens. She argues that magic emerged in that period after the Persian Wars as part of the discourse of alterity and, more specifically, the "discourse of barbarism," in order to establish a new Athenian civic identity. Magic discourse was reinforced by a new type of ritual then widespread in Athens: binding spells introduced from Mesopotamia in the archaic period. Magic discourse in Attic tragedy draws on female alterity, and Stratton examines the depiction of Medea in Euripides' Medea and Deianeira in Sophocles' Trachiniae, where women's magic is associated with gender subversion, revenge, and sexual jealousy. For Stratton both these tragedies reflect the personal anxiety generated by Pericles' new citizenship law (451–50 BCE), according to which only the sons of two Athenian parents were legal citizens.

In the next chapter, Stratton examines representations of magic in Roman literature, situating them in their socioideological and political context. The economic and political independence of elite Roman women developed as early as the third century BCE. Magic discourse appeared in Roman literature in the second century BCE, combined with the discourse of "female immorality" or "wicked women." Stratton argues that accusations about women's immorality and sexual misconduct often revealed social rivalries between men. Magic discourse was part of the broader gender and social order discourse and was intensified by Augustus's moral and religious reforms. The marriage and adultery laws passed by Augustus in 18 and 17 BCE aimed at "an idealised and politicised vision of female behaviour as part of his imperial ideology" (p. 99), against which the image of the immoral witch emerged. At the political level, in the Senate tribunal there are accusations and convictions of women involved in magic more often than of men. For Stratton, the mixing of discourses of magic and wicked women is a logical development of alterity discourse. She surveys references to women's practice of magic in Roman literature, for example in Virgil's Eclogues and Aeneid and Horace's Satires, arguing that these "contribute to a developing discourse of magic" (p.84). Women's use of magic in these representations is more aggressive than in fifth-century Athens. These differences may be explained, according to Stratton, by developments in ritual technology, Roman tastes, and social...