The Materiality of Magic is an exciting new book about an aspect of magic that is usually neglected. Considerations of black (i.e., harmful) and white (i.e., beneficial) magic often depended entirely on who was the intended target, with magic directed against royalty punishable by death throughout antiquity, not necessarily because of the practice of magic per se, but because the practice was aimed at those in positions of power. Judgment of legitimacy was a matter of perspective, as practices considered "magical" by modern Western standards permeated ancient societies and had potential legitimacy according to accepted social norms. Even this general description poses certain difficulties and the broad nature of magic may necessitate dispensing with any universal definitions in favor of interpretations sensitive to their cultural and temporal contexts. In general, magic has been understood as the attempt to influence a course of events through intentional actions beyond direct physical cause, typically of a ritual nature, performed by gods, skilled practitioners, and laity alike. There is serious difficulty in defining the limits of what constitutes magical practice in the ancient world and the concept of magic had culturally specific interpretations that varied across time and place. The paper then proceeds to suggest possible reasons for magic's lack of salience in the early Empire, including the role of various sceptical discourses concerned with the supernatural in general and magic in particular, and the consequence of the largely agonistic context of its use on the limited occasions that it was employed. Not only is evidence for its presence more equivocal than usually presumed, but magic is found to be strikingly absent from major popular cultural sources that shed light on the presuppositions and preoccupations of most of the empire's inhabitants, and to have had little explanatory or symbolic utility. However, this paper argues that if we attempt, having determined a contextually appropriate definition of magic, to gauge the prevalence and significance of magic in this period, it can be seen to have had little cultural salience. 1 A variety of written and material evidence is commonly taken to be indicative of both the regular use of magic and widespread anxiety about its deployment. Magic is usually assumed to have been ubiquitous and culturally significant in the early Roman Empire, something exemplified by Pliny the Elder's claim that "there is no one who does not fear to be spellbound by curse tablets". In short, if we are to progress in our understanding of Roman socio-moral instrumentalization of ocular malformation in relation to the evil eye, we must pay careful attention to the contexts and strategies of our texts. In transposing the theme to his figure of the procuress Dipsas almost a century earlier, Ovid created a synecdoche for moral disorder at Rome itself shortly before the two Augustan laws of 18 b.c.e. This paper understands Pliny the Elder’s accounts of peoples and families able to cast the evil eye, objectified in the possession of a double pupil, as a significant aspect of his socio-moral account of the effects of world-empire upon Rome. The second was physiognomics, the systematization, mainly by the Peripatetics but also by some Hippocratic authors, of the popular idea that ethical character can be read from somatic signs. The first was the paradoxographic or mirabilia tradition, a literary genre that in the aftermath of Alexander’s conquests inventoried supposed natural and anthropological wonders, reports that were subsequently brought up to date and adapted by Roman authors such as Cicero and Varro. During the early Roman Principate, the literary representation of such malformations was clearly influenced by two genres that had been developed in the Greek world during the Hellenistic period. All over the world, such phenomena are often interpreted as an index of inherent personal capacity for causing harm. Ocular pathologies are a natural phenomenon that can be detected empirically.
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