At first sight, the development of Roman law seems to follow the same trajectory.52 The code of the Twelve Tables, from the early republic – as far as it can be reconstructed from later evidence – forbade the specific act of luring away the profit of crops from somebody else’s land to one’s own, as an infringement of property rights; but did not specify that the means was by magic. It also outlawed ‘an evil song’, which could signify a magical incantation or merely an insult. Likewise, the Lex Cornelia of 81 BC forbade a number of means of killing by stealth, one of which was veneficium, a term which to modern eyes has the same frustrating imprecision as the Greek pharmaka, as it could mean both poison and magic: once more, ancient people would in practice often find it impossible to distinguish between the two. Things become clearer only in the second century AD, when the work of the magus in general became equated with veneficium and with maleficium, meaning the intentional causing of harm to others. By the third century, Roman law codes were adapting to this change, extending the Lex Cornelia to cover the making of love potions, the enactment of rites to enchant, bind or restrain, the possession of books containing magical recipes, and the ‘arts of magic’ in general. To own such a book now meant death for the poor and exile for the rich (with loss of property), while to practise magical rites incurred the death penalty, with those who offered them for money being burned alive. As the possession of books and the provision of commercial services were activities that could readily be proved objectively, these were relatively easy laws to enforce.
Two major problems attend any attempt to understand the actual status of magic in the Roman world. One is that very little information survives on how these laws were actually enforced; the other, that it was perfectly possible to conduct witch-hunts without having any law against magic itself, if the victims were accused simply of committing murder by magical means. It was recorded, centuries later, that in 331 BC an epidemic hit Rome, with high mortality, and over 170 female citizens, two of them noblewomen, were put to death for causing it with veneficium. This may have meant straightforward potions, as the first suspects, having claimed to be healers instead, were made to drink their alleged medicine and died, triggering the mass arrests. The years 184 to 180 BC were also a time of epidemic disease in Italy, and much bigger trials were held in provincial towns, claiming over two thousand victims in the first wave and over three thousand in the second. Again the charge was veneficium, and it is impossible to tell whether this meant poisoning in the straightforward sense, or killing by magical rites, or a mixture.53 If the second or third sense of the word was what counted, and the reports are accurate, then the republican Romans hunted witches on a scale unknown anywhere else in the ancient world, and at any other time in European history, as the body counts recorded – however imprecise – surpass anything in a single wave of early modern trials.54 Nothing like this is known under the pagan Roman Empire, but individuals were certainly prosecuted then for working magic, whether or not it resulted in physical harm to anybody else. The (alleged) case of Apollonius and the (historical) one of Apuleius have already been cited: the former was accused of using divinatory rites to predict a plague, and the latter of securing a woman’s love by casting a spell. Hadrian of Tyre, a second-century legal expert, was quoted as pronouncing that those who offered pharmaka for hire (he wrote in Greek) should be punished ‘simply because we hate their power, because each of them has a natural poison’, and they offer a ‘craft of injury’.55 The Chronicle of the Year 354 claimed that Tiberius, the second emperor of Rome in the early first century AD, executed forty-five male and eighty-five female veneficiarii and malefici in the course of his reign.56 Again the terminology is cloudy, and the terms could just mean respectively poison-sellers and criminals in general; but if so, the totals seem far too low, and it is more likely that magicians are intended. Furthermore, whether or not the Romans were hunting witches by the opening of the imperial period, they were certainly imagining them in a way that the Egyptians and Greeks did not, but the Mesopotamians, Persians, Hittites and Hebrews did. Indeed, the literary images that they produced were the main ancient source cited by early modern authors to prove the long existence of the menace from witchcraft. Some of them echo, and indeed copy, the Greek and Hellenistic model of the lovelorn woman seeking to use magic to secure or retrieve a partner.57
In addition, however, there are characters that have no parallel in Greek literature: women who habitually work a powerful and evil magic, using disgusting materials and rites and invoking underworld and nocturnal deities and spirits, and human ghosts. They appear in the later first century BC and continue into the later centuries of the empire. Such is Horace’s Canidia, a hag who poisons food with her own breath and viper’s blood, has ‘books of incantations’, and enacts rites with her accomplices to manufacture love potions or blight those who have offended her. They burn materials such as twigs grown from tombs, owl feathers and eggs, toad’s blood and venomous herbs, and tear a black lamb apart, as offerings to the powers of night. They also make images of people, and murder a child to use his body parts in their concoctions. It is predicted that they will be stoned to death by a mob, and their bodies left for animals to eat.58 Another is Lucan’s Erictho, another repulsive old woman who understands ‘the mysteries of the magicians which the gods abominate’, because they can ‘bind the reluctant deity’. Even ordinary practitioners, Lucan assures his audience, can induce helpless love, stop the sun in its course, bring rain, halt tides and rivers, tame beasts of prey and pull down the moon. Erictho possesses in addition the ability to learn the future by reanimating corpses with a potion of dog’s froth, lynx entrails, hyena hump, stag marrow, chunk of sea monster, dragons’ eyes, stones from eagles’ nests, serpents and deadly herbs: like Canidia’s, her mixtures are the apotheosis of veneficium. Like her, too, she practises human sacrifice, but on a grander scale, even cutting children from wombs to offer up burnt on altars.59 The rituals of both women invert all the norms of conventional religious practice. Similar figures appear in the work of other poets, though drawn in less detail. Virgil wrote of a foreign priestess with the power to inflict joy or agony on other humans by her spells, reverse the movements of rivers and stars, make trees march and the earth bellow, and summon the spirits of darkness.60 Ovid produced a drunken hag called Dipsas, who understood the power of herbs and magical tools and could control the weather, raise the dead and make stars drip blood and turn the moon red, as well as performing the usual trick with rivers.61 Propertius’ equivalent was Acanthis, whose potions could make a magnet fail to attract iron, a mother bird abandon her chicks and the most faithful woman betray her husband. She also had the power to move the moon at her will, and turn herself into a wolf.62 Tibullus’ equivalent, called a saga, could perform the same feats with the moon, rivers, the weather and the dead, and (with an incantation) deceive the eyes: Roman witches inverted the natural as well as the religious order.63 Apuleius, himself no stranger to charges of magic, put a range of magic-working women of different ages and degrees of wickedness and power into a novel. They are all murderous, lecherous or sacrilegious, and use magic to get their way: Apuleius remarks that women as a sex often do this. His most terrifying such invention, Meroe, can lower the level of the sky, stop the planet turning, melt mountains, put out the stars and summon the deities. Routinely, his witches can change their own shapes, and those of others, into animals.64 In the same period, an older character occasionally got the same makeover: above all Medea, whom Roman poets and playwrights transformed into a darker figure, performing the kind of elaborate nocturnal rites, to dark powers, credited to these witch figures.65 The satirist Petronius testified to the familiarity of the stereotype of the terrifying and mighty witch by the mid-first century AD, by sending it up in his own novel. The anti-hero, needing a cure for sexual impotence, which he has blamed on witchcraft, turns for help to an old priestess who boasts of possessing all the powers over nature attributed to Canidia, Erictho, Meroe and their kind, yet wh
o lives in poverty and squalor and proves farcically to be a charlatan.66
It may fairly be wondered whether any of this was intended to be taken as seriously at the time as early modern demonologists were later to take it. These are, after all, literary inventions appearing in genres equivalent to romantic fantasy, Gothic fiction, satire and comedy. A major element of preposterous exaggeration was plainly present. On the other hand, such images – of potent magic worked by evil women – would not have been chosen had they not resonated to some extent with the prejudices and preconceptions of the intended audience. Kimberley Stratton has plausibly linked their appearance to a concern with the perceived sexual licence and luxury of Roman women in the same period, combined with an ideal of female chastity as an indicator of social stability and order. The image of the witch, in her view, emerged as the antithesis of this idealized and politicized version of female behaviour.67 However persuasive an argument, this still needs once again to take into account the likelihood that the image flowered so rapidly and luxuriantly because it was planted in soil made fertile for it. After all, the Romans who produced and consumed it had a historical memory of having put to death almost two hundred women in their city, centuries before, for having deliberately produced a major epidemic that claimed huge numbers of lives, by using veneficium. According to medical realities, all of them would have been innocent of this offence, and so their society would already have needed to believe in the capacity and will of women to commit it. An unknown number of women, perhaps the majority, would have been among the thousands of victims of the mass trials for the same crime in the 180s BC. Rome therefore already had a sense of wicked women as agents of murder and social disruption who used hidden means. Likewise, though with much more muted consequences both in social reality and in literature, it must be significant that when the Greeks conceived of divine or semi-divine figures who used dangerous magic, like Circe and Medea, these were female. It seems that cultures which had defined magic as an illicit, disreputable and impious activity, and in which women were excluded from most political and social power, such as the Greek and Roman (and Hebrew and Mesopotamian), were inclined to bring the two together into a single stereotype of the menacing Other. In the Roman case, however, the results, both practical and literary, were the most dramatic.
It is not clear how much a belief in the ‘evil eye’ tempered, or meshed with, Rome’s fear of witchcraft. Romans certainly had one. Virgil described a shepherd who blamed ‘the eye’ for a sickness in his flock, while Pliny and Varro both wrote of the use of amulets to avert it from children and Pliny of the efficacy of spitting three times to break its power. Pliny and Plutarch discuss the details of belief in it, and testify that it was believed to be wielded both deliberately and inadvertently, and the willingness to recognize the latter effect should in theory have damped down one to blame witches for injury. They also record, however, that it was thought to be a special property of foreigners, fathers and women with double pupils (a rare condition). This would not have affected the great majority of people suspected of witchcraft, and so the belief would probably not, in practice, have mitigated very much.68 One further indication that the Romans took witchcraft seriously is that they became the first people in Europe and the Near East since the Hittites, over a thousand years before, recurrently to make accusations of it as a political weapon. These studded the first two reigns of the first imperial dynasty, as a feature of its attempts to establish its authority and the stability of the state. The first emperor, Augustus, linked that stability to a suspicion of magicians by declaring war on all unofficial attempts to predict the future, which might serve to encourage people in disruptive political ambitions. One decree early in his reign ordered the expulsion of all goētes and magoi from the city, and the retention only of the native and traditional forms of seeking oracles from the deities and natural world. This measure was repeated nine times in the following hundred years (testifying either to its continued importance or to its lack of effect), and Augustus was said to have ordered the burning of more than two thousand books of prophetic writings by unauthorized persons.69 The next emperor, Tiberius, drove a prominent senator to suicide by investigating charges against the man of consulting magi and Babylonian astrologers and trying to summon underworld spirits with ‘incantations’. Another leading senator then resorted to suicide when accused of implication in the death of the heir presumptive to the throne, Germanicus, by having remains of human bodies, curse tablets, charred and blood-stained ashes and other instruments of evil magic concealed about the prince’s house. It was claimed that the empress dowager Livia, Tiberius’ mother, had accused a friend of her hated step-granddaughter Agrippina of veneficia, while Agrippina’s own daughter, who bore her name, charged three rivals with using magic, one of whom was also driven to suicide. A noblewoman was accused of driving her husband insane with ‘incantations and potions’. After that, such charges disappeared from high politics, only to reappear spectacularly in the fourth century, when two more dynasties struggled to establish themselves, the Flavian and that of Valentinian. They seem to have been a feature solely of that occasional phenomenon in Roman history, the protracted stabilization of a new imperial family.70
It remains to consider the evidence for the actual working of destructive magic, and the fear of it, among people in the Roman Empire. By its very nature, this is relatively sparse, but it exists; and that is even when excluding for the time being the texts of complex ceremonial magic, which will be the concern of a later chapter. Curse tablets persisted in their original Greek homeland, and spread out from it across much of the empire.71 An inscribed lead tablet placed in the tomb of a woman at Larzac, in southern France, alleged the existence of two rival groups of ‘women endowed with magic’. One had cast malicious spells against the other by ‘sticking’ or ‘pricking’, perhaps of images of their intended victims, and been foiled by counter-magic aided by an additional ‘wise woman’: the person in the tomb may have been one of the presumed casualties of the conflict, or one of those who had triumphed in it, or the tablet may simply have been lodged in a grave as part of a rite to work with the dead or their deities.72 Andrew Wilburn has conducted a study of the material evidence for the working of magic, and especially of curses, at three sites, in the Roman provinces of Egypt, Cyprus and Spain respectively. His conclusion is that the cursing of opponents or oppressors, often using the services of experts, was a regular and important aspect of life under imperial rule, though not a respectable one.73 It seems to substantiate the famous declaration of the Roman scholar and administrator Pliny, in the first century, that ‘nobody is unafraid of falling victim to an evil spell’.74
It is also clear that people identified individuals whom they loved as having fallen victim to such spells. In the 20s AD, the princess Livia Julia, daughter-in-law of the emperor Tiberius, left an inscription to lament the loss of her little slave boy, whom she believed to have been either killed or abducted by a saga, one of the Roman words for a female magician.75 This is vivid testimony that the accusations of witchcraft made by the imperial family during that reign were not merely the product of cynical political opportunism. One of the leading scholars of Greek and Roman magic in recent decades, Fritz Graf, has made a systematic study of epitaphs similar to that commissioned by Livia Julia, for people, usually young, who were thought to have been killed by magic. He found thirty-five, most from the eastern, Greek half of the empire and from the second and third centuries. They were not common among tomb inscriptions for young persons, suggesting that untimely death was not usually ascribed to witchcraft, and they called for divine vengeance upon the assailants, who were sometimes unknown and sometimes suspected and named (women being only slightly more common than men among these suspects). Graf suggested that this tactic of appealing to deities averted the need for legal accusations.76
How far this is true is hard to tell given the lack of surviving legal archives from the pagan period of the empire. We can be reasonably c
ertain that there were no mass hunts and trials, because these would surely have left traces in historical records. It is much harder to judge whether or not individual accusations often reached the courts, and if so how seriously they were treated. Occasionally one is revealed by a chance survival of evidence, such as the Egyptian papyrus which records that a farmer in the Fayum had denounced neighbours to the local governor for using magic to steal his crops. The outcome of the case is unknown.77 Livia Julia’s passionate outburst on the death of her slave boy included an appeal to Roman mothers to protect their own children against such evil spells. It is only possible to wonder whether they needed such a warning, and if they shared the same reaction when their children died or disappeared, and what steps, if any, they took against the presumed killers.
The Witch Page 11