1 - Plato

Summary

Alcibiades I 120e–122c, translation W. R. M. Lamb

Laws 933c–e, translation Marios Skempis

Although he neither wrote systematically nor extensively on the topic, Plato (b. 428/427 BCE; d. 348/47 BCE) played a formative role in shaping Western discourses of “magic”. The two statements presented here – Alcibiades I 120e–122c and Laws 933c–e – albeit contradictory, exerted a major influence on later writers.

The Alcibiades I, a work dubiously ascribed to Plato, discusses the traits and skills that a potential political leader such as the young aristocrat Alcibiades, Socrates' interlocutor in the dialogue, ought to possess. In our passage, Socrates refers to the Persian kings and their manners of educating their sons; we learn that at the age of fourteen the Persian princes learn “magic” (Greek “μαγεία”, translated by Bury as “magian Lore”) from the “wisest” teacher in the Persian Empire. “Magic” is here defined as “worship of the gods” (θεῶν θεραπεία) – an apparently positive statement often quoted by later authors who intended to valorize the concept (see, e.g., Chapter 10 in this volume). Furthermore, the Alcibiades I is one of the first extant texts that links Zoroaster to the concept of “magic”, another idea that had substantial impact upon later authors who advanced Zoroaster to the rank of one of the founding fathers of “magic” (see Chapters 2 and 5; see in more detail Stausberg 1998 I: 503–69).