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While belief in witchcraft and magic abounds in Greece during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E.,1 actual trials for witchcraft are extremely rare, though not nonexistent during this period.2 The exception that proves the rule is the case of Theoris, an alleged witch (pharma/6s) from the island of Lemnos, who was prosecuted in Athens before 338(3) allegedly for casting incantations (epoidai) and using harmful drugs (pharmaka).4 The evidence of her prosecution gives us the most detailed account of a trial for witchcraft5 from this period in Greece, though by the standards of late medieval or early modern witchcraft trials the details as we have them are very slim. The practice of singing incantations and administering harmful drugs had existed in the Greek popular imagination at least since the eighth century, the era of Homeric poetry, and so we shall have to consider what this exact combination of charges signifies for Theoris in the fourth century. From the point of view of late fifth- and fourth-century intellectuals (physicians, philosophers), the prejudice against Theoris and her alleged magic sounds similar to those of contemporary American physicians toward folk healers and their remedies. Many of the same differences between modern physicians and folk healers toward illness outlined, for example, in the work of David Hufford (1988 and 1992), bear striking resemblances to the attacks on magic by Plato and Hippocrates. Ultimately, as I hope to demonstrate, Theoris's demise can be attributed to a legal apparatus for the most part uninterested in magic, except where magic could be shown to be responsible for serious injury or death. What Athenian law was less equipped to deal with, however-and here is the crack in the system through which Theoris fell-was whether magic was intended for healing or harmful purposes. Hence those of Theoris's ilk played a dangerous game in which they were free to offer magical services for healing, but if a patient took a turn for the worse those same services could be used as evidence of intent to harm or murder, for which the penalty was death.
One would think that such a rare historical case as that of Theoris would have attracted much attention by classical scholars interested in Greek magic and witchcraft, yet she has passed with...