Outside of the Greek-speaking world, whence of course magic spread to Rome, Pliny mentions Jewish magic, represented by such names as Moses, Jannes, and Lotapes. But he holds that magic did not originate among the Hebrews until long after Zoroaster. He also speaks of the magic of Cyprus; of the Druids, who were the magicians, diviners, and medicine men of Gaul until the emperor Tiberius suppressed them; and of distant Britain.[191] Thus discordant nations and even those ignorant of one another’s existence agree the world over in their devotion to magic. From what Pliny tells us elsewhere of the Scythians we can see that the nomads of the Russian steppes and Turkestan were devoted to magic too. [Sidenote: Failure to understand its true origin.] It has been shown that Pliny regarded magic as a mass of doctrines formulated by a single founder and not as a gradual social evolution, just as the Greeks and Romans ascribed their laws and customs to some single legislator. He admits in a way, however, the great antiquity claimed by magic for itself, although he questions how the bulky dicta of Zoroaster and Dardanus could have been handed down by memory during so long a period. This remark again shows how little he thinks of magic as a set of social customs and attitudes perpetuated through constant and universal practice from generation to generation. Yet what he says of its widespread prevalence among unconnected peoples goes to prove this. [Sidenote: Magic and divination.] Pliny has a clearer comprehension of the extensive scope of magic and of its essential characteristics, at least as it was in his day. “No one should wonder,” he says, “that its authority has been very great, since alone of the arts it has embraced and united with itself the three other subjects which make the greatest appeal to the human mind,” namely, medicine, religion, and the arts of divination, especially astrology. That his phrase _artes mathematicas_ has reference to astrology is shown by his immediately continuing, “since there is no one who is not eager to learn the future about himself and who does not think that this is most truly revealed by the sky.” But magic further “promises to reveal the future by water and spheres and air and stars and lamps and basins and the blades of axes and by many other methods, besides conferences with shades from the infernal regions.” There can therefore be no doubt that Pliny regards the various arts of divination as parts of magic. [Sidenote: Magic and religion.] While we have heard Pliny assert in general the close connection between magic and religion, the character of the _Natural History_, which deals with natural rather than religious matters, does not lead him to enter into much further detail upon this point. His occasional mention of religious usages in his own day, however, supports our information from other sources that the original Roman religion was very largely composed of magic forces, rules, and ceremonial.