Letter 297

To Thalassius the Silver-dealer [argyroprates, a banker or money-changer]. How is it that certain sorcerers, having set a certain wandering man upon a tomb, dispatched him away into foreign nations as though to his homeland, while darkness lay over everything? It is plain that, by the wicked invocation and by the power of natural things, a demon took up the man and conveyed him elsewhere. So too, then, the magicians often seem to turn a man into a beast, not by transforming the very substance of the body, but by putting around him the form of a beast. Therefore, even if the man is saddled, as it were, within that form, he bears as much as he is able as a man, while the demon lifts up upon his own shoulders all the rest.

Πῶς τινες τῶν γοήτων (α), τινὰ πλανώμενον ἄνθρωπον μνημεῖῳ ἐπιβιδάσαντες, εἰς ἔθνη πατρίδα ἐξέπεμψαν σκοτίας ὑπαρχούσης; δῆλον ὅτι τῇ πονηρᾷ ἐπικλήσει, καὶ τῇ δυνάμει τῶν φυσικῶν πραγμάτων δαίμων βαστάσας τὸν ἄνθρωπον ἀλλαχοῦ διεκόμισεν. Οὕτως τοίνυν καὶ ἀποκτηνοῦν ἄνθρωπον, πολλάκις δοκοῦσιν οἱ φαρμακοὶ, οὐχὶ τὴν οὐσίαν τοῦ σώματος μεταπλάττοντες, ἀλλὰ μορφὴν κτήνους περιτιθέντες αὐτῷ. Οὐκοῦν κἂν σαγματισθῇ ὥσπερ ἐντὸς ὁ ἄνθρωπος, ὅσον μὲν δύναται ὡς ἄνθρωπος βαστάζει, τὸ δὲ λοιπὸν τοῖς ὤμοις ὁ δαίμων ἀνακουφίζει.