Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Private Life 193
At the beginning of the Republic, Plato puts the following pronouncement into
the mouth of the elderly Kephalos, which may serve as a fitting epitaph to the
instability of beliefs concerning the afterlife within even the same individual at
different periods of one’s life:
When a man gets to the end of his life he becomes subject to fear and anxiety
about what lies ahead. The stories told about people in Hades, that if you commit
crimes on earth you must pay for them down below, although they were
ridiculed for a while, now begin to disturb a man’s soul with the possibility that
they might be true. (330de)
immediately after decease, and sometimes it takes years to do so,
whether due to sentiment or to some vague notion that the dead
are still present and needy. Even the passing of a cherished household
pet provokes confused ideas.
MAGIC
Magic is a difficult concept to identify in ancient Greece, because
there was no category exactly equivalent to our modern notion.
(The word magos, from which the word magic derives, referred to a
Persian shaman.) It is likely that the use of what we might broadly
describe as magical practices was widespread in all places and at
all times, however. Although a number of Greek philosophers,
including Plato and Aristotle, as well as members of the medical
profession, tended to equate magic with fraud, there was never
any systematic persecution of its practitioners, as there was, for
instance, of witches in Medieval Europe and later.
This is all the more surprising in view of the negative image of
witches in Greek mythology. A particularly chilling example is
Medea, who, in Euripides’ play of that name, uses her dark skills
to fashion a deadly wedding dress for her ex-husband’s bride and
also murders her own children. As today, witchcraft seems to have
been associated primarily with women, especially foreigners.
The Hellenistic writer Theophrastos provides a compelling portrait of an individual
who is weighed down by a dread of both religious and magical taboos:
The superstitious man is the kind of person who . . . if a weasel crosses his path
will not walk on until someone else has passed him or until he has thrown three
stones across the road. . . . When he encounters smooth stones at the crossroads,