1 Earliest Rome

I I . T H R E A T S T O T H E R O M A N O R D E R
it alone integrated and incorporated the three other arts that had the greatest sway over
the human mind. (2) No one will doubt that it first arose from medicine and under the
guise of promoting health it stealthily inserted itself as a superior and holier form; so, to
its most tempting and welcome promises, it added the powers of religio, on which the
human race remains even today completely blind; then, to add an extra force, it blended
in astrology, everybody being keen to know their future and believing that it may be
known most accurately from the heavens. So having trapped the human spirit in a triple
bond it has reached such heights that today it has sway over a great proportion of nations
and, in the East, rules the king of kings . . .
(12) It is certain that magic has left traces among the Italic peoples too, for example in
our Twelve Tables and in other sources, as I have explained earlier . Only in
the 657th year of the city when Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus and Publius Eicinius Crassus
were consuls was a senatorial decree passed banning human sacrifice, which
shows that down to that time these monstrous rites were still performed. 1
(13) The Gallic provinces were certainly controlled by magic, and that down to our
own time. For it was only the Principate of Tiberius Caesar that suppressed their Druids
and this species of prophets and doctors. 2
But need I recall these actions against an art
which has actually crossed the Ocean and reached the wilds of nature? Even today Britain
in its madness practises magic with such grand rituals that one could imagine that she
gave it to the Persians. So, all the peoples in the world, though they are at odds or
unknown to each other, are in agreement on this doctrine, and one cannot calculate how
great a debt is owed to the Romans for having swept away these monstrosities in which to
kill a person was an extremely religious act, and to eat him guaranteed one's well-being.
(14) As Osthanes said, 3
there are several types of magic. He promises divination from
water, globSs, air, stars, lamps, basins, axes and by many other methods, as well as
interviews with ghosts and those in the underworld. In our time the Emperor Nero
discovered that all this was a deceptive fraud; for his passion for magic was no less than
that for the lyre and tragic recitations, his attainment of the highest human fortune
arousing in him the most profound vices of his soul; his principal ambition was to give
orders to the gods, and he could rise to no nobler objective. No one ever patronized an
art more vigorously. (15) For this purpose he had no lack of wealth, strength, aptitude for
learning, or anything else the world offered. What an immense and irrefutable proof of
the falseness of magic is the fact that Nero abandoned it!
264
1. See Vol. 1, 80-3 and 154-6; 6.6. The Twelve Tables are the first Roman law code, com­
piled 451—450 B.C.
2. Suetonius [Life of ClaudiusTb) claims that Claudius stamped out the Druids; see Vol. 1,
341-2.
3. A Persian of the fifth centurv B.C. A book allegedly by him was. according to Pliny, the
earliest work on magic.