THE GEOGRAPHY OF WITCHCRAFT

of certain Greek heroes, especially Menelaus and Agamemnon, after Ilium (Troy) had fallen. The author of the Nostoi, a poem in five books, was Agias of Troezen (c. 750 B.C.), but he is a mere name to us. In some way, as appears from the Scholiast’s Argument to the Medea of Euripides, Medea was brought into the old epic, and the incident of the restoration of Aeson to youth was therein related. Pausanias, who had read the poem, tells us that it contained an account of the underworld, and it may be guessed that much light would have been thrown thence on Greek magic and eschatology.

It should incidentally be mentioned that in addition to the priest-sorcerers there grew up another class of wizards who, however, held a very inferior place in the public estimation and who were, it seems evident, on occasion addicted to jugglery and the most bare-faced charlatanry. These were the goetes (γόητες), whose name was derived from the wild shrieks and howls—Seneca’s barbaricus ululatus (barbarian howling)—with which they chanted their incantations. Yet they were feared almost as much as they were disliked, for in spite of their impostures, it was believed that they had malevolent powers not to be despised with impunity, and they were in fact generally credited with the most mischievous and unlucky intentions. They were the confectioners of love potions and poisons; they peddled their craft for money; they raised jars, jealousies, and strifes. The goetes were indeed most like the witches of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Sawyers, Demdikes, Cullenders, and the hags whom Bodin and De Lancre burned. The priests hated their tradition, and more than once laws were passed to check their activities. The cynic philosopher Oenomäus (c. A.D. 150) wrote a treatise The Goetes Unveiled in which he exposed their frauds and quackery.

It is supposed that the goetes were the indigenous wizards of Greece and that their arts preserved some rude aboriginal superstitions, while the more sober and solemn magic of the priests was, if not actually in its origin, at least in its development, Oriental. Pliny (Natural History, XXX, 1) attributes the importation of systematized magic into Greece to Osthanes, a soothsayer who accompanied Xerxes on his expedition against the West in 480 B.C., and he tells us that Osthanes was a disciple of Zoroaster. But this is uncritical...