Detail from a miniature from Ibn Butlan’s Risalat da`wat al-atibba, L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art, Jerusalem
Ostanes the Alchemist
Ostanes the Alchemist was a legendary mage in classical and medieval literature. He is first mentioned by Hermodorus (a disciple of Plato) as one of the names common in a line of magi that ran from Zoroaster down to Alexander’s conquest. He dates Zoroaster 5,000 years before the fall of Troy and puts Ostanes first among the names of members of the line.
Pliny (d. 79 C.E.) in his Natural History (30.3ff.) was skeptical of the pretended succession, but thought the first man to write an extant account of magic - which he identified with the practices of the magi - was an Ostanes who had accompanied Xerxes on his expedition to Greece. Ancient Persia was witness to numerous scientific activities that led to the development of science and knowledge in later historical eras in Persia and outside Persian territory. Ostanes is an example of such great scientific figures.
The works of Xerxes’ Ostanes made the Greeks “rabid” to learn more of the subject; Pythagoras, Democritus, Plato and the like, traveled to study it and returned to teach it. This information probably originated from Alexandrian scholarship, which had also produced the works of Ostanes that Pliny had read or read about. Pliny refers to Ostanes as describing the different sorts of magic - divination from water, air, stars, lamps and other instruments, as well as necromancy, the use of human bodies and various animal substances for divination and medicine. From the end of the 1st century on, Ostanes is often referred to as an authority on necromancy and other forms of divination, astrology, the manufacture of amulets, and secret names and magical properties of plants and stones. These references are commonly supposed to reflect works fathered upon him in the Hellensitic period. No doubt they often do so, but forgery did not stop with the Roman annexation of Alexandria. Both Ostanes’s legend and his literary output increased throughout imperial times; by the Byzantine period he had become one of the great authorities in alchemy; in so much that medieval alchemical material circulated under his name.
The name Ostanes was the pen-name used by several pseudo-anonymous authors of Greek and Latin works from Hellenistic period onwards. Together with Pseudo-Zoroaster and Pseudo-Hystaspes, Ostanes belongs to the group of pseudepigraphical "Hellenistic Magians", that is, a long line of Greek and other Hellenistic writers who wrote under the name of famous "Magians". While Pseudo-Zoroaster was identified as the "inventor" of astrology, and Pseudo-Hystaspes was stereotyped as an apocalyptic prophet, Ostanes was imagined to be a master sorcerer.
Once the magi had been associated with "magic"—Greek magikos—it was but a natural progression that the Greek's image of Zoroaster would metamorphose into a magician too. In the 1st century CE, Pliny the Elder placed the responsibility of introducing the dark arts to the Greek and Roman worlds upon the magus, Ostanes, to whom most of the pseudepigraphic magical literature was attributed." That, while "universal consensus" says that magic began with Zoroaster, as far as Pliny says he could determine, "Ostanes" was the first extant writer of it.
Pliny also transmits Ostanes's definition of magic: "As Ostanes said, there are several different kinds of it; he professes to divine (divina promittit) from water, globes, air, stars, lamps, basins and axes, and by many other methods, and besides to converse with ghosts and those in the underworld". Thus, by the end of the 1st century CE, "Ostanes" is cited as an authority on alchemy, necromancy, divination, and on the mystical properties of plants and stones. Both his legend and literary work attributed to him increased with time, and by the 4th century "he had become one of the great authorities in alchemy" and "much medieval alchemical material circulated under his name."