On Facebook, Michael Swanwick mentioned a historical (or maybe apocryphal) episode when the Pope invited Etruscan seers to use lightning magic to defend Rome against Alaric and his Ostrogoths. It’s a pretty good story, whether or not it’s actually history. Here’s the ultimate source (in an anonymous 1814 translation).
Pompeianus, the prefect of the city, accidentally met with some persons who were come to Rome from Tuscany, and related that a town called Neveia had delivered itself from extreme danger, the Barbarians having been repulsed from it by storms of thunder and lightning, which was caused by the devotion of its inhabitants to the gods, in the ancient mode of worship. Having discoursed with these men, he performed all that was in his power according to the books of the chief priests.
Recollecting, however, the opinions that were then prevalent, he resolved to proceed with greater caution, and proposed the whole affair to the bishop of the city, whose name was Innocentius. Preferring the preservation of the city to his own private opinion, he gave them permission to do privately whatever they knew to be convenient.
They declared however that what they were able to do would be of no utility, unless the public and customary sacrifices were performed, and unless the senate ascended to the capitol, performing there, and in the different markets of the city, all that was essential. But no person daring to join in the ancient religious ordinances, they dismissed the men who were come from Tuscany, and applied themselves to the endeavouring to appease the Barbarians in the best possible manner.
Zosimus 5.41.1-3 (public domain version available in a few places, but the best version is at Livius.org here; an unfortunately fuzzy scan of the Greek text here)
Swanwick also mentioned his secondary source: an old paper in Classical Weekly by a guy named Eugene S. McCartney.
I looked up the McCartney paper and found that it unlocked the door to a treasurehouse of dusty wonders. As I wrote in gratitude to Swanwick, “With my right hand I’m hardwiring the copious references into my Monsters, Ghosts, and Magic course, while my left hand loots their weird magic to deploy in future tales of sword-and-sorcery.”
This McCartney guy was an absolute maniac for weird classical folklore, and published a lot of serialized papers in Classical Weekly and elsewhere. (Imagine getting to the cliffhanger of an academic article and waiting with bated breath for a whole week until you can read the exciting conclusion. Those were the heroic days of academic publishing.) I wasted a lot of time this afternoon downloading the installments from JSTOR, then thought to look on archive dot org for booklength work by McCartney.
There’s some there, and it looks interesting. But I found that a fellow-enthusiast named Robert Bedrosian had already assembled in single file the scattered installments of ESM’s folklore papers and kindly uploaded it. A great read for people who are into this stuff, which includes all my various personalities
