Necromancy in Greece and Rome: A Legal Problem, Not a Moral One

Odysseus digs a pit a cubit square. He pours honey and milk, then wine, then water, and scatters barley over it. He cuts the throats of a ram and a black ewe so the blood runs into the trench. Then he sits with his sword drawn and waits, because the dead will come for the blood and he must not let the wrong ones drink first.

That is Book 11 of the Odyssey, and it is the earliest description we have of consulting the dead. What is striking about it is how technical it is. Not a prayer, not a vision. A procedure, with materials, an order of operations, and a failure mode if you get it wrong.

People spent the next thousand years following it.

Oracles with priests and opening hours

The most persistent misconception about necromancy is that it was furtive. For much of antiquity it was an institution with a building.

Ancient sources name four nekyomanteia, oracles of the dead: on the river Acheron in Epirus, at Cape Tainaron in the southern Peloponnese, at Herakleia Pontike on the Black Sea, and at Lake Avernus in Campania. They had priesthoods. They had procedures: purification, dietary restriction, a period of waiting.

They also had clients of the highest rank. Herodotus records that Periander, tyrant of Corinth, sent envoys to the oracle on the Acheron to question his dead wife Melissa about a missing deposit. This is a head of state using a consultation service, and Herodotus reports it in the same register he reports embassies and battles.

None of this is described as transgressive. It is described as expensive and far away.

The obvious question, where exactly these places were, turns out to be much harder to answer than the tourist signage suggests.

Doing it at home

Below the sanctuaries sat a whole layer of private practice, and this is where the evidence gets unusually good.

The magical papyri from Roman Egypt contain working instructions for summoning the dead: which skull to use, what to inscribe on it, what to say. Other texts describe compelling a spirit to serve as an assistant, a paredros, for ongoing work rather than a single question.

Meanwhile curse tablets went into graves by the thousand, on the explicit assumption that the dead could receive a message and act on it. Preference went to those who died young or violently, on the reasoning that such spirits were restless and therefore available.

Put the layers together and you get a society in which contacting the dead was not an exotic act. It was a service you could buy at several price points.

Emperors on both sides of it

Then the accusations start, and they cluster around the throne.

Suetonius says Nero, tormented after murdering his mother, tried to summon her shade to beg forgiveness. Cassius Dio says Caracalla called up the dead and did not care for what they told him.

Both claims deserve the obvious caution. Suetonius and Dio are writing about emperors whose memory the establishment had comprehensively turned against, and "he dabbled in necromancy" is precisely the sort of thing that attaches to a hated ruler after the fact. Neither is a neutral record of imperial practice. What they are good evidence for is that the charge was damaging. You do not smear a man with something nobody minds.

The question that made it a crime

Here is the part that reframes everything above.

Necromancy was not banned because Rome decided the dead should be left alone. It was banned as collateral in a much narrower prohibition: divination concerning the emperor's death or his successor.

Think about what a working method of consulting the dead offers a Roman aristocrat. Not comfort. Intelligence. If the technique functions, it answers the one question the entire political class is desperate to know and forbidden to ask: how long has this one got, and who is next. A man who knows that in advance can position himself. Several men knowing it is a civil war.

So the law went after the question, and swept up the methods. Astrology, entrail-reading, dream interpretation and necromancy all became dangerous in the same way and for the same reason: not impiety, but treason.

Ammianus Marcellinus describes what this looked like in practice in the fourth century. A group at Antioch used a divining device (a tripod, a disc inscribed with letters, a suspended ring) and asked who would succeed the emperor Valens. The device spelled out the first letters of a name. The resulting investigation killed a great many people, and Ammianus, who had no sympathy for the practitioners, is plainly appalled at the scale of the response.

Books were burned by the armful. People destroyed their own libraries pre-emptively, on the reasoning that owning the wrong scroll was now lethal.

What that leaves us

The pattern should be familiar by now. A practice runs for a thousand years, has institutions and a literature and imperial clients, and then the state decides one of its applications is intolerable and takes the whole thing down with it.

What survives is lopsided as a result. We have Homer's procedure, because it is poetry. We have the papyri, because Egypt is dry and somebody buried them. We have hostile accounts by writers settling scores with dead emperors, and legal texts describing what was forbidden rather than what was done.

What we do not have is a single account by someone who consulted the dead and told us plainly what happened, which is, on the evidence, something a very large number of people believed they had done.