III. Pliny’s Account of Magic.
Oriental origin of magic.
Pliny supplies some account of the origin and spread of magic[189] but a rather confused and possibly unreliable one, as he mentions two Zoroasters separated by an interval of five or six thousand years, and two Osthaneses, one of whom accompanied Xerxes, and the other Alexander, in their respective expeditions. He says, indeed, that it is not clear whether one or two Zoroasters existed. In any case magic has flourished greatly the world over for many centuries, and was founded in Persia by Zoroaster. Some other magicians of Media, Babylonia, and Assyria are mere names to Pliny; later he mentions others like Apollobeches and Dardanus. Although he thus derives magic from the orient, he appears to make no distinction, as we shall find other writers doing, between the Magi of Persia and ordinary magicians, nor does he employ the word magic in two senses. He makes it evident, however, that there have been other men who have regarded magic more favorably than he does.
Its spread to the Greeks.
Pliny next traces the spread of magic among the Greeks. He marvels at the lack of it in the Iliad and the abundance of it in the Odyssey. He is uncertain whether to class Orpheus as a magician, and mentions Thessaly as famous for its witches at least as early as the time of Menander who named one of his comedies after them. But he regards the Osthanes who accompanied Xerxes as the prime introducer of magic to the Greek-speaking world, which straightway went mad over it. In order to learn more of it, the philosophers Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, and Plato went into distant exile and on their return disseminated their lore. Pliny regards the works of Democritus as the greatest single factor in that dissemination of the doctrines of magic which occurred at about the same time that medicine was being developed by the works of Hippocrates. Some regarded the books on magic ascribed to Democritus as spurious, but Pliny insists that they are genuine.[190]
Its spread outside the Graeco-Roman world.
Outside of the Greek-speaking world, whence of course magic spread to Rome, Pliny mentions Jewish magic, represented by such names as Moses, Jannes, and Lotapes. But he holds that magic did not originate among the Hebrews until long after Zoroaster. He also speaks of the magic of Cyprus; of the Druids, who were the magicians, diviners, and medicine men of Gaul until the emperor Tiberius suppressed them; and of distant Britain.[191] Thus discordant nations and even those ignorant of one another’s existence agree the world over in their devotion to magic. From what Pliny tells us elsewhere of the Scythians we can see that the nomads of the Russian steppes and Turkestan were devoted to magic too.
Failure to understand its true origin.
It has been shown that Pliny regarded magic as a mass of doctrines formulated by a single founder and not as a gradual social evolution, just as the Greeks and Romans ascribed their laws and customs to some single legislator. He admits in a way, however, the great antiquity claimed by magic for itself, although he questions how the bulky dicta of Zoroaster and Dardanus could have been handed down by memory during so long a period. This remark again shows how little he thinks of magic as a set of social customs and attitudes perpetuated through constant and universal practice from generation to generation. Yet what he says of its widespread prevalence among unconnected peoples goes to prove this.
Magic and divination.