‘There is no one who doesn’t fear being bound by curses.’
Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 28.4, 1st century AD
The Rome of the imagination is dazzling. In films and paintings and books, it is a place of glittering marble, a city of striking sophistication and beauty, a place of men with brilliant white togas and brilliant minds. To the modern eye, the grandeur that was Rome lies not merely in its buildings – in its straight roads and aqueducts and amphitheatres and efficient toilets – but also in its straight thinking. This is a city of eager erudition, a city whose richest men might acquire a library of well over a thousand scrolls. It is a city so voraciously intellectual that a man might, as Pliny the Elder did, instruct his assistant to walk around after him, reading out loud to him constantly from the scrolls that he carried in his hands (his gloved hands in winter): reading to him as he ate, as he lay in the sun, as he was rubbed down after his bath – reading, reading, reading, text after text, lest learning be lost for even a moment.1 It is a city of architectural advances too, in which vast tumbledown areas are cleared to make way for projects of elegance and light, for gardens like the famous ones of Maecenas, with its elegant promenades and handsome landscaping, and – it is thought – the first heated swimming pool in Rome.
All that is true. But it is also not true. Rome was a city of light and brilliant intellectual advances, but it was also a city of darkness. Despite its daytime beauty, Rome could not overcome the night. Arguably, it never even tried to. There were no streetlights in this city and, after dusk fell, the towering blocks of flats – Augustus had limited their height to seventy feet, but laws were made to be broken – resulted in streets so dark that even an emperor could walk along them unnoticed, brawl in them unrecognized.2 The rich man in his scarlet cloak could swirl through the streets with a long line of attendants carrying flickering brass lamps and torches – but even the wealthy weren’t safe. Death at the hands of bandits was a common enough end that it had its own inscriptional shorthand on tombstones.3 And while the rich had torches and attendants, the poor had to hurry on alone, their way lit only with a single guttering lamp, through streets stinking of piss and studded with shit, through the dripping arches of the aqueducts, through the dark. Through the fear.4
Because the Romans were afraid, very afraid, of the dark.5 They were afraid of thieves and robbers and brigands, of cold iron and hard clubs. And above all they were afraid of ghosts. Look carefully and the fear can be seen, clearly, in their writings. Among the upright architectural treatises and the stirring tales of military victories in foreign lands, there are other works that speak not of conquered peoples but of unconquered terrors: of the terror of the dark, and of the ghosts of the night; the terror of pale shades that flit and of the shadowed tomb.6 In the graveyards, wild figs grew, splitting open tombs with their roots.7 In the shadows, cries were heard. Beneath those straight minds lay crooked fears, and beneath the white marble statues of the gardens of Maecenas lay white bones. For those famous gardens – a powerful symbol of growing Roman sophistication – had been built on a necropolis, on the mass graves of criminals and paupers. The corpses, so one poet hinted, had not quite been covered over.8 And at night, into these places, the magic came.
For there was magic in Rome, in those days. Modern minds might not take such things seriously, but for the ancients magic was serious – deadly so. Roman poets immortalized it, Roman laws banned it, Roman mothers warned their children against it. Witches – or so the poet Horace said – crept into those gardens of Maecenas at night, with their pale faces and their unkempt hair and black robes, and their strange rites.9 Some of these hags performed rites among the dead – pouring blood sacrifices to summon spirits, or to turn the path of the moon, or to control the fates. But many did even more horrifying work among the living. In another poem, Horace wrote of the most feared witches of all: the child-snatchers. These women had vipers for hair, it was said, and stones for hearts, and they would abduct a small boy and then they would kill him, even as his soft mouth begged for mercy.10
All ridiculous, of course – just Horace being silly. Or so Romans might tell themselves by day. But when darkness came – when the sun set, when shadows fell, when a child was lost – it was hard to see clearly what was ridiculous and what was not. ‘A magical hand snatched me,’ reads the epitaph on one ancient tombstone, erected for a four-year-old boy. Not just any boy, either, but a slave boy from the house of the Caesars themselves – and evidently a beloved one, as it would not have been cheap to commemorate him so. But, as his epitaph makes clear, love wasn’t enough to save him from dark magic. There is ‘cruelty everywhere’, the stone warns. ‘You parents,’ its ominous inscription reads, ‘Guard well your children / lest grief be fixed in your whole heart.’11
Many might laugh at all this – but even those who thought witches were nonsense knew that knives were real enough. You didn’t need to believe in magic to believe in magical rites. And these rites, as educated Romans knew, could be appalling. Stillborn infants, records Pliny the Elder, were ‘cut up limb by limb for the most abominable practices.’12 The idea of this frightened people enough that, eventually, the law stepped in. ‘If any man or woman shall undertake the crime of killing an infant,’ ruled one later law, thought to have been formulated against magical practices, ‘let all know that the guilty party shall be punished with death.’13 The Christians weren’t the only ones who believed that drinking human blood might have magical powers.
There were other fears, other spells – so many spells. And so many who claimed to be able to perform them. For, alongside its more familiar professions – its straight-backed centurions and its serpent-tongued orators; its engineers and its architects and its lawyers – Rome also had a large number of people who made their living through more disreputable means: through magic. They are less celebrated these days, but they were there, a rich seam of specialists who, for a price, would perform any magical service you required. Horace wrote about the witches and the hags, but it certainly wasn’t just them. There were also the fortune-tellers and the exorcists, the diviners and the augurs and the haruspices, the astrologers and the enchanters and the poisoners and – or so the cynics would say – the priests. And, most famous of all, there were the magicians – or, to give them their Latin name: the magi.
The magi themselves would doubtless have baulked at being bracketed together with the hags and the chancers. In Persia, such men were a proper priestly caste: there, Herodotus wrote, the magi interpreted the dreams of kings and even had the power to offer human sacrifices. In Persia, the magi were men of status, practising something closer to what a modern eye would call religion rather than magic; though, such nice distinctions – insofar as they existed at all in the ancient world – were largely lost in translation. So, in the Rome of the first century AD, the word magi came to be widely used to mean little more than ‘magicians’, ‘diviners’ – or, at best, ‘astronomers’– and to refer to any wonder-worker who came from the East. Perhaps they came from Persia, but ancient geography was vague and so you might also qualify as a magician if you came from Egypt or even from India – from any of those lands of spice and of strangeness and – at least in Roman minds – of powers beyond imagining.14
Precisely what magic Roman magicians had practised was, for a long time, not very clear to modern scholars. Rome officially disapproved of magic, and had done for centuries. Stand before the Twelve Tables, Rome’s most ancient and august legal code – already almost half a millennium old when Christ was born – and there, in beaten bronze, among the sober statutes about land disputes and inheritance procedures and the right height to which one should prune fruit trees, it was possible to see other laws, far stranger laws: laws that ruled against anyone who ‘enchants by singing an evil incantation’ or against any miscreant who ‘enchants away crops’.15 It was almost more alarming that Rome outlawed magic than it would have been if it had ignored it: official disapproval denoted official anxiety. ‘There is no one’, wrote Pliny the Elder, ‘who doesn’t fear being bound by evil curses.’16
Most educated Greeks and Romans treated magicians with frank disdain. Pliny’s writing drips with disapproval as he recounts ‘the infamous lies that have been promulgated by the magicians’.17 It wasn’t just the Twelve Tables that issued penalties: the emperor Augustus himself had thousands of prophetic texts burned, and the punishments meted out to magicians could be horrifyingly vicious.18 One Roman legal expert later noted that people who perform ‘impious or nocturnal sacrifices, to enchant, curse, or bind anyone with a spell, are either crucified or thrown to beasts.’19 Magicians themselves ‘should be burned alive.’20
Once the Roman Empire embraced Christianity in the fourth century, laws against magic hardened even further. The Bible itself offered good precedent for rooting out magic: when St Paul visited Ephesus, he caused its inhabitants to be so seized with fear by his miracles that ‘a number of those who had practiced magic arts brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all. And they counted the value of them and found it came to fifty thousand pieces of silver.’21 No doubt the number is a vast exaggeration, but the point is clear: Christianity was happy to be associated with the extravagant burnings of incorrect books.
In later centuries, as Christianity consolidated then extended its power, magical texts were cracked down on further. House-to-house searches were conducted by fervent Christian brethren, who served their God by seeking out and burning unacceptable texts.22 Many magical books were burned at such times – though the men lighting the bonfires were not careful bibliophiles, and volumes of philosophy and the liberal arts ended up in the flames too.23 At particularly dangerous moments, intellectuals – terrified of the mere taint of magic – burned their own libraries themselves, lest the accusation of magic might attach itself to them.
The result of all this is that, today, evidence for ancient magic is scant. There was never a total absence of writings about magicians – text after text can be found disparaging magical practices, or despising them, or outlawing them. But there were no libraries by magicians themselves, no great compendiums of ancient lore. Most magical books that existed in ancient times had, as the translator and academic Hans Dieter Betz put it, ‘disappeared as the result of systematic suppression and destruction.’24 An entire genre of classical writing had been lost. Or so, for centuries, it seemed.
And then, in the first half of the nineteenth century, some unusual papyri started to turn up in the antiquities markets of Europe.