Magic in Ancient Greece and Rome by Lindsay C. Watson (review)

Watson’s book joins an expanding community of scholarship on magic in antiquity, specifically Greece and Rome, but it is not focused on theoretical distinctions. Nor does Watson focus on the material cultural and archeological evidence as much as do recent works by (e.g.) D. Boschung and J. N. Bremmer (eds.), The Materiality of Magic (Paderborn 2015), and C. Houlbrook and N. Armitage (eds.), The Materiality of Magic: An Artifactual Investigation into Ritual Practices and Popular Beliefs (Oxford and Philadelphia 2015). Some readers may wish that Watson struck more of a balance between drawing upon both the literary/textual and the archeological records, as Radcliffe G. Edmonds III aims to do in Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World (Princeton 2019).

A large part of the book is devoted to various magical practices. Seven chapters clearly demarcate the specific aims of magical practices under the following classifications: (1) amatory magic; (2) defixiones, or curse magic; (3) herbal magic; (4) the role of animals in magic; (5) literary representations of witches; and (6) human sacrifice in ancient magic rituals.

Chapter 2 examines the spells by which magicians can reduce a person to a condition in which they will yield to the spell casters desire. The latter include spells to fetch, bind, and make drunk with desire the target body of lust. Chapter 3 deals with curses. Watson notes the linguistic formulaic structure employing the phrase “I bind X” directed against the intended target. For those who have wronged the curser, the ability to achieve the death of the offender is enabled by binding spells known as katadesmoi. Again, Watson might have delved further by comparing such acts of cursing with those in Jewish practical Kabbalists such as Pulsa diNura ( ) whereby the offender is cursed measure for measure with incantations of mikubalim circling a graveyard and calling down death upon the offender, in the form of fiery lashes of stroke.

Chapter 4 deals with herbal magic and the use of plants in ancient rituals. The attention to detail is clearly a great strength, as in all the chapters, but perhaps especially in this chapter. Through such detail Watson reveals the rationale and logic behind the folkish use of medicinal herbal magic in ancient ritual, and the nature of sympathy and etymological nomen omen in forming conceptual relationships to healing practices. Again, multicultural comparison may have yielded further insights, as many cultures contain such variegated notions. Hence, in Judaism, the custom on Rosh Hashanah of eating certain fruits and vegetables as omens that signal a good upcoming year.

Chapter 5 treats the role of animals in magic, with considerable focus on the use of animal ingredients in witches’ potions. Chapter 6 addresses literary representations of witches such as Circe, who was able to turn Odysseus’ men into swine. Other witches treated include Medea, Theocritus’ third-century bce sorceress Simaetha, Lucan’s Erictho, Horace’s Canidia, and Apuleius’ Pamphile, etc. This is perhaps the strongest chapter, not least because of the sense it conveys that life is stranger than fiction, and that these literary figures have their correlates in real life (41). The concluding chapter 7 looks at the unsettling documented cases of the sacrifice of children for divinatory or initiatory purposes.

Watson argues that “[b]y the time of the early Roman Empire there was plainly a two-way traffic in ideas between the Graeco-Roman and Egyptian worlds. One can therefore speak of the ‘internationalization’ of magic, or of a ‘pan-Mediterranean’ tradition of magic limited only by the borders of the known world” (17). One might wish that Watson had expanded this line of research by widening and broadening the scope in the comparative interdisciplinary comparison of other cultures beyond the Greco-Roman. If, for instance, he had juxtaposed Greek culture with the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22, more insights could be derived on the differences between the two cultures, as in Eric...