Page:The place of magic in the intellectual history of Europe.djvu/66

58 return. Beside the name of Hippocrates in the field of medicine he set that of Democritus in the domain of magic. Elsewhere he said that Pythagoras and Democritus, having embraced the doctrine of the magi, first expounded the properties of magic plants in the Western world. In Cicero's De Divinatione, Epicurus is alone of the Greek philosophers declared free from trust in divination, and Panaetius is said to have been the only Stoic to reject astrology.

Fortunately we are not here concerned to measure either relatively or absolutely with any attempt at exactness the amount of magic in the learning of the closing centuries of Greek national life, but only to investigate whether in the philosophy of the Greeks there were not theories at least liable to encourage a later age to belief in magic. There