The last remark brings us to charges of evil practices made against the magicians. Besides poisons, they specialize in love-potions and drugs to produce abortions;[198] and some of their operations are inhuman or obscene and abominable. They attempt baleful sorcery or the transfer of disease from one person to another.[199] Osthanes and even Democritus propound such remedies as drinking human blood or utilizing in magic compounds and ceremonies parts of the corpses of men who have been violently slain.[200] Pliny thinks that humanity owes a great debt to the Roman government for abolishing those monstrous rites of human sacrifice, “in which to slay a man was thought most pious; nay more, to eat men was thought most wholesome.”[201]
Pliny’s censure of magic is mainly intellectual.
Pliny nevertheless lays less stress upon the moral argument against magic as criminal or indecent than he does upon the intellectual objection to it as untrue and unscientific. Indeed, so far as decency is concerned, his own medicine will be seen to be far from prudish, while he elsewhere gives instances of magicians guarding against defilement.[202] Moreover, among the methods employed and the results sought by magic which he frequently mentions there are comparatively few that are morally objectionable, although they seem without exception false. But many of their recipes aim at the cure of disease and other worthy, or at least admissible, objects. Possibly Pliny has somewhat censored their lore and tried to exclude all criminal secrets, but his censure seems more intellectual than moral. For instance, he fills a long chapter with extracts from a treatise on the virtues of the chameleon and its parts by Democritus, whom he regards as a leading purveyor of magic lore.[203] In opening the chapter Pliny hails “with great pleasure” the opportunity to expose “the lies of Greek vanity,” but at its close he expresses a wish that Democritus himself had been touched with the branch of a palm which he said prevents immoderate loquacity. Pliny then adds more charitably, “It is evident that this man, who in other respects was a wise and most useful member of society, has erred from too great zeal in serving humanity.”
Vagueness of Pliny’s scepticism.
Pliny himself fails to maintain a consistently sceptical attitude towards magic. His exact attitude is often hard to determine. Often it is difficult to say whether he is speaking in sober earnest or in a tone of light and easy pleasantry and sarcasm, as in the passage just cited concerning Democritus. Another puzzling point is his frequent excuse that he will list certain assertions of the magicians in order to expose or confute them. But really he usually simply sets them forth, apparently expecting that their inherent and patent absurdity will prove a sufficient refutation of them. On the rare occasions when he undertakes to indicate in what the absurdity consists his reasoning is scarcely scientific or convincing. Thus he affirms that “it is a peculiar proof of the vanity of the magicians that of all animals they most admire moles who are condemned by nature in so many ways, to perpetual blindness and to dig in the darkness as if they were buried.”[204] And he assails the belief of the magi[205] that an owl’s egg is good for diseases of the scalp by asking, “Who, I beg, could ever have seen an owl’s egg, since it is a prodigy to see the bird itself?” Moreover, he sometimes cites assertions of the magicians without any censure, apology, or expression of disbelief; and there are many other passages where it is practically impossible to tell whether he is citing the magicians or not. Sometimes he will apparently continue to refer to them by a pronoun in chapters where they have not been mentioned by name at all.[206] In other places he will imperceptibly cease to quote the magi and after an interval perhaps as imperceptibly resume citation of their doctrines.[207] It is also difficult to determine just when writers like Democritus and Pythagoras are to be regarded as representatives of magic and when their statements are accepted by Pliny as those of sound philosophers.
Magic and science indistinguishable.
Perhaps, despite Pliny’s occasional brave efforts to withstand and even ridicule the assertions of the magicians, he could not free himself from a secret liking for them and more than half believed them. At any rate he believed very similar things. Even more likely is it that previous works on nature were so full of such material and the readers of his own day so interested in it, that he could not but include much of it. Once he explains[208] that certain statements are scarcely to be taken seriously, yet should not be omitted, because they have been transmitted from the past. Again he begs the reader’s indulgence for similar “vanities of the Greeks,” “because this too has its value that we should know whatever marvels they have transmitted.”[209] The truth of the matter probably is that Pliny rejected some assertions of the magicians but found others acceptable; that he gets his occasional attitude of scepticism and ridicule of their doctrines from one set of authorities, and his moments of unquestioning acceptance of their statements from other authors on whom he relies. Very likely in the books which he used it often was no clearer than it is in the Natural History whether a statement was to be ascribed to the magi or not. Very possibly Pliny was as confused in his own mind concerning the entire business as he seems to be to us. He could no more keep magic out of his Natural History than poor Mr. Dick could keep Charles the First’s head out of his book. One fact at any rate stands out clearly, the prominence of magic in his encyclopedia and in the learning of his age.
IV. The Science of the Magi
Magicians as investigators of nature.
Let us now further examine Pliny’s picture of magic, not as he expressly defines or censures it, but as he reflects its own assertions and purposes in his fairly numerous citations from its literature and perhaps its practice. Here I shall rather strictly limit my survey to those statements which Pliny definitely ascribes by name to the magi or magic art. The most striking fact is that the magicians are cited again and again concerning the supposed properties, virtues, and effects of things in nature—herbs, animals, and stones. These virtues are, it is true, often employed in an effort to produce wonderful results, and often too they are combined with some fantastic rite or superstitious ceremonial performed by a human agent. But in many cases either no rite at all is suggested or merely some simple medicinal application; and in a few cases there is no mention of any particular operation or result, the magicians are cited simply as authorities concerning the great but unspecified virtues of natural objects. Indeed, they stand out in Pliny’s pages not as mere sorcerers or enchanters or wonder-workers, but as those who have gone the farthest and in most detail—too far and too curiously in Pliny’s opinion—into the study of medicine and of nature. Sometimes their statements, cited without censure, supplement others concerning the species under discussion;[210] sometimes they are his sole source of information on the subject in hand.[211]