CHAPTER VI
Critics of Magic
The reader will remember how men in the Roman Empire condemned "magic" but understood the word in a restricted and bad sense; how Pliny made pretensions to complete freedom from all belief in magic and how inconsistent was his actual attitude; how Seneca rejected magic only in part, accepting divination in all its ramifications. This partial rejection and partial acceptance of magic by the same individual seem characteristic of the age of the Empire, as one would expect of a time when magic was in a state of decay and science in a process of development. It is true that this rejection of certain varieties of magic often proceeded from the motive of morality rather than of scepticism. Thus in Cicero's De Divinatione, Quintus Cicero is represented as closing his long argument in favor of the truth of divination by solemnly asserting that he does not approve of sorcerers, nor of those who prophesy for sake of gain, nor of the practice of questioning spirits of the dead—which nevertheless, he says, was a custom of his brother's friend Appius.[1] But there were some men, we may well believe, who would reject even those varieties of magic which found a welcome in the minds of most educated people and in the general mass of the thought and science of the age. Such cases we shall now consider.
- ↑ De Divinatione, bk. i, ch. 58. "Haec habui, inquit, de divinatione quae dicerem. Nunc ilia testabor non me sortileges neque eos qui quaestus causa hariolentur, ne psychomantia quidem quibus Appius amicus tuus uti solebat, agnoscere."
