Farting Statues, Witches, and Gross Rome: discussing Horace “Satires” 1.8
After a hiatus following my mother’s death, I was back to discussing weird stuff with students again.
I stupidly decided to go with Horace Satires 1.8. The poem was published sometime around 36/35 BCE in a collection of satirical poems Horace dedicated to his uber-wealthy patron, Maecenas, the close friend of Rome's first emperor, Augustus. I chose it as I’ve always found it to be hilarious (and the last thing I need right now is something sad), I have a heap of background information on Roman witches, and it’s already translated. A lazy option.
Ha ha ha ha ha! So funny that I thought that.
I went straight to the Loeb as I really like being able to compare the Latin text to the translation. Now the Loeb translation is H. Rushton Fairclough’s 1926 translation. And I immediately found that I had significant problems with it. First and foremost he uses the term “witch” a few times, but Horace never uses any Latin word meaning “witch” throughout his 50 lines of hexameters. The closest he gets is the name Sagana which derives from the Latin saga which means female diviner, wise woman, fortune teller, or perhaps "witch."
So of course I start revising the translation. I then find later translations (I’ll add a list of various translations at the end). And I have issues with those too.
So, by this time I have pretty much made my own translation. This blog will include my translation with notes explaining some of choices, some background information of Priapus, the narrator of the poem, and a discussion of what this poem tells us about Rome.
Horace Satires 1.8
Once I was a fig-wood trunk, a useless log, when the carpenter, unsure whether to make a bench or a Priapus, chose that I be a god. So I am a god, the greatest terror of thieves and birds; for instance my right hand and this red stake, protruding from my indecent groin, checks thieves; while for the troublesome birds, a reed set on the top of my head scares them and hinders them from settling in the new gardens.1 | Olim truncus eram ficulnus, inutile lignum, |
|
cum faber, incertus scamnum faceretne Priapum, |
| |
maluit esse deum. deus inde ego, furum aviumque |
| |
maxima formido; nam fures dextra coercet |
| |
obscenoque ruber porrectus ab inguine palus; | 5 | |
ast importunas volucres in vertice harundo |
| |
terret fixa vetatque novis considere in hortis. |
| |
Previously, fellow slaves arranged the removal of corpses from narrow chambers to this place, carried in a cheap box. Here stood the common burial-place for poor people: for Pantolabus the scurra,2 and spendthrift Nomentanus.3 | huc prius angustis eiecta cadavera cellis |
|
conservus vili portanda locabat in arca; |
| |
hoc miserae plebi stabat commune sepulcrum, | 10 | |
Pantolabo scurrae Nomentanoque nepoti. |
| |
Here a pillar gave a thousand feet in front and three hundred towards the field, and provided that the monument should pass to no heirs. | mille pedes in fronte, trecentos cippus in agrum |
|
hic dabat, heredes monumentum ne sequeretur. |
| |
Now it is permitted to reside on a salubrious Esquiline, and stroll on the sunny agger,4 where once the mournful beheld a horrid field of pale bones. While it is not so much the thieves and wild beasts accustomed to plague this place that cause me care and concern, as those who through incantations and potions twist human souls:5 I am able by no means to ruin or restrain them from gathering bones and noxious herbs6 as soon as rising Luna has shown her shining face | nunc licet Esquiliis habitare salubribus atque |
|
Aggere in aprico spatiari, quo modo tristes | 15 | |
albis informem spectabant ossibus agrum; |
| |
cum mihi non tantum furesque feraeque suetae |
| |
hunc vexare locum curae sunt atque labori, |
| |
quantum carminibus quae versant atque venenis |
| |
humanos animos: has nullo perdere possum | 20 | |
nec prohibere modo, simul ac vaga Luna decorum |
| |
protulit os, quin ossa legant herbasque nocentis. |
| |
I myself saw prepared Canidia7 walk in a black robe, her feet bare and her hair loose, wailing with the older Sagana; pallor had made the pair frightful to behold. They began to scratch the earth with their fingernails and to tear to pieces a blackish lamb with their teeth; the stream of blood having been poured into the furrow, in order that from there they might conjure spirits; souls that would give responses. | Vidi egomet nigra succinctam vadere palla |
|
Canidiam, pedibus nudis passoque capillo, |
| |
cum Sagana maiore ululantem: pallor utrasque | 25 | |
fecerat horrendas aspectu. scalpere terram |
| |
unguibus et pullam divellere mordicus agnam |
| |
coeperunt; cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde |
| |
manis elicerent, animas responsa daturas. |
| |
One effigy was woollen, and the other was waxen; the woollen was larger, in order that it restrain the smaller with punishments; the waxen stood submissively, as if it were being killed in the manner of a slave. One calls on Hecate, the other on cruel Tisiphone. You would have seen serpents and infernal bitches8 roaming about, and blushing Luna, hiding behind great tombs, lest she be witness to these things. | lanea et effigies erat, altera cerea: maior | 30 |
lanea, quae poenis compesceret inferiorem; |
| |
cerea suppliciter stabat, servilibus ut quae |
| |
iam peritur a modis. Hecaten vocat altera, saevam |
| |
altera Tisiphonen: serpentes atque videres |
| |
infernas errare canes, Lunamque rubentem, | 35 | |
ne foret his testis, post magna latere sepulcra. |
| |
If I am lying, may my head be stained by the white shit9 of ravens, and may Julius, the delicate Pediatia and the thief Voranus come piss and crap on me.10 | mentior at si quid, merdis caput inquiner albis |
|
corvorum, atque in me veniat mictum atque cacatum |
| |
Iulius et fragilis Pediatia furque Voranus. |
| |
Why should I recount each detail? How the shades conversing with Sagana had resounded sad and shrill; how they secretly hid in the ground a wolf’s beard with the tooth of a mottled snake;11 how the fire blazed higher with the waxen image; and how I trembled at the words and deeds of the two furies, but not as an unavenged witness? | singula quid memorem, quo pacto alterna loquentes | 40 |
umbrae cum Sagana resonarint triste et acutum, |
| |
utque lupi barbam variae cum dente colubrae |
| |
abdiderint furtim terris, et imagine cerea |
| |
largior arserit ignis, et ut non testis inultus |
| |
horruerim voces Furiarum et facta duarum? | 45 | |
For it sounded like an exploding balloon12 when I farted, with my fig-wood buttocks split. And they raced into the city. | nam displosa sonat quantum vesica pepedi |
|
diffissa nate ficus: at illae currere in urbem. |
| |
You would have seen Canidia’s teeth, Sagana’s tall wig, herbs, and cords enchanted through lizards fall with great laughter and joy.
| Canidiae dentes, altum Saganae caliendrum |
|
excidere atque herbas atque incantata lacertis |
| |
vincula cum magno risuque iocoque videres. | 50 |
Notes
- Gardens: I considered leaving this untranslated as horti, but in the end decided to go with gardens. Horti can mean "gardens," but it can also mean something like an "estate;" a villa-style property within the confines of or at the edge of a city. I chose to translate as "gardens" as I have been convinced by the argument of T. P. Wiseman that the common placement of this satire within Maecenas' misnamed "Gardens" is wrong, because the site's identification is incorrect. He makes the point that Maecenas' estate was not open to the public, so Canidia and Sagana could not have accessed it and suggests that this poem should be situated in the same place referred to by another poet (Propertius 4.8) as "the new fields" on the "watery Esquiline" which included houses, taverns, and gardens, revitalising the area near the old cemetery.
On the so-called "Gardens of Maecenas," for decades I had misunderstood term to be something like a huge botanical garden, when it actually means the “estate of Maecenas.” Yes, I am salty about this and feel that an effort ought to be made to change how Maecenas' property is referred; either call it the "horti of Maecenas" or the estate.
Canidia and Sagana are undoubtedly visiting the recently gentrified area which had been a paupers’ cemetery not too far from where monumental tombs still stood. The new horti might relate to actual gardens built to try improve the area. For the use of Priapus statues in cemetery gardens, see Lowell Edmund's paper. - Scurra: I left scurra untranslated as it is hard to choose a single English word to define it. It can mean either a "dandy" and "man-about-town" or it can mean a "clown" or "jester." The term took on a significant change in meaning in the century leading up to its appearance here. Whereas earlier scurra had a pleasant undertone that someone was witty and entertaining, who might have even been a professional entertainer, by Horace's time was a negative term. This change might be the result of changing Roman attitudes to public entertainers whose low social regard even becomes codified in law. By 35 BCE, the scurra was someone who hung around more successful men hoping for a dinner invite but wasn't a faithful friend. He was invited to dinner with an expectation that he might be an entertaining inclusion. That said, Horace was also hanging around more successful men and relying on their generosity, so seeing such people as rivals might have influenced his negative representation of them.
The name Pantolabus literally means "Grab-all", and according to later (3rd and 5th Century CE) scholiasts, he was identified as Mallius Verna, a man who was always hitting up people for loans. This identification might have influenced the translation of scurra as "parasite," but I have avoided this interpretation, although it might fit, because parasitus was also a term associated with a collegium of sub-dramatic performers in Rome, going by the name "the Parasites of Apollo." - Nepos Nomentanus: nepos is the word from which our English word "nepotism" derives. It literally means "grandson" but takes on the generalised "descendant" or "heir." It also takes on a negative tone and was commonly used to mean someone who has spent all their inheritance. I was tempted to translate this as "trust-fund kid," except trusts are set up to prevent people from spending their capital; the use of nepos here has an overlay of social judgement similar to that associated with "trust-fund kid." One of the translations I disliked translated it as "playboy," but perhaps I've watched too much Batman and the term doesn't convey the notion of having spent all your inherited wealth.
The name Nomentanus literally means "man from the town Nomentum" which was not far from Rome. There is some argument about whether he was an adaptation of a similarly named character used by the "father of satire" Lucilius, or was a reference to Lucius Cassius Nomentanus who was named by the scholiasts. This man was recorded as having spent 7,000,000 sesterces (that is seven times the monetary requirement to qualify as a senator in the Augustan period), on food and pleasure (the dictionaries are cagey about whether this should be interpreted as sexual pleasure). - Agger: this refers to the raised part of defensive fortification known to Romans as the Servian Walls in the Esquiline section which was composed of a raised earthwork that was almost 15 metres wide preceded by a fosse that was nearly 30 metres wide and almost 9 metres deep (Dionysius of Halicarnasus 9.68.3-4). The broad raised earthwork was still referred to as the Agger for more than a century after this. Agger here is commonly translated as "rampart," but this translation fails to convey that this was at the time a common name for the area. For this reason, I have left it untranslated.
- Incantations and potions twist human souls / carminibus quae versant atque venenis humanos animos. The Latin word I have translated as incantation is to carmen, which literally means "songs" How carmen (pl. carmina) is translated depends on the context, as the act of singing to derive a supernatural outcome was not inherently seen as bad in Rome. Even in Rome's oldest law code, the Twelve Tables, carmina were only illegal when used to the detriment of others, in that case "singing away someone's crops," whereas a carmen used to help heal a broken leg was perfectly acceptable.
Potions: my translation of noun venenum, which has a multitude of meanings which again depends on the context. It can mean a "potion," "juice," "drug," "dye," or even a "charm." More often than not it was conceived as having a liquid form. Unlike carmen, it usually had a negative connotation, like another Latin word derived from it, veneficium, which referred to "poisons," or a "magical potions," or sorcery.
Souls: my translation of the noun animus, which again has a multitude of meanings which I won't go into. The term can relate to the spirit or soul, whether it is attached to the human body or detached, in what we would call a ghost or spirit. Horace uses the word below in line 29 to discuss ghosts. I have translated both instances as "souls."
Twist: the verb verso can have both negative and positive connotations and plenty of potential translations. I went with twist as it fits the meaning well and gives a strong sense of being disturbed which fits the meaning well. - Noxious herbs: I went with a literal translation, but herba can refer also to "grass" or simply "plants." Nocens means "harmful," "injurious," or even "wicked," but I decided to use the English term derived from it, "noxious."
- Prepared Canidia: this was another example where I strongly disagreed with other translators. Every translation I found understood the word succinctam in relation to Canidia's clothing and therefore was translated as her "black garment girt," but in addition to not matching grammatically (at least to me it should be read as relating to Canidia herself which it matches as both use the accusative case), they don't take into consideration how people were thought to dress when performing magic. When performing magic and even some religious duties, the participant ought not were anything which is tied on or around them as it prevents them from performing the ritual. Compare, for example, Ovid's description of Medea in the Heroides (6.89-94):
Among sepulchres she stalks, ungirded, with hair flowing loose, and gathers from the yet warm funeral pyre the appointed bones. She vows to their doom the absent, fashions the waxen image, and into its wretched heart drives the slender needle—and other deeds ’twere better not to know. Ill sought by herbs is love that should be won by virtue and by beauty.
I have instead translated succinctam as "prepared" because I think it better reflects the Latin and how magical rituals were practiced. - Infernal bitches: Horace specifies that the dogs were female. I chose "bitches" not only to reflect the specified gender, but also because canis was used to denote a shameless, vile person, so if there was a double meaning I am not fully aware of, the English can also denote that. Also, satires were known for their use of foul language, so it fits the genre too. I have seen this translated as "hellhounds," but I think the use of "hell" is especially inappropriate for a poem written well before Christianity.
- Crap: the Latin merda is still used as a swear word in Italian, and "merde" is commonly understood as "shit" in French.
- Piss and crap: I have translated mictum as "piss" as it can have a "somewhat rude" meaning according to Whittaker's Words, and again, this kind of vocabulary suits the genre. Cacatum I have translated as "crap" because this is a loan work from classical Greek, and today the Greek word has what is described as a more "childish" way to describe excrement, and I have always preferred "crap" as a more polite alternative to "shit."
- Snake: I had difficulty in deciding how to translate calubra. While it can just be another word for "snake," I wanted to distinguish it from the serpentes described previously. Dictionaries refer to this as sometimes specifically the snakes associated with the hair of Medusa or the Furies (certainly on theme given the following lines), but this was a magical ingredient. I had decided to go with "water-serpent" because of one use of this word in Pliny the Elder (32.82):
The enhydris is a snake so-called by the Greeks and living in water. With four upper teeth of this creature they scrape the upper gums, when there is aching of the upper teeth, and with four lower teeth the lower gums when there is aching in the lower teeth. Some are content to use the canine tooth only of these creatures.
However, on reflection, the "water" here relates to the specified type of snake whose name means "aquatic." So, I have reverted back to snake, but I have noticed that some have translated it elsewhere as "grass snake." - Balloon: while the Latin vesica literally refers to the organ "bladder," a "bursting bladder" in English has the connotation that someone desperately needs to urinate. I propose the translation "balloon" not only because of the appropriateness of that sound for this description, but because there is evidence to suggest that bladders were used like modern balloon today. Galen (On Natural Faculties 1.7) described the blowing up of bladders by children which we can relate to modern balloons:
Children take the bladders of pigs, fill them with air, and then rub them on ashes near the fire, so as to warm, but not to injure them. This is a common game in the district of Ionia, and among not a few other nations. As they rub, they sing songs, to a certain measure, time, and rhythm, and all their words are an exhortation to the bladder to increase in size. When it appears to them fairly well distended, they again blow air into it and expand it further; then they rub it again. This they do several times, until the bladder seems to them to have become large enough. Now, clearly, in these doings of the children, the more the interior cavity of the bladder increases in size, the thinner, necessarily, does its substance become.
I can soon no reason to assume that upon bursting, these blown-up bladders would make a different, shocking sound to modern balloons, and would therefore convey the correct sound-scape to the audience.
Who Was Priapus, and What Was His Statue Meant to Do?
Trigger warning: this section does discuss sexual violence.
Priapus was a god originally from Lampsacus, city on the Hellespont in modern Turkiye. So he came to Rome via Greece, but there is no mention of him in sources prior to the 4th century BCE, and he doesn't appear in any Roman sources until the 2nd century BCE, but he is more commonly seen from the 1st century BCE onwards. The son of Dionysus and either Aphrodite or a nymph, he seems to become the urban person's idea of what a garden guardian god should be: he is deliberately rendered most commonly in a rough manner, but only ever seen in urban or suburban contexts. This statue from the House of the Vettii in Pompei is an exception to how he was normally rendered. Typically he would be carved roughly from wood.
Priapus' typically wooden nature is indicated in poems, for instance Martial's (Epigrams 8.40) address to him:
Priapus, guardian—not of a garden or fertile vineyard, but of a scattered copse, from which you were born and can be born again—keep off thievish hands, I warn you, and preserve the wood for its owner’s hearth. If it gives out, you too are timber.
Apparently only one wooden Priapus as survived, but according to Peter Stewart remains unpublished.
This stone rendering includes the upraised arm described by Horace, but typically he would be carrying a sickle (falx) with which to threaten thieves, as Virgil (Georgics 4.109-11) wrote:
Let there be gardens fragrant with saffron flowers to invite them, and let the watchman against thieves and birds, guardian Priapus, lord of the Hellespont, protect them with his willow sickle.
Now, Horace's Priapus also alludes to his over-sized penis as another way in which he threatened thieves. This is because he threatens sexual violence to those who would steal from his garden in some poems described as Priapea. In fact, in more than one of these poems he threatens women/girls with vaginal rape, boys with anal rape, and men with oral rape (Uden 2007: 18). That said, he is a wooden statue who cannot move, so despite the bombast of the literature, in which he is sometimes the victim of sexual violence because he is indeed only an unmoving statue, I think Priapus and his extremely large penis should be viewed as other large phalli in the classical world: he is an apotropaic protection figure.
It should be noted that for a considerable period now, Priapus has been used by modern scholarship as indicative of the ideal Roman male sexuality, the active penetrator, and all other sexual behaviour was abnormal. Indeed, the majority of academic discussions featuring him address this theory. I have always found this theory nonsensical because Priapus' penis was considered abnormal and disgusting. More recent discussions of Roman sexual mores are moving away from the "Priapian model" and are becoming more nuanced in relation to both sexual behaviour and gender norms (see Levin-Richardson 2020).
Where Did Horace Set This Poem?
 |
| The Agger is marked in read at to the right. |
Horace is quite explicit in his description of the setting of this poem: it is in a recently established horti situated on the Esquiline Hill, abutting the graveyards which had been established there for some time. This cemetery was situated close to the Agger which I discussed above. How this all related topographically is debated is a bit debated (see Wiseman 2016, 140-1).
What Do We Know About the Cemetary on the Esquiline Hill?
Trigger Warning: this section describes the manner in which some human remains were disposed of, how they were excavated, and includes confronting descriptions thereof.
I personally think it’s hard to improve on the descriptions of this area provided by Rodolfo Lanciani who completed a number of excavations of this area in the 19th Century.
The Esquiline cemetery was divided into two sections: one for the artisans who could afford to be buried apart ... one for the slaves, beggars, prisoners, and others, who were thrown in revolting confusion into common pits or fosses. This latter section covered an area one thousand feet long, and three hundred deep, and contained many hundred puticuli: or vaults, twelve feet square, thirty deep, of which I have brought to light and examined about seventy-five. In many cases the contents of each vault were reduced to a uniform mass of black, viscid, pestilent, unctuous matter; in a few cases the bones could in a measure be singled out and identified. The reader will hardly believe me when I say that men and beasts, bodies and carcasses, and any kind of unmentionable refuse of the town were heaped up in those dens. Fancy what must have been the condition of this hellish district in times of pestilence, when the mouths of the crypts must have been kept wide open the whole day!
Rodolfo Lanciani 1890. Ancient Rome in Light of Recent Discoveries, p. 64-5.
Lanciani does not state what he based his description of 1,000 feet length and 300 feet depth. Elsewhere in his discussion of his excavations of this area he does mention other dimensions which he stated that he had measured himself. I cannot be sure that this description might have been based on Horace's description of the poor people's burial are in line 12.
While the “great tombs” which Horace described at line 36 were gone when Lanciani was excavating, we can get a sense of how different kinds of burials were situated next to each other by looking at a slightly later cemetery, Isola Sacra, which provided burials for Portus, the imperial port of Rome, which was excavated between 1925 and 1940.
Lanciani goes on to say:
… the town authorities had increased their potency by allowing the daily refuse of a population numbering nearly a million souls to be heaped up within and around the precincts of this Esquiline cemetery. In later times, seven centuries after the foundation of Rome, they endeavored to stop the practice, or at any rate to regulate it. Decree upon decree was issued on the subject, and a line of stone cippi, inscribed with sanitary rules, was set up around the edge of the pestiferous ground. I have found three of these police regulations engraved on square blocks of travertine. … This line of stones, beyond which the refuse of the town could be legally thrown and be allowed to putrefy under the burning sun, was only four hundred feet distant from the walls and embankment of Servius Tullius. On the day of the discovery of the above-mentioned stone, June 25th, 1884, I was obliged to relieve my gang of workmen from time to time, because the smell from that polluted ground (turned up after a putrefaction of twenty centuries) was absolutely unbearable even for men so hardened to every kind of hardship as my excavators.
Rodolfo Lanciani 1890. Ancient Rome in Light of Recent Discoveries, pp. 66-7.
This is one of the “signposts” to which Lanciani refers.
The Latin reads:
L(ucius) SENTIVS C(ai) F(filius) PR(aetor)
DE SEN(atus) SENT(entia) LOCA
TERMINANDA COER(avit).
B(onum) F(actum) NEIQVIS INTRA
TERMINOS PROPIVS
VRBEM VSTRINAM
FECISSE VELIT NEIVE
STERCVS CADAVER
INIECISSE VELIT
Painted in red:
STERCVS LONGE
AVFER
NE MALVM HABEAS
Lucius Sentius, son of Gaius, praetor, by order of the Senate, has set up to mark the extent of area. May it prove good that nobody burn corpses and nobody throw shit or a corpse within the borders of the city proper.
(Painted in red)
Carry shit further lest you be punished.
So, in addition to what was an unsuccessful attempt to stop the dumping of bodies and excrement, a local even added their own graffito to attempt to discourage this practice.
The pits which Lanciani describes that were used to receive Rome’s rubbish, which sadly included the bodies of the city’s lowest economic classes, were described in literature. Varro (On the Latin Language 4.25) wrote on the topic not that long before Horace:
Outside the towns there are puticuli ‘little pits,’ named from putei ‘pits,’ because there the people used to be buried in putei ‘pits’; unless rather, as Aelius writes, the puticuli are so called because the corpses which had been thrown out putescebant ‘used to rot’ there, in the public burial-place which is beyond the Esquiline.
Given Lanciani’s experiences, Horace’s description of a “field of pale bones” which used to be a common sight seems completely believable. It also indicates that any successful attempt to stop the dumping of corpses, cadavers, and excrement would have definitely brought a healthful change to the experience of walking along the Agger.
"The Monument Should Pass to No Heirs"
Here a pillar gave a thousand feet in front and three hundred towards the field, and provided that the monument should pass to no heirs.
This is a reference to a very common inscription which were placed in, on, or around burial places. Here is an example dating around the same time as the poem.
 |
| CIL 6.37156. 1st Century BCE. Rome, via Nomentana. 54cm x 97cm. Capitoline Museum, NCE 3027. |
The stone reads:
θ Flaminia ((mulieris)) l(iberta) Salvia,
C(aius) Valerius Triari l(ibertus) Phileros,
accensus,
Valeria C(ai) et ((mulieris)) l(iberta) Scurra,
C(aius) Valerius C(ai) l(ibertus) Eros.
In hoc sepulchrum inferetur nemo praeter
quam quorum nomina supra inscrìpta sunt.
Hoc monumentum heredem non sequitur.
In fronte ped(es) XII, in agr(o) ped(es) XVIII.
This inscription not only features the phrase, but even an outline of the area which the deceased person was claiming as their burial/monument plot, just as Horace described.
So common was this inscription that a short-hand was derived to take up less space on the stone. According to the Trismegistos database, there are 466 examples of the abridgement HMHNS, of which 303 were found in Italy, of which 161 were found in Latium, of which 120 were found in Rome. All of this is to say that Horace’s audience was very aware of this language and was seeing this frequently. They also knew that no one whose remains were flung into a pit could claim exclusive usage. These lines would have been met with laughter. As an indication for how ridiculous this line is, the space claimed measures 26,284 square metres, whereas for comparison, modern graves typically measure 2.4 x 0.9 metres, or 2.16 square metres.
I personally feel sorrow for those people whose remains were just thrown into landfill no different to any other kind of rubbish, but this joke about claiming exclusive rights to this place suggests that Horace and his audience felt quite different.
There has been surprisingly little research that I was able to find on this formula since a paper written by Charles Mierow in 1934. Mierow eviscerated the idea that this was a legal formula carving out burial plots from inheritances by pointing out that all property classified in Roman law as either res sacrae (things consecrated to the gods above by official, public action) or res religiosae (things devoted to the spirits of the departed) were excluded from inheritance. He instead proposes that the inscription states that heirs are not permitted to use the burial space despite their relationship to the person who arranged the inscription.
Magical Practices
There are multiple magical practices described in this poem, many of which were also described in other Roman popular literature. This might make you wonder whether Romans actually believed this was happening, or it was a stock character. I think it is safe to assume that this was a real fear held by the people in antiquity. This can be seen in literature and epigraphic evidence. Pliny the Elder (Natural History, 28.19) a little of a century later:
There is indeed nobody who does not fear to be spell-bound by imprecations.
This inscription found in Rome (CIL 6 19747) also shows that the fear of harmful magic performed by people like Canidia and Sagana was real:
Iucundus, the slave of Livia the wife of Drusus Caesar, son of Gryphus and Vitalis. As I grew towards by fourth year I was seized and killed, when I had the potential to be sweet for my mother and father. I was snatched by a witch's hand [saga manus], ever cruel so long as it remains on the earth and does harm with its craft. Parents, guard your children well, lest grief of this magnitude should implant itself in your breast.
This inscription has more in common with Horace's more horrifying poem, Epodes 5, which features Candidia and two other women starving a child to death in order to use his liver in a love potion.
Horace does not explicitly refer to love potions in this poem, but I have identified five different kinds of magical practice to which allusions are made.
Incantations
...those who through incantations and potions twist human souls...
I already make references to incantations in my commentary (number 5) above. References to carmina abound in multiple kinds of sources. See below for an example of its use by Virgil.
Binding Poppets
One effigy was woollen, and the other was waxen; the woollen was larger, in order that it restrain the smaller with punishments; the waxen stood submissively, as if it were being killed in the manner of a slave. ... how the fire blazed higher with the waxen image...
Please do not refer to these a "voodoo dolls." this kind of magic has nothing to do with religion of Vodou (see my discussion of this here).
There is plenty of evidence for this. Virgil (Eclogues, 8.64-83) includes this along with the use of knotted cords and incantations. The wax and clay refers to the use of binding poppets, just like the effigies mentioned by Horace.
Bring Daphnis home from town, bring him, my songs [carmina]!Three threads here I first tie round you, marked with three different hues, and three times round this altar I draw your image. In an uneven number heaven delights. Weave, Amaryllis, three hues in three knots; weave them, Amaryllis, I beg, and say, ‘Chains of love I weave!’Bring Daphnis home from town, bring him, my songs!As this clay hardens, and as this wax melts in one and the same flame, so may Daphnis melt with love for me! Sprinkle meal, and kindle the crackling bays with pitch. Me cruel Daphnis burns; for Daphnis burn I this laurel.
A similar description of poppets features in Ovid's Heroides (see note 7 above). We even have binding poppets recovered from archaeological sites. This one made of flour, wax, and bone was recovered from the cistern at the shrine of Anna Perenna in Rome.
 | ||
|
Cords and Knots
...cords enchanted through lizards fall...
Cords, threads, and strings were commonly used in binding spells like the quote from Virgil above and Horace's casual mention of them at the end of his satire. Another example of cords used along with an incantation in Roman popular literature was in Petronius' Satyricon (131.4-7):
In the meantime the old woman took from her pocket a twisted ball of various colored threads, and tied it round my neck. Next she mixed some dust with her own saliva, took it up with her middle finger, and ignoring my attempt to ward her off, marked my forehead with it. Once her chant [carmen] was finished, she ordered me to spit three times and then toss some pebbles into my underwear three times, after she had uttered a spell over them and had wrapped them in purple material. She then placed her hands on my member and began to test its powers. Before anyone could utter a word, the muscle tissue in my penis responded to her command, and with a mighty throbbing filled the old woman’s hands. She was overjoyed and said: “My dear Chrysis, do you see the hare that I’ve started for others to enjoy?”
There are numerous other examples which I will not go into.
Necromancy
They began to scratch the earth with their fingernails and to tear to pieces a blackish lamb with their teeth; the stream of blood having been poured into the furrow, in order that from there they might conjure spirits; souls that would give responses.
The use of spirits of the dead to obtain answers, often relating to the future, is what is called necromancy. Ignore the ideas of reanimated corpses which is a popular understanding of "necromancy" today. This description bares significant resemblance to the earliest reference to necromancy in the classical world; that provided by Homer in The Odyssey, (11.23-43).
Here Perimedes and Eurylochus held the victims, while I drew my sharp sword from beside my thigh, and dug a pit of a cubit’s length this way and that, and around it poured a libation to all the dead, first with milk and honey, thereafter with sweet wine, and in the third place with water, and I sprinkled on it white barley meal and I earnestly entreated the strengthless heads of the dead, vowing that when I came to Ithaca I would sacrifice in my halls a barren heifer, the best I had, and load the altar with rich gifts, and to Teiresias alone would sacrifice a ram, wholly black, the finest of my flocks. But when with vows and prayers I had made supplication to the tribes of the dead, I took the sheep [ram and a black ewe] and cut their throats over the pit, and the dark blood flowed. Then there gathered from out of Erebus the ghosts of those that are dead, brides, and unwed youths, and toil-worn old men, and frisking girls with hearts still new to sorrow, and many, too, that had been wounded with bronze-tipped spears, men slain in battle, wearing their blood-stained armor. These came thronging in crowds about the pit from every side, with an astounding cry; and pale fear seized me.
Except for the fact that Sagana and Canidia performed the most vital parts of this ritual, the digging of a hole and the sacrifice of a black sheep, with their bodies, literally tooth and nail, rather than tools, these elements were the same and both parties sought answers from the deceased.
Amulets and Magical Ingredients
...how they secretly hid in the ground a wolf’s beard with the tooth of a mottled snake...
...enchanted through lizards fall...
I am able by no means to ruin or restrain them from gathering bones and noxious herbs...
These lines also indicate a common magical tradition in Rome. Parts from wolves and various animal teeth, including those of snakes were commonly used in medical amulets described by Pliny the Elder. If you want to know more about Pliny's description of amulets, which also features multiple uses of lizards, I have a published dataset available here. The teeth of snakes were also used in magical cures (see note 11 above).
Herbs were also commonly associated with this kind of magic (see note 7 above).
False Teeth in Antiquity
You would have seen Canidia’s teeth... fall with great laughter and joy.
Conclusion
You can find out a lot about the city of Rome from poetry of this nature. This blog does not even cover all I discovered looking just a little closer at what Horace wrote.
Bibliography
Other Translations
Translated by A. S. Kline 2005
Works I Looked At or Recommend
Lowell Edmunds, 2009. "Horace's Priapus: A Life on the Esquiline (Sat. 1.8)," Classical Quarterly, vol. 59 pp. 125-31, doi:10.1017/S0009838809000093
A. E. Gordon 1951. "Seven Latin Inscriptions in Rome," Greece and Rome vol. 20, pp. 75-92 + plates.
Emily Gowers, 2012. Horace: Satires Book I. Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics. Cambridge University Press.
Sarah Levin-Richardson, 2020. "Roman and un-Roman sex," in Ivleva, T., & Collins, R. (2020). Un-Roman Sex: Gender, Sexuality, and Lovemaking in the Roman Provinces and Frontiers. Routledge pp. 346-59. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315269894
Hugh Lindsay, 2001. "The Cost of Dying at Rome," Ancient History Resources for Teachers, vol. 31, pp. 17-27.
Charles. C. Mierow, 1934. "Hoc Monumentum Heredem Non Sequitur-An Interpretation," Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, vol. 65, pp. 163–177. https://doi.org/10.2307/283026
Daniel Ogden 2002. Magic, witchcraft, and ghosts in the Greek and Roman worlds: a sourcebook, Oxford University Press.
Piranomonte, M., 2013. "Religion And Magic At Rome: The Fountain Of Anna Perenna". In Magical Practice in the Latin West. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, pp. 191–213. https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004179042.i-676.42
L. Richardson, jr, 1992. A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, John Hopkins University Press.
Niall Rudd, 1960. "The Names in Horace’s Satires," The Classical Quarterly, 10(2), 161–178. http://www.jstor.org/stable/638047
Alex Scobie, 1986. "Slums, Sanitation, and Mortality in the Roman World," Klio, vol. 68, 399-433.
Peter Stewart, 1997. "Fine Art and Coarse Art: the Image of Roman Priapus," Art History, Volume 20, pp. 575–588, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.00082
James Uden, 2007. "Impersonating Priapus," American Journal of Philology, vol. 128, pp. 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2007.0021
Comments
Post a Comment