Kernos

Revue internationale et pluridisciplinaire de religion

grecque antique
20 | 2007
Varia

CARASTRO Marcello, La cité des mages. Penser la

magie en Grèce ancienne
Fritz Graf

Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/kernos/211
DOI: 10.4000/kernos.211
ISSN: 2034-7871

Publisher
Centre international d'étude de la religion grecque antique

Printed version
Date of publication: 1 January 2007
ISSN: 0776-3824

Electronic reference
Fritz Graf, “CARASTRO Marcello, La cité des mages. Penser la magie en Grèce ancienne”, Kernos [Online],
20 | 2007, Online since 10 February 2011, connection on 26 February 2021. URL: http://
journals.openedition.org/kernos/211 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/kernos.211

Kernos
400 Revue des Livres

2. Comptes rendus et notices bibliographiques

CARASTRO Marcello, La cité des mages. Penser la magie en Grèce ancienne, Grenoble,
Jérôme Millon, 2006. 1 vol. 16 × 24 cm, 271 p. (coll. Horos). ISBN : 2 84137
190 5.
The traditional narrative on the history of magic in Greece understands its rise as the
result of Near Eastern influence on Greece; nwγος, after all, is a Persian word, attested in
Greece at the earliest in the late sixth century BCE, and magical rites have close parallels in
Mesopotamian texts. Past discussions resulted in two ways of understanding this influence.
An older view, palpably committed to an ideologically determined concept of ‘pure’
Hellenism, had it that magic, its practitioners and its rites introduced themselves into Greece
where these rites were previously unknown. A more recent view assumed the presence of
such rites and practices already in early Greece, as part and parcel of what the indigenous
actors understood as their religious tradition; Near Eastern practices and practitioners,
known in Greece through the close contacts with Persia, helped the Greeks to rethink magic
and segregate it as a specific field that was negatively viewed. This is the view C(arastro)
subscribes to in the present book, as I would myself.
The book – developed from a PhD thesis at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences
Sociales in Paris – presents its argument in three major steps. A first part (“L’avènement des
mágoi”, 17 61) looks at the religious specialists that fifth century Greeks called nwγοι, in a
Persian term extensively discussed in Herodotus’ ethnography, and at the ways Greeks
(tragedians, the author of On Sacred Disease, Gorgias) used this ethnographical fact to think
about their own religious specialists and their rites, such as diviners or kathartai, but also
about the role of language in society. This is convincing and helps to explain why the
semantics of nwγος and nαγεaα in fifth century Greek does not conform to our own
semantics, or those of the Imperial epoch. But it is bought with some streamlining of the
evidence: the text which some authors, the present writer included, regard as the first
attestation of the term in Greece, Heraclitus F 14 DK as cited in Clement of Alexandria, is
dismissed as spurious, since its negative connotations fit too well to the Christian
condemnation of magic [20f.]; I still would argue that the semantic value of the Heraclitean
use is different enough from the later meanings of nwγος, both of Clement’s time and of the
fifth century BCE, that this virtually guarantees the authenticity of the text. This is more
than mere quibbling, since it puts the Persian facts that the Greeks perceived, and the way
they perceived them, into a sharper focus: Heraclitus, after all, wrote in a world that was
under Persian rule.
The second part, “La constellation du thélgein” (65 159) constitutes the core of the book.
In a sweeping, but carefully argued and convincing move, C. analyzes the semantic and
symbolic nexus of θ€λγειν in early Greece, especially in Homer. From the gods that have the
power to ‘enchant’ humans (C.’s French uses the verb ‘méduser’ that conveys much better
what he is talking about) and thus freeze their own will and self determination (from Athena
and Zeus to Eros who even enchants Zeus [65 99]), C. leads the discussion to other
mythical figures that have a similar power – the Sirens and the music associated with them
and with θ€λγειν (101 139), and Circe whose drugs influence human thought and create
forgetfulness (141 159). C. succeeds to reconstruct a cultural system that reckoned with the
power of superhuman beings to suspend human autonomy and self determination and
subject it to another will through the use of words, musical sounds and dangerous
 Revue des Livres 401

substances – in short, the cultural nexus in which nαγεaα would inscribe itself, had the term
already existed.
The third part (“Penser la mageía” 163 216) analyzes how nαγεaα was practiced and
thought, once the complex was perceived as a special field of practices. A lengthy chapter
treats fifth century binding spells, centered on the very detailed interpretation of two texts,
one from Selinus, the other one from Carystus (163 187); this is compelling, although not
entirely novel. C. insists on the vital function of writing not just to fix an otherwise fleeting
and transient voice but because the very shape of what is written (“la disposition graphi
que”) has ritual power; this might well be, but we would need more proof than just three
underlinings in the Selinuntian lead tablet, and the evidence we have about the connection
between reciting a binding formula and writing it down does not bear C. out. The final
chapter treats Plato – not just the well known passages where the philosopher condemns
magical practices, but the way Socrates, the master of the powerful word, acts as a sorcerer
himself: C. succeeds to show that Plato is well inside the Greek symbolic nexus of magical
binding and that to describe him as the ancestor of a rationalist rejection of magic projects
later values on him. Surprisingly enough, Plato uses the term nwγος only once, and not in
the passages where he condemns ‘magical’ practices but in Rep. 9, 572E where the term
denotes the sophists: this again shows that to him the ritual practices were part of the
religious tradition, not something alien, and the nwγος was a master of the word.
C. succeeds in his aim to show that what we call magic was an integral part of the
symbolic system of the Greek cities from early on, and he can show how the Persian term
was used to think about some of its aspects in fifth century Athens; he is somewhat hazy,
however, in explaining why there was a need for such a rethinking. And it goes without
saying that his methodological stance makes it impossible to prove or disprove Near
Eastern imports into this system: whatever wandering practitioners might have brought (and
I am still convinced that they brought a considerable amount of private rituals during the
Archaic age), was seamlessly integrated. Scholars who are looking for answers on questions
of religious import and cross fertilization, then, have to look elsewhere, as do scholars who
want to know more on the Persian specialists that lent their name to the magicians, and on
magical practices in early Greece. Scholars, on the other hand, who want to know how
Greek reflection on the respective phenomena in their own religion started, will have a
useful and well argued study at their disposition.
Fritz Graf
(The Ohio State University, Columbus OH)

PAPALEXANDROU Nassos, The Visual Poetics of Power. Warriors, Youths, and

Tripods in Early Greece, Lanham / Boulder / New York / Toronto / Oxford,
Lexington Books, 2005. 1 vol. 15 × 22 cm, 293 p. ISBN : 0 7391 0734 8.
Que ce soit du point de vue de l’histoire de l’art et des techniques, des pratiques sociales
ou religieuses, les chaudrons à trépied de bronze occupent depuis longtemps une place
importante dans l’étude du monde grec. La forte valeur symbolique de l’objet, comme l’A. le
rappelle dans son 1er chapitre, a été mise en valeur pour un certain nombre d’usages et de
contextes : objet de don dans le monde des héros de l’épopée, offrande de prestige par
excellence dans les grands sanctuaires de l’époque géométrique et du haut archaïsme (IXe
VIIe s.), Olympie en tout premier lieu, prix de concours poétiques ou athlétiques, symbole
oraculaire, signe de souveraineté… Elle n’a cependant pas été explorée à fond, en particulier
pour les époques les plus anciennes, car les études sur les trépieds ont jusqu’ici négligé une
des composantes visuelles majeures de ces objets parfois monumentaux : les figurines d’atta
che en bronze qui, formant paire, ornaient parfois le haut des poignées ou le rebord de la