고대 로마 사회의 주술과 종교 개념에 대한 소고

Abstract

It is a preliminary study intending to illuminate the concept of ‘magic’ and its relationship with the concept of ‘religion’ by examining some legal accusations against magic occurring in ancient Roman history. For this purpose, I briefly examined three cases from ancient Roman history; the Law of the Twelve Tables, Lex Cornelia (1st century BCE), and the Apologia by Apuleius (2nd century CE). The Law of the Twelve Tables contained three regulations labeled as magical. Here the point of the crime was not the magical activity itself but the violation of someone else’s property. Thus, it seems that the Law of the Twelve Tables did not define magical practices themselves as punishable. The Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis, proclaimed in 82/81 BCE had a considerable impact on the conception of a  ‘crimen magiae’. However, even here, the ‘magia’ itself was not the illegal act. This code had originally concerned the use of poison to harm other people, even though later Roman officials and lawyers expanded its range to cover explicitly various kinds of magical spells and rituals. But while ‘veneficia’ in Lex Cornelia could mean ‘magia,’ ‘magia’ did not directly mean ‘veneficia’. In the 2nd century, Apuleius used this logic efficiently in his apology. Therefore what Roman officials were concerned about in this period was not whether certain rituals belonged to a category of religion or magic, but whether someone had performed a secret ritual to harm others or not. Thus, the distinction between public rituals and secret rituals, or devotional rituals and malicious rituals, was more critical than the distinction between religion and magic. However, after the 3rd century, the art of magic and even the possession of books about magic became illegal. If we consider the previous cases we examined, it seems a drastic change in the concept of magic in ancient Roman history, since at least in the context of legal discourses, magic itself was not something punishable or in opposition to religion until the 3rd century. In conclusion, this study shows that there was not a simple dichotomy between religion and magic in ancient Roman society and the concept of magic was not necessarily set against the concept of religion all the time. Since the criterions of what was religion and what could be included in the concept of religion were changing according to the historical situation, sometimes magic was considered as a highly respected religion of others but other times condemned as illegal and set outside the boundary of religion. Although this study has limitations as a preliminary study, it still expects to have some contribution to the reconsideration of the concept of magic and religion in ancient Roman society and to the unsettling discussions of how to understand magic and its relationship with religion.