The Roman War on Magic: From the Twelve Tables to the Christian Empire
Long before Christianity reshaped the Roman world, magic was already regarded as a serious threat to social and economic order. The earliest written Roman laws, the Twelve Tables displayed on bronze tablets in the Forum in 451–450 BC, contained explicit provisions against magical practices. Table VIII criminalized the chanting of malicious incantations (“qui malum carmen incantassit”) and, most importantly in an agrarian society, the use of spells to lure away a neighbor’s crops or to enchant another’s fields (“qui fruges excantassit” and “qui alienam segetem pellexerit”). The prescribed penalty could be death.
Roots in the Early Republic: The Twelve Tables (451–450 BC)
These clauses were not theoretical. Roman agriculture depended entirely on the fragile balance of weather, soil, and labor. Any suspicion that someone was secretly manipulating harvests through spells threatened not only individual farmers but the food supply of the entire community. Magic, in the eyes of the early Republic, was a form of covert economic sabotage.
A Famous Trial: Gaius Furius Chresimus (191 BC)
One of the best-documented cases comes from 191 BC and is preserved by Pliny the Elder. A freedman named Gaius Furius Chresimus owned only a small plot yet consistently produced far higher yields than his neighbors with larger estates. Jealous rivals accused him of using spells to “lure away foreign crops” (alienam segetem pellexerit). The prosecutor was a powerful curule aedile and future consul.
In court, Chresimus dramatically presented his well-maintained tools, healthy slaves, and strong oxen, declaring: “These, Roman citizens, are my magical arts! But you cannot see my nightly toil, my sleepless vigilance, and my sweat.” The jury acquitted him unanimously. The trial reveals both the persistence of popular belief in agricultural magic and the growing willingness of educated Romans to accept rational explanations for extraordinary success.
Philosophical Critique in the Late Republic and Early Empire
By the first century BC, Roman intellectuals were sharply dividing acceptable religion from dangerous superstition. In De natura deorum, Cicero distinguished true religio—a rational reverence for the gods who order the cosmos—from superstitio, an irrational and fear-driven excess. Most popular magical practices fell squarely into the latter category for him: they were fantasies that enslaved the mind to pointless terror.
The Stoic philosopher Seneca went further. In his Naturales quaestiones he ridiculed the idea that spells could move clouds or control the weather, quoting the very clause from Table VIII (“neve alienam segetem pellexeris”) as an embarrassing relic of primitive thinking. For Seneca, natural phenomena followed rational laws discoverable by philosophy; magic was nothing but mendacium et fabula—lies and fairy tales.
Imperial Escalation: From Sulla to the Christian Emperors
Despite philosophical dismissal, the legal repression of magic intensified. In 81 BC, Sulla’s Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficiis grouped sorcery with murder, poisoning, and arson, making it punishable by death or exile. Under the Empire, accusations of magic became a convenient political weapon.
In AD 53, for example, the senator Statilius Taurus was accused of “magical superstitions” (magicae superstitiones) in order to seize his famous gardens. Although acquitted, he committed suicide from shame. Tacitus treats the charge as obviously fabricated, yet the mere accusation was enough to destroy a career.
By the early fourth century, penalties had become barbaric: crucifixion, burning alive, exposure to wild beasts, and public hanging. Possession of magical books could lead to execution and confiscation of property. A clear social divide persisted until the third century: members of the senatorial and equestrian orders (honestiores) usually received lighter sentences or exile, while ordinary citizens (humiliores) faced the full brutality of the law.
The Christian Turning Point
The conversion of Constantine and his successors dramatically accelerated the campaign against magic. What had previously been a matter of public order and occasional political expediency now became a religious crusade. Constantius II, Valens, Valentinian I, and above all Theodosius I issued a series of increasingly severe edicts that equated pagan magical practices with heresy and treason. By the end of the fourth century, the private practice of almost any non-Christian ritual could be construed as a capital offense.
Conclusion: A Persistent Shadow
Roman law on magic thus traces a long arc: from the pragmatic agricultural safeguards of the Twelve Tables, through philosophical skepticism and political exploitation in the late Republic and early Empire, to the ferocious religious persecution of late antiquity. Throughout these changes, one constant remained—the deep popular conviction that invisible forces could be manipulated for good or (more often) for harm. Laws could punish the practitioners and philosophers could mock the belief, but the fear itself proved remarkably resistant to both reason and imperial terror. Magic, in the end, was never fully exorcised from the Roman world; it merely changed its legal and religious guise.
