For my paper I’m trying to find a way to use later literary sources, in particular versions of the Medea myth up to and including Euripides’ play, in order to find or create a useful framework for looking at magic in Homeric sources. Unsurprisingly, those earlier sources are by far the more problematic to deal with. Medea is unambiguous in treating the magic employed by said witch as harmful, evil and unnatural. In contrast, both the Iliad and the Odyssey contain actions that could be interpreted as magic, but it’s much less clear whether the characters in the works consider them as such.
Before even considering the specifics of the events in these works, I think it’s important to note that they are the result of an oral tradition, and could be representative of an earlier form of Greek culture, adapted to an audience contemporary to its recording in literary form, or the compilation of a series of poems gathered from other cultures; in all likelihood there are elements of all of these, making any analysis a matter of educated guesses and deductive reasoning rather than based on unassailable facts or truths.