Pliny represents a number of marvelous and to us incredible things as proved by experience. Divination from thunder, for instance, is supported by innumerable experiences, public and private. In two passages out of the three mentioning _experti_ which I cited above, those experienced persons recommended a decidedly magical sort of procedure.[186] In another passage “the experience of many” supports “a strange observance” in plucking a bud.[187] A fourth bit of magical procedure is called “marvelous but easily tested.”[188] Thus the transition is an easy one from signs of experimental science in the _Natural History_ to our next topic, Pliny’s account of magic. III. _Pliny’s Account of Magic._ [Sidenote: Oriental origin of magic.] Pliny supplies some account of the origin and spread of magic[189] but a rather confused and possibly unreliable one, as he mentions two Zoroasters separated by an interval of five or six thousand years, and two Osthaneses, one of whom accompanied Xerxes, and the other Alexander, in their respective expeditions. He says, indeed, that it is not clear whether one or two Zoroasters existed. In any case magic has flourished greatly the world over for many centuries, and was founded in Persia by Zoroaster. Some other magicians of Media, Babylonia, and Assyria are mere names to Pliny; later he mentions others like Apollobeches and Dardanus. Although he thus derives magic from the orient, he appears to make no distinction, as we shall find other writers doing, between the _Magi_ of Persia and ordinary magicians, nor does he employ the word magic in two senses. He makes it evident, however, that there have been other men who have regarded magic more favorably than he does. [Sidenote: Its spread to the Greeks.] Pliny next traces the spread of magic among the Greeks. He marvels at the lack of it in the Iliad and the abundance of it in the Odyssey. He is uncertain whether to class Orpheus as a magician, and mentions Thessaly as famous for its witches at least as early as the time of Menander who named one of his comedies after them. But he regards the Osthanes who accompanied Xerxes as the prime introducer of magic to the Greek-speaking world, which straightway went mad over it. In order to learn more of it, the philosophers Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, and Plato went into distant exile and on their return disseminated their lore. Pliny regards the works of Democritus as the greatest single factor in that dissemination of the doctrines of magic which occurred at about the same time that medicine was being developed by the works of Hippocrates. Some regarded the books on magic ascribed to Democritus as spurious, but Pliny insists that they are genuine.[190] [Sidenote: Its spread outside the Graeco-Roman world.]