In the Greek and Roman world, if you wanted to describe a sorceress par excellence, it was enough to say she came from Thessaly. This region of northern Greece, made up of great plains ringed by mountains, was regarded as the homeland of women able to master the forces of nature. And of all their powers one was the most famous and the most spectacular: drawing the moon down from the sky.
Aristophanes and the moon in a box
One of the earliest testimonies to this reputation is found in a comedy. In Aristophanes' Clouds, staged in Athens in the fifth century BC, old Strepsiades, crushed by debts, has a brilliant idea: buy a Thessalian witch, have her draw down the moon at night and shut it in a round case, as one does with a mirror.
The motive is financial. In Athens interest on loans was paid at the beginning of the lunar month: if the moon never rose again, the month would never change and Strepsiades would never have to pay. The joke works because the audience knew the reputation of Thessalian women well.
Plato and the price of power
Plato also alludes to this belief. In the Gorgias, Socrates observes that whoever seeks power in the city risks doing as the Thessalian women who draw down the moon: obtaining what they want at the cost of what is dearest to them. The expression suggests that this power was considered dangerous even for those who wielded it, and that it was paid for with a personal loss.
Aglaonice and the explanation of eclipses
A rational explanation of this reputation is offered by Plutarch. He mentions a Thessalian woman, Aglaonice, daughter of Hegetor, who knew when lunar eclipses would occur and, foreseeing them, led other women to believe that she herself darkened the moon by her spells.
This testimony suggests a fascinating hypothesis: the power to "draw down the moon" may have arisen from knowledge of the heavenly cycles, transformed in the eyes of the people into a magical prodigy. Whoever knew when the moon would darken could present the event as the effect of her own will.
The fear of eclipses
To grasp the impact of this belief we need to remember how much eclipses frightened the ancients. During a lunar eclipse people tried to help the moon with noise, striking bronze objects. Tacitus, in the Annals, describes the soldiers of the mutinous legions in AD 14 who, during an eclipse, made bronze and trumpets resound, interpreting the darkening of the moon as an omen about their own fate.
The underlying idea was that the moon, at such moments, was in danger, drawn towards the earth by magical forces, and that the din could break the spell.
Thessalian witches in Latin poetry
Latin poets returned to this theme very frequently. Some examples:
| Author | Work | Image |
|---|---|---|
| Virgil | Eclogues, VIII | Songs can bring the moon down from the sky |
| Horace | Epodes, V | A witch tears stars and moon from the sky with a Thessalian voice |
| Lucan | Pharsalia, VI | The witches of Thessaly overturn the laws of nature |
In these texts the adjective Thessalian becomes almost a synonym for magical. The "Thessalian voice" is the voice of incantation, able to subvert the order of the cosmos.
Apuleius' Thessaly
The work that more than any other fixed this image is Apuleius' novel, the Metamorphoses. Its protagonist, Lucius, travels to Thessaly itself, to the town of Hypata, driven by curiosity about magic. There he stays in the house of Milo, whose wife, Pamphile, is a powerful witch.
Lucius spies on her as, anointing herself with an ointment, she turns into an owl and flies off into the night. Trying to imitate her, he uses the wrong ointment and turns into an ass, beginning his long adventures, which will end only with the intervention of the goddess Isis. Thessaly is here the place where the boundary between human and animal, between ordinary and prodigious, grows thin.
Why Thessaly?
Scholars have proposed several explanations, none of them definitive:
- Thessaly was a peripheral region compared with Athens, seen as archaic and somewhat wild;
- its vast plain offered a wide horizon for observing the moon;
- the region was linked to myths of potent herbs and to figures such as the centaurs, experts in plants;
- once born, the reputation fed on itself through literature.
The symbolic meaning
The image of the moon drawn down from the sky expresses an ancient desire: to bend the order of the cosmos to human will. The moon governed time, the months, the cycles of life. Whoever could bring it down had, symbolically, power over time itself. That is why the Thessalian witch remains, in the ancient imagination, the figure who dares to lay hands on the sky.
In short
- In the ancient world Thessaly was considered the homeland of witches par excellence.
- Their most famous power was drawing down the moon, already mentioned by Aristophanes and Plato.
- Plutarch tells of Aglaonice, who foresaw eclipses and presented them as her own work.
- During eclipses people struck bronze to help the moon, as Tacitus recalls.
- Apuleius sets the Metamorphoses in Thessaly, with the witch Pamphile and the transformation of Lucius.
