This article aims to offer a fresh analysis of two passages in the extensive necromancy episode in Lucan's Bellum Ciuile: the ritual to reanimate the dead soldier's corpse (6.667–73), and the surgical procedure Erichtho then proceeds to undertake (6.750–7), resembling the practice of a vivisection. The study will focus mostly on the strong connection of magic to medical traditions in antiquity, with a commentary on, and analysis of, these verses through the lenses of medical vocabulary, themes and motifs. It ultimately concludes that Lucan was familiar with the language and characteristics of the medical tradition, enriched his report with them, and was playing with his audience's knowledge of the same.

The Te’omim Cave is a large karst cave located in the Jerusalem Hills. Since 2009, the cave has been explored by our team as a joint project of the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University and the Cave Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Over 120 intact oil lamps were collected in the 2010–2016 survey seasons from all sections of the cave; most of them were dated to the second to fourth centuries CE. All of these lamps had been deliberately inserted in narrow, deep crevices in the main chamber walls or beneath the rubble. Some crevices contained groups of oil lamps mixed with weapons and pottery vessels from earlier periods or placed with human skulls. This article discusses the possibility that the oil lamps, weapons, human skulls, and other artifacts were used as part of necromancy ceremonies that took place in the cave during the Late Roman period, and that the cave may have served as a local oracle (nekyomanteion).

In one of his fragments, Empedocles addresses his protégé Pausanias, predicting or promising that he will learn pharmaka, a word that is usually understood to mean herbal ‘drugs' or ‘remedies’ for disease, an interpretation that in turn seems to have been encouraged by a modern understanding that Empedocles was an empirically minded medical doctor. An alternate interpretation is suggested, however, by the recently published Getty Hexameters which use the word pharmaka several times to refer to hexametrical incantations that will protect a group of houses or a city from danger. These hexameters, moreover, are inscribed on a lead tablet of late-classical date that most probably came from the Sicilian city of Selinus, a date and a provenance that put its composition in close proximity to Empedocles himself.