Among writers both ancient and contemporary there is great interest in magic and wonder --- thaumata, thelxis, and cognates in the Greek. From the shining gods of the Homeric epics, through the second-century collection of spells known as the Papyri Magicae Graecae, down past the the occultism of Yeats, to the popularity of the Harry Potter series today, the western literary tradition has long been held fascinated by the imaginative power of such factors. Beyond popular culture, today's wealth of scholarly articles, anthologies, and monographs on the study of magic attests to a lively academic discussion around magic's cultural import. This paper aims to participate in that perennial discussion. Although it can be traced back to Platonic philosophy, it has become something of a commonplace that stories themselves work magical effects. This paper seeks to unpack the claims about narrative magic through a literary analysis of its representative deployment in selected works of Classical Antiquity. The Greek Magical Papyri are my main source for the internal terminology of magic, as it was employed in the Imperial period. For language scrutinizing magic, external to the practice itself, and for the fictional representation of both registers, I primarily examine two particularly important oeuvres: those of Lucian of Samosata, in Greek, and Apuleius, in Latin. Lucian's Philopseudes and Alethe Diegemata are key examples of fantastic stories, containing as they do the first versions of the ``Sorcerer's Apprentice'' and the ``Voyage to the Moon'' tales, respectively. Equally significant, Apuleius' Metamorphoses tells a series of magical accounts in a well-wrought masterpiece of early novelistic prose. Furthermore, both these authors are careful and clever, expressing within their texts a self-awareness of the narratological process itself. Outside these decisive thaumata, further comparative examples will be brought to bear as tangental explorations of storytelling's magical properties.