Antiochia'da görülen büyücülük davaları: Yasadışı kehanetler ve imparatorun bakış açısı

In 371, a group of men wanted to find out who will be the successor of the Emperor Valens. To gain this information, they secretly preformed a divination ritual. While at this point, public divination was still legally allowed, secret divination was forbidden by law, and was considered not only an illegal act of magic, but an act of treason as well. This event was the trigger for large-scale sorcery trials conducted in Antioch. Many people from all classes of society were accused of either directly participating in the ritual, or of unrelated acts of magic and sorcery. The punishments seem to have been severe, and many of the accused were executed, or exiled. Ammianus Marcellinus provides the most detailed account of the events, although information is available from several other Byzantine sources as well. This thesis seeks to understand the circumstances that led to the trials of Antioch, the mechanisms according to which the process unfolded, as well as to investigate how this event was recorded and interpreted in later historical sources. In order to do that, I will evaluate Ammianus' account of the events against the background of contemporary legislation and developments on the religious scene. The information obtained from the analysis will be supplemented and compared with the accounts of other historical sources in order to better evaluate the events of the trials, as well as to understand what attitudes later historians held about the issues of magic and divination.