First-Year Seminar: Magicians and Witches in Greco-Roman Literature

3 units

This course examines the representation of magicians and witches in ancient Greek and Roman literature. The starting point is Apuleius' Metamorphoses (or The Golden Ass, as St. Augustine dubbed it), written in the second century CE. This work of narrative prose collects several tales of witches, magical transformations, and religious revelation. From there, we examine other tales of magicians and witches, paying particular attention to the role of gender in these representations and the conflict between magic and religion. The goal is to understand how these representations function within their particular society, what anxieties they reveal, and how they relate to the archaeological evidence we have for these practices.