Are they, and welcome to Emperors of Rome, a Roman history podcast from Latrobe University.

I'm your host, Matt Smith, and with me today is Daniel Ogden, Professor in Classics

and Ancient History at the University of Exeter.

This is Episode C-L-X-X-I, Roman Magic.

It was an essential part of the Roman world.

You could use it in love, revenge, profit, life, and death.

All levels of Roman society made use of it, and it was an integral part of the understanding

of both religion and medicine.

Here's Daniel Ogden.

Various authorities, modern authorities will come out with definitions of magic.

They're all really a version of Fraser's definition, you know, Fraser Goldenberg Fraser,

that in religion one has a subplikative attitude towards the gods, you know, and ask the

gods for things nicely, and in magic you order the gods to do things.

Every work of scholarship comes out, feels obliged, and it's preface to produce some sort

of definition of that sort, you know, some working definition, and I think we can be

pretty sure that the Romans wouldn't recognise any of these definitions.

I'm into folklore and folk tale in a big way, and I strongly believe that it's through

folklore and folk tale that one understands phenomena like magic in an ancient society.

You're not told a definition of magic when you're a baby, you hear the stories, and,

you know, frankly, I mean, most children today in the modern world, in Australia, in Britain,

that's how they know what magic is, isn't it?

Because they see the stories, they read the stories.

...