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In the works of anthropologists, ethnologists and sociologists of the 19th and 20th centuries, we may notice their efforts to distinguish magic, on the one hand, from religion, and on the other, from science. One of the criteria, which set the boundaries between these field was the way, in which a community understood god/divinity. This, among others, enabled the identification of the three ‘ideal stages’ in the development of human culture: magical, religious and metaphysical-philosophical. This article is an attempt to analyse to what extent modern definitions of religion and magic can be applied in regard of ancient Greek culture. The surviving literary sources and other artefacts, which provide us with information on this culture, suggest that these stages, distinguished by modern researchers, never seemed to exist in ‘pure form’ in ancient Greek culture, but rather they intermingled and, at times barely noticeably, switched from one stage to another. Religion, magic and science not only functioned side-by-side, but they permeated and complemented each other.

Lycophron’s Alexandra is often quoted as a literary source in the modern scholarship on the mythical origins of Etruria. The poem indeed refers to several mythological traditions that testify the curiosity that Lycophron had for Etruscan history. Moreover, certain visual images found in Etruscan sites provide unexpected parallels for the poem. The purpose of this paper is to explore the possible causes and meaning of these similitudes between poem and images. One of the possible answers may be sought in a close examination of the ideological use of images by the Etruscan elites of the Early Hellenistic period. A case study will be provided by the confrontation between the poem and a complex monument: the François Tomb in Vulci, which is one of the foremost examples of an elite and learned use of iconographical traditions.