Greek and Roman Necromancy (review)

To us, necromancy is the ultimate transgression: our curiosity disturbs the peace of the dead, for purely selfish reasons. It is nigromancia, in the medieval spelling, black magic par excellence, a heathen thing. Thus, it was only a matter of time until Daniel Ogden would chance upon it. After all, he is the author of books on Bastardy (1996) and Crooked Kings (1997), and of a juicy account of the Hellenistic royals (Polygamy, Prostitutes, and Death, 1999). With such an unashamed tabloid take on antiquity, how could he resist this long?

But as with the tabloids, the reality—in this case the reality of necromancy as "the most powerful form of divination available" (xvii)—is much more complex, and often different from the one we read about. Ogden himself is aware of some problems, right from the start: "There is little in any of our fields of evidence—arguably even none of it—that, when pressed, can be taken to document directly any specific historical performance of necromancy in antiquity. There is, then, a sense in which this is less a history of necromancy itself in antiquity, than a history of ancient ideas, beliefs, and prejudices about it" (xxii–xxiii). Had Ogden only listened to his own voice of reason, he might have written a superb book on a forgotten corner of ancient mentalité, given his mastery of the ancient sources. But mentalité is not really what Ogden is interested in; he needs hard facts, and he finds them even where lesser minds would tread more softly. Necromancy's surprising (and utterly unconvincing) elevation into a major form of ancient divination is mainly achieved through uncritical positivism and the blurring of categories; often enough, the two work hand in hand.

A few examples should suffice to prove my point. Chapter 1 musters the evidence for necromancy at the tomb; it starts with Aeschylus' Persae, adds more tragic evidence, and easily moves to Vergil's Moeris and Horace's Canidia. All this is fiction, of course, and Ogden agrees. But in between comes the assertion that "Pythagoreans may have been particularly keen on necromancy at the tomb" (5); witness the anecdote about Lysis in Plutarch, and a story in Iamblichus about Philolaus—no caveat whatsoever that this might be fiction as well. Then, four inscriptions are added to prove that "at least some of the dead could welcome consultation in the tomb" (6): thus, this is hard historical fact, engraved in stone. But at a closer look, this evidence crumbles: one inscription (Rome, CIL VI 27365) is misunderstood, the other three (all Anatolian, second to fourth century A.D.) are isolated and deserve much more discussion than Ogden gives them. Although in two of them deceased persons are the source of divination, it is not necromancy, but the extension of divinatory practices onto important dead. As scholars, we gain nothing by tagging them as "necromancy"; the tag rather hides information about the role of divination, dreams, and incubation in Imperial Greek or Roman society.

In the same chapter, Ogden draws on phenomena that have only a tenuous connection with his main topic: neither the incubation shrines of Trophonius and Amphiaraus nor the itinerant Pythagoreans and Orphics (rather, the Orpheotelestai) belong to necromancy. But heroes, he argues, are deceased mortals, and thus Amphiaraus and Trophonius can bolster the meager evidence, although no ancient text we have connects them with necromancy. As for the Pythagoreans and "Orphics," they were itinerant religious entrepreneurs, as were, presumably, the psychagogoi, and both Pythagoras and Apollonius of Tyana were accused of illicit divinatory practices. This then tells more about how some people in late antiquity viewed itinerant charismatics than about the reality of their activities.

Chapter 4 deals with the oracular sites of Heraclea Pontica and Tainaron. The latter, Ogden asserts, is "fairly easy to identify" from the literary evidence (34). But the text cited (Mela) does not bear this out...