THE WIZARDS OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE.
The Roman philosophers, like the Greeks, claimed to possess occult
powers, and the practitioners of magic and sorcery were numerous
during the time of the Empire. We have a graphic description of the
incantations of a Roman sorceress in the story of Dido. Deserted by
Æneas, she resolves on self-destruction. To delude her sister as to
her secret purpose she sends for a priestess from the gardens of the
Hesperides, pretending that her object is to effect the return of her
lover by means of certain magical incantations. The priestess, who is
invested with magical powers, can call up the spirits of the dead,
cause the solid earth to rock and quake, and the trees of the forest
to descend from the mountains. On the arrival of the sorceress, she
commands that a funeral pyre shall be erected in the interior court of
the palace, and that the arms of Æneas, what remains of his attire, and
the marriage bed in which Dido had received him, shall be placed upon
it. The pyre is to be hung round with garlands and branches of cypress,
and the whole crowned with a picture of Æneas and his sword.
Altars were placed around, and the priestess, with dishevelled hair,
cried aloud with terrible charms upon her three hundred gods, upon
Erebus, Chaos, and the three-faced Hecate. The waters of Avernus were
then sprinkled about, and certain magical herbs that had been cut
by moonlight with a sickle of brass. The priestess had with her the
excrescence which is found upon the forehead of a new-cast foal, of the
size of a dried fig, a talisman of great power.
Dido is then called upon to approach, and, with her robe drawn up
exposing one bare foot, she makes the circle of the altars, embracing
them successively, and breaks over each a consecrated cake. The pyre is
lit, and the charm is supposed to be complete.
But all the power and the elaborate ritual prescribed by the sorceress
were of no avail. Æneas returns not, and the broken-hearted Dido
finally stabs herself and dies.
Many prodigies are interspersed throughout the early history of Rome,
and most of the acts of these people were surrounded with a halo of
superstition natural at the time, and doubtless largely exaggerated.
Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan all allude to the belief in and the
practice of sorcery and magic by the Romans.
In the eighth eclogue of Virgil we have a detailed description of a
Roman sorceress. She is introduced by the poet as giving directions to
her assistant as to the working of certain charms. Her object (a common
one apparently at that time) is to recall Daphnis, whom she calls her
husband, to return once more to her arms. The assistant is directed to
burn vervain and frankincense, and the highest efficacy is ascribed
to a solemn chant, which is capable of calling down the moon from its
sphere or making the cold-blooded snake burst in the field, and was the
means by which Circe turned the companions of Ulysses into beasts. The
image of Daphnis is then ordered to be thrice bound round with fillets
of three colours, the assistant at the same time repeating the words,
“Thus I bind the fillets of Venus,” and then paraded about a prepared
altar.
An image of clay and one of wax are placed before the same fire; and as
the image of clay hardens, so does the heart of Daphnis harden towards
his new mistress; and as the figure of wax softens, so is the heart
of the ex-lover made tender towards the sorceress. A sacred cake is
then broken over the image, and crackling laurels burnt before it.
She prays that as the wanton heifer pursues the steer through woods
and glens till at length, worn out with fatigue, she lies down on the
oozy reeds by the banks of the stream, and the night dew will not
even drive her away, so Daphnis may be led on after her for ever with
inextinguishable love. The relics of his belongings are then buried
beneath the threshold. She bruises poisonous herbs of resistless
virtue, which had been gathered in the kingdom of Pontus, herbs which
enabled him who gave them to turn himself into a hungry wolf prowling
amidst the forests, to call up ghosts from the grave, and to translate
the ripened harvest from the field where it grew to the lands of
another. The ashes of these herbs are cast over her head into the
running stream, while she must not look behind her.
At length the sorceress begins to despair and cries, “Daphnis heeds not
my incantations, heeds not the gods”. She looks again, and perceives
the ashes on the altar are glowing and emitting sparks of fire. Her
faithful house dog barks before the door. “Can these things be,” she
exclaims, “or do lovers dream what they desire? It is not so! The real
Daphnis comes; I hear his steps; he has left the deluding town; he
hastens to my longing arms!”
In the works of Horace an interesting description of a witches’
incantation is also given, the details of which it is instructive to
compare with those given by other writers.
Four sorceresses are assembled in conclave, the chief being Canidia,
with three assistants, in order to work a charm by means of which a
youth named Varus, for whom Canidia had conceived a passion, may be
compelled to reciprocate her affections.
Canidia, with the locks of her dishevelled hair twined round with
venomous and deadly serpents, orders the wild fig tree and the funeral
cypress to be rooted up from the sepulchres on which they grew, and
these, together with the egg of a toad smeared with blood, the plumage
of the screech owl, various herbs brought from Thessaly and Georgia,
and bones torn from the jaws of a famished dog, to be burnt in flames
fed with perfumes from Colchis. One assistant, whose hair stands stiff
and erect like the quills of the sea-hedgehog or the bristles of a
hunted boar, sprinkles the ground with drops from the Avernus, while
another, who is reputed to have had the faculty of conjuring the stars
and moon down from heaven, assists in other ways.
The fourth witch is busy digging a hole with a spade, in which is to
be plunged up to his chin the beardless youth stripped of his purple
robe—the emblem of his noble descent—and naked, that from his marrow,
already dry, and his liver (when at length his eyeballs, long fixed on
the still renovated food which is withheld from his famished jaws, have
no longer the power to discern), may be concreted the love potion from
which the witches promise themselves the most wonderful results.
Canidia, unmoved by his sufferings, works herself into a great
rage, and calls upon the night and the morn to help in her infamous
incantation. But her victim manages to evade destruction by means
of some magical antidote. She then resolves to prepare a still more
powerful charm, exclaiming, “Sooner shall the sky be swallowed up in
the sea and the earth be stretched a covering over both, than thou,
my enemy, shalt not be wrapped in the flames of love as subtle and
tenacious as those of burning pitch”.