A Babel of Voices: Styling Malign Magic in the Roman World

A long-lasting imperial state such as the long Roman Empire, comprising many different cultures and languages, was too complex to count as a single social formation, and lacked “characteristic” narratives of events interpreted as the result of malign magic. I argue that we need to think in terms of multiple, even competing, types of knowledge of magic, each with its own stories. In the two parts of this article, after an address to ethnographic narratives of witchcraft, I compare discursive modalities of Greco-Roman literary narratives with the narratives historians must extrapolate from fragmentary evidence to understand what might have happened in real social situations where magic was used.