GREECE AND ROME

and such an attribution must be centuries too late. "What is certain is that this Osthanes, in particular, drove the peoples of Greece to a frenzy—not merely with a greed for his science."Original: "Quod certum est, hic maxime Osthanes ad rabiem, non auiditatem modo scientiæ eius, Græcorum populos egit." Pliny held Zoroaster to be, in effect, the first magician, but this Osthanes could not have been his pupil, inasmuch as, although the Pahlavi books traditionally place this master's era between the first half of the seventh century and the sixth century, most scholars have no hesitation in assigning him to a hundred years, or even several hundred years, before this date. Apuleius (De Magia, XXVI) mentions Zoroaster and Oromazus as the inventors of sorcery: "Do you not know that magic... is an art pleasing to the immortal gods... a science which has been noble and reverend from the very times of Zoroaster and Oromazus, who invented it, a science which is the handmaid of the lords of heaven?" He classes Osthanes with Epimenides, Orpheus, and Pythagoras, "whom the vulgar term magicians too."Original: "eos uero uulgo magos nominent."

St. Augustine, in The City of God, VII, 35, quoting Varro, says that various kinds of divination used both in Greece and Rome were of Eastern origin. "For Numa himself, being not instructed by any prophet or angel of God, was fain to fall to hydromancy: making his gods (or rather his devils) to appear in water and instruct him in his religious institutions. Which kind of divination, says Varro, came from Persia, and was used by Numa and afterwards by Pythagoras, wherein they used blood also and called forth spirits infernal. Necromancy the Greeks call it; but necromancy or hydromancy, whether you like, there it is that the dead seem to speak."

One of the earliest and, incidentally, one of the most important scenes of necromancy in Greek literature is to be found in the Odyssey, Book XI. Odysseus has been advised by Circe—the witch, be it noted—to take counsel from the shade of Tiresias, the famous seer, and so he makes his way to the shores of eternal darkness, the home of the Cimmerians, where he lands and seeks the poplar groves that skirt the house of Hades. Between earth and the realm of Hades is an intermediate region of ghosts, Erebus. Tartarus, the prison of the Titans and other rebels against divine providence, is as far below Hades as Hades is below the earth.