Besides the miracle-mongers of antiquity there were also cup-and-ball conjurers, who were called “acetabularii,” from the Latin word _acetabulum_, which means a cup, and professors of natural magic in general who laid no claim to supernatural powers. They wandered from place to place, giving their shows. The grammarian, Athenæus, in his _Deipnosophists_, or “Banquet of the Learned” (A. D. 228), mentions a number of famous conjurers and jugglers of Greece. He says: “The people of Histiæa and of Oreum erected in their theatre a brazen statue holding a die in its hand to Theodorus the juggler.” Xenophon, the conjurer, was very popular at Athens. He left behind him a pupil named Cratisthenes, “a citizen of Phlias; a man who {12} used to make fire spout up of its own accord, and who contrived many other extraordinary sights, so as almost to make men discredit the evidence of their own senses. And Nymphodorus, the conjurer, was another such man. . . . And Diopeithes, the Locrian, according to the account of Phanodemus, when he came to Thebes, fastened round his waist bladders full of wine and milk, and then, squeezing them, pretended that he was drawing up those liquids out of his mouth. And Noëmon gained a great reputation for the same sort of tricks. . . . There were also, at Alexander’s court, the following jugglers who had a great name: Scymnus of Tarentum, and Philistides of Syracuse, and Heraclitus of Mitylene.” (_Deipn._ Epit., B. 1, c. 34, 35.) [Illustration: CONJUROR PULLING A TOOTH BY PISTOL. From a rare book called _The Whole Art of Hocus Pocus, Containing the Most Dexterous Feats of Sleight-of-hand Performed by Katerfelto, Breslaw, Boas, etc._ London, 1812. (From the Ellison Collection, New York.)] {13} II. In the Middle Ages the art of magic was ardently cultivated, in spite of the denunciations of the Church. Many pretenders to necromancy made use of the secrets of optics and acoustics, and gained thereby a wonderful reputation as genuine sorcerers. Benvenuto Cellini, sculptor, goldsmith and man-at-arms, in that greatest of autobiographies,[5] records a magical seance which reads like a chapter from the Arabian Nights. [5] _Memoirs of Cellini_, Book I, Chapter LXIV.