Magic in Pliny the Elder revisited

Аннотация

The article is devoted to a critical revision of information about the essence, history and content of ancient magic, which Pliny the Elder presents in Books 28 and 30 of his Natural History, as well as to analyzing a number of theoretical and source-study approaches to this information, which have developed to date in modern scholarship. The general reconsideration of Pliny the Elder's concept of magic is caused, firstly, by the fact that our knowledge of magic and its theoretical underpinnings among the ancients has greatly expanded over the past half century, and, on the other hand, by the fact that in the past few decades the scientific approach to Natural History has greatly changed. Without ceasing to be, as it was for the medieval reader, a wonderful grandmother's chest from which a variety of things can be obtained for various research purposes, Naturalis Historia became interesting in and of itself, as an opus sui generis. In the article, discussion of magic in Pliny the Elder derives primarily from the philosophical and ideological premises of Natural History itself...