The conception of magic in ancient Greece (French text)

The Greeks have invented magic. Indeed, in the perspective of a history of the ideas, the birth of the concept of magic is to place in Classical Greece, at the end of the fifth century BC. The starting idea of this dissertation is that ancient Greek culture has developed a system of notions, like an ecological niche, within which the words for magic have been inserted and therefore magic has been conceived. Historically, the phenomenon of the sudden introduction of this concept in such a cultural milieu has to be understood within the context of a strong debate, where the success of magic was linked to its function as a catalyst of a long process of religious and epistemological innovation. Then, the first part of this research is devoted to exploring this cultural niche structured by the notions of dazzle and bedazzlement, binding, stillness, forgetfulness, cunning, deception, pleasure, power of song and poetry. The Homeric poems constitute the main source for this enquiry on terms such as thélgein, kēleîn, pharmakeúein and epōidē´ even though, following certain paths of sense, other texts like Hesiod's poems, Homeric hymns, tragedies and Platonic dialogues are particularly valuable. Only by studying synchronically these notions in their links and configurations, does the niche reveal the living system that brought about the conception of magic. The second part explores the ways and the reasons why the Greek concept of magic was given birth. In order to analyze more diachronically the use of the term mágos and of its derivates mageúein and mágeuma in the last quarter of the fifth century BC, attention is focused on the two main Greek texts using them: Herodotus' Enquiries and the Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred Disease . Acculturated with a negative portrait, mágoi are admitted to the polis as the catalysts of an internal process contesting Greek tradition. Therefore, mágoi were not the authors of katádesmoi, but only the victims of a Greek debate. Finally, with Gorgias' Praise of Helen, the Greek concept of magic, mageîa, has been definitely rooted in the Greek cultural niche and in later tradition.