Volume 50, Number 7 · May 1, 2003
That Old Black Magic
By Jasper Griffin
Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4
translated from the Latin and with commentary by Margaret Graver
University of Chicago Press, 254 pp., $40.00; $17.00 (paper)
Greek and Roman Necromancy
by Daniel Ogden
Princeton University Press, 313 pp., $47.50
In some ways the classical world of Greece and Rome seems very remote from ours: there were no automobiles, no planes, no television, no weapons (in the modern sense) of mass destruction. There was even no America. In other ways it seems surprisingly close. That is so in part because the art and literature of that time have never, like those of Egypt or Mesopotamia, sunk out of sight and needed to be rediscovered and laboriously deciphered; partly because an unbroken tradition of thought links us to that world, while we have no such link to the great civilizations of Asia or of the Americas. Not least, we often find the expression of sensibilities and interests which we recognize as intelligible to us and, in many ways, akin to our own.
Review, 3168 words
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