Daughters of Hecate: Women & Magic in the Ancient World.

• Author: Fried, Lisbeth S.
• Position: Book review

Daughters of Hecate: Women & Magic in the Ancient World. Edited by KlMBERLY B. STRATTON and DAYNA S. KALLERES. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2014. Pp. xv + 533. $39.95 (paper)

The essays in this volume examine the ancient background of the association of women with witchcraft that has contributed to early modern witch-hunts and to a continuing presence in popular culture. It considers the links between women and magic in Roman, Jewish, and late antique culture. The essays are divided into three sections: the first treats literary presentations of magic, the second magical discourse in practice, and the third material culture. Stratton's introduction locates the volume as an intervention more in the scholarship on witchcraft than in the study of antiquity. She points out that while the association of magic with women is frequent in the early modern period, it is not found in the Middle Ages and is not universal even later. Yet, Stratton argues, the scholarship on witchcraft has been influenced by assumptions that it is inherently female.

In the first section, Babette Stanley Spaeth discusses the Greek and the Roman witch, and Kimberly Stratton treats "Magic, Abjection, and Gender in Roman Literature." Both essays are valuable, especially for non-specialists. Spaeth's paper argues that Latin poetry portrays witches as more grotesque and disgusting than Greek literature does. It is good to be reminded that the witches represented in ancient Greek literature are young and beautiful. The physical nastiness of many Latin witches is important for reception. However, if we want to understand the authors themselves, genre and accidents of preservation need to be considered--for example, if the Lydian woman who seems to be giving the speaker a magical treatment for impotence in Hipponax fr. 92 was described in the poem, she was not pretty. Also, Silver Latin generally tends to the baroque, and the extravagantly disgusting Erichto is typical of Lucan. Stratton uses J. Kristeva's "abjection" to define the way magic in Roman literature threatens the integrity of the body and patriarchal power, and she argues that this abjectness led to the association of women with magic. Stratton's emphasis on how magic violates physical integrity is enlightening, but the abject is not a useful category, since it can cover anything and so defines nothing. Stratton tends to ignore genre, citing erotic magic in Tibullus in a discussion of the threat adultery posed...