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.100 The term and its family derive from the Old Per-sian name for priest magu- (nom.maguF) and is etymologically relatedto Avestan mo³u-, which seems to have meant (member of a) tribe.101Magos and its sphere of application have received much attention fromscholars because it is the basis, by way of Latin magus, of our term magic.102 Properly the term mageia refers to the activity of a magos,magikos is the related adjective, while the terms manganeuein to use ofcharms/trickery , manganon charm/philter , mageuein to be a magos/use magic arts , mageumata charms, spells and related terms are allderivative.Given the range of Empedocles activities and the fluidity of allthe terms considered so far, there is of course no very good reason whyhe should not have been called a magos, since his knowledge of weathermagic and reported ability to evoke the dead make him remarkablysimilar to the skills attributed to Persian magi, who comprised from theviewpoint of the Greeks a significant and respected group of religiousspecialists.The central problem with the philological history of the term magos andits derivatives is that they tell us little to nothing directly about the activ-ities performed by this kind of individual.Moreover, when the Greeks were 9781405132381_4_002.qxd 30/10/2007 12:11 Page 55A Framework for Greek Magic 55not speaking explicitly about Persian magoi, who were the servants of thePersian king and his empire and from whom the Greeks borrowed the termmagos, their use of the term in the fifth century bce regularly connotescharlatanry and deception, usually for personal gain.To give some ideaof this unhelpful state of affairs, let us turn to the often-quoted firstinstance of magos in Greek.The attestation in question is found inHeraclitus of Ephesus (late sixth century bce) but because it is reportedby a later author, Clement of Alexandria (early third century ce), it is unclearhow much of the passage is original.According to Clement, then, Heraclitusis reported to have prophesied that a punishment by fire awaited thosewho wander in the night: magoi, bacchants, maenads, initiates 103 becausethese individuals improperly initiated others into the mysteries.There areanachronisms in the wording here of the terms for Dionysiac worshippers,bacchants and maenads, that have caused some scholars to doubt theauthenticity of the fragment, but Heraclitus characterization of magoi isclearly negative.It is not as clear whether the magos in this passage refersto Persian magoi, although that may be a reasonable inference given thatEphesus was under Persian control in the time of Heraclitus and Persiaalready had, by the middle of the sixth century bce, begun to expand westinto Asia Minor.104 But the main problem from our point of view is that,even if we accept that magoi were associated with private cults andperformed initiations that were out of line with mainstream civic cult, asHeraclitus suggests, we still learn next to nothing of what they actually did.It is above all in fifth-century Greek tragedy where we find referencesto the dubious, non-Persian magos known stereotypically for his skull-duggery and avarice.Some of this evidence accords remarkably well withwhat we find in On the Sacred Disease and Plato.The most commonexample comes from Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannos, datable toward the lastquarter of the fifth century.When Oedipus begins to suspect that Creonand his court seer, the famously blind Teiresias, are collaborating to over-throw him, he denounces Teiresias as a magos, a weaver of plots, and acrafty beggar-priest (agurtBs) who only has sight when it comes toprofit.105 The association between magos and agurtBs is exactly that madeby the author of On the Sacred Disease,106 which attests in my view to thewide nature of this stereotype.It is also in this context that Oedipus men-tions the envy or malice (phthonos) of Teiresias107 as the driving forcebehind his presumed political ambition.This term, phthonos, is often asso-ciated in Greek literature with magic and has led at least one scholar toargue that envy is therefore its principal motivation.108 I am very sympa-thetic to this view, inasmuch as rivalry and personal ambition are frequentlyassociated with certain types of magical accusations, such as thoseinvolving curse tablets, although it reveals next to nothing about why magic 9781405132381_4_002.qxd 30/10/2007 12:11 Page 5656 A Framework for Greek Magictakes the shape that it does for the Greeks.However, recognizing that envy,malice, or ill-will (all covered by the term phthonos) play an important rolein magical accusations gives us another way to demonstrate how magicis situated within an intentional context, defined by social relations.There are other examples of magos and related terms deployed within Greektragedy with the same range of associations as those in the OedipusTyrannos.None of these references adds anything substantial, however,to the view that these so-named individuals were suspected of abusing theirprivileged relationship with divinity for private rather than public gain.The deceptive uses to which magic was put by magoi in tragedy havelittle in common with the activities of Persian priests, or the magi proper,who worshipped fire, sacrificed, chanted, sang theogonies, interpreteddreams and solar eclipses, and performed numerous other religious rites.Our source for most of these references to the early Persian magoi isHerodotus, but there are important if scattered references in other histo-rians and philosophers of the fifth and fourth centuries bce.109 With theexception of three ritual events mentioned by Herodotus, the balance ofevidence suggests that the Greeks regarded the activities of this Persianpriestly class as more or less legitimate in contrast to how they viewed theactivities of a Teiresias or an anonymous beggar-priest.But the meaningof three ritual events appears less transparent to Herodotus, and may giveus insight into where Greek notions of religious piety diverged fromPersian.First, in a passage that describes the march of the Persian kingXerxes and his forces westward to the river Strymon in Thrace, Herodotustells us that the Persians paused there and the magoi made a bloodsacrifice of white horses to obtain good omens.110 This sacrifice is on a parwith the typical activities of the Greek military seer, although the contextand the language used by Herodotus do not permit us to say with accu-racy whether divination from horse entrails or some other type of divina-tion was involved.The Greeks, for instance, did not divine from horseentrails.What is interesting is that Herodotus refers to this sacrifice by theverb pharmakeuD (from pharmakon drug, spell ), which is used else-where regularly in Greek to connote magic in the sense in which, for exam-ple, the author of On the Sacred Disease and Plato criticize magic.111 It isnot clear whether Herodotus is unconvinced of the religious legitimacy ofthis rite, or whether he employs the verb because he is influenced by hisown preconceptions about Greek magic.But his next example appears toraise further questions.After the sacrifice at the river Strymon, the Persians passed over to anEdonian town named the Nine Ways.Learning that this was the name ofthe town owing to the number of bridges thrown across it, the magoi thenfor some inexplicable reason buried alive there nine boys and maidens taken 9781405132381_4_002.qxd 30/10/2007 12:11 Page 57A Framework for Greek Magic 57from among the people of the country
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