And The Gods Dread To Hear Another Poem PDF

Materiali e discussioni
per l’analisi dei testi classici
68
Pisa · Roma
Fabrizio Serra editore
2012
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Rivista semestrale
Direttore : Gian Biagio Conte (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa).
 
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Roma « Tor Vergata »), Mario Citroni (Università di Firenze), Mario De Nonno
   
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Pisa), Michael Reeve (University of Cambridge), Gianpiero Rosati (Università
di Udine), Alessandro Schiesaro (« Sapienza » - Università di Roma), Ernst A.
   
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Emily Pillinger
« And the gods dread to hear another poem » :
     
The Repetitive Poetics of Witchcraft

from Virgil to Lucan*
1. Witches’ Carmina : Songs and Spells, Poems

and Prophecies
T he canon of witches in classical literature stretches from the

powerful mythological figures of Circe and Medea, through
the more girlish characterisations of the Hellenistic era, down to
the hags and procuresses populating Latin comic drama, elegy,
satire and the ancient novel, with an epic cameo provided by the
spectacular Erictho in Lucan’s Bellum Civile. 1 These witch-figures
 
and the carmina they compose tend to be read as straightforward

manifestations of the ‘other’, as representing a challenge to the
more normative characters, narratives and aesthetics of the texts
they inhabit. Lacking conventional religious, social or poetic au-
thority, the women are defined purely by their attempts to per-
vert the traditional rituals and hierarchies of the communities on
whose fringes they live. Nonetheless the presence of these coun-
tercultural, antisocial figures in so many different texts cannot be
satisfyingly explained by a token recognition or even appreciation
of their anarchic tendencies, and readers do these literary witches
a particular disservice by studying them in isolation. When they
* Versions of this paper were presented at Princeton University, the Advanced

Seminar in the Humanities at Venice International University (2007), and the Imi-
tation and Innovation Colloquium in Classics at Ohio State University (2008). Many
thanks are due to the participants in these events, and to the anonymous reviewer
for « md », all of whom improved this paper with a wealth of helpful comments and
   
suggestions.
1 This article focuses solely on literary figures of witchcraft, without offering or
depending on any historical reconstruction of ‘real’ witches in the ancient world.
In largely ignoring the evidence for witchcraft in the world outside literature I am
following the line taken by Gordon 1987 in his discussion of Erictho : « What is ap-
   
propriated is not the knowledge – the social practice in a specific context – but a
motif, which becomes then progressively subject to arbitrary evocation » (p. 236). For
 
recent discussions of magic (particularly cursing) as a historical phenomenon see,

e.g., Eidinow 2007 ; Faraone, Obbink 1991 ; Gager 1992 ; Graf 1997 ; Ogden 2001 ; John-
         
ston 2008.
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40 Emily Pillinger
are considered alongside each other it becomes clear that their acts
of apparently arbitrary opposition operate from within a tradition.
It is an explicitly marginal tradition, but one that nonetheless has
its own strict rules of engagement and its own distinctive poetic
goals. In this paper I offer some thoughts on the tradition of witch-
craft as it appears in Latin poetry, by focusing on the role of rep-
etition and revision in poets’ representations of witches’ carmina.
These carmina, which borrow and rework other poetry without
disguise, prove to be capable of both upholding and undermining
the authority of literary traditions in general, and individual poets
in particular.
The metapoetic dimension to the literary tradition of witchcraft
is evident from the central role of the carmen in poetic representa-
tions of witches. The word carmen covers a wide gamut of mean-
ings, signifying a combination of « song », « spell », « poem » and
           
« prophecy ». 1 The lack of firm distinctions between the different

     
semantic domains in the Latin word has provided a catalyst for sev-
eral recent attempts to explore the fraught relationship between
literature and the historical world that lies behind, outside, and
yet also still within, literary texts. These explorations all depend to
some extent upon identifying a performative aspect to the notion
of the carmen, for the activation of a theme of ‘song’ potentially
offers a challenge to the textuality of Roman literature. 2 However,  
at least in the case of the tradition of literary witches, the very

feature of carmina most normally adduced as evidence for their
oral origins, their chanting repetitiveness, is only one end of a
spectrum of repetitive acts that at the other end encompasses just
as comfortably the intertextuality of written poems. Viewed from
this perspective the performativity of carmina is not about the chal-
1 old, s.v. carmen. Two wide-ranging books published recently focus on this poly-
valence : Habinek 2005 discusses the ambiguous semantics of carmen across different
 
Roman social contexts, and Lowrie 2009, esp. pp. 1-23 focuses on the power play at
work when poets claim to be operating in a sung rather than a written medium.
Even scholars focusing their attention on the word carmen and its cognates in the
more limited sense of « spells » acknowledge the slippery nature of the terms ; this is
     
apparent from their earliest attestation in the Twelve Tables, whose fragments some-
times seem to refer to magic spells (Sen. nat. quaest. 4.7.2, Plin. hn 28.17), sometimes
to invective poetry (Cic. Rep. 4.12 and Tusc. 4.4). See Luck 1985, p. 77 ; Tupet 1976, pp.
 
166-168 ; Graf 1997, pp. 41-46. Lowrie adds the neat point that the Twelve Tables were
 
themselves described as a carmen necessarium (Cic. Leg. 2.59) so, as she puts it, « The  
Twelve Tables turn out to be ‘songs’ regulating ‘songs’ » (p. 340).

 
2 Lowrie 2009 ; Putnam 2000, pp. 130-150, esp. pp. 132-133.

 

The Repetitive Poetics of Witchcraft from Virgil to Lucan 41
lenge of the spoken word against the written text, but about the
use and power of marked repetition in any poetic text, whether
written or spoken. The witches’ carmina are performative not be-
cause they describe any particular performance mode beyond the
text, but because they claim the power to achieve certain ends by
means of a ritualised articulation. 1  
The direction of witches’ carmina towards specific goals means

that the question of authorial intent and control becomes thema-
tised in their representation. The spellbinding repetitions in these
carmina are constructed in order to influence the future, so a pro-
claimed authorial intent is clear. This desire to affect future events
is marked by references to more conventional prophetic figures or
tropes, but the prophetic mode adopted by witches is one identi-
fied primarily with cursing. While prophecy involves quotation
of an externally predestined fate, cursing intends to bring about
or transform fate ; indeed Pliny defines a witch’s carmen as that
 
which is designed primarily to influence or direct the gods : al-  
iquid… dignum deo movendo, immo vero quod numini imperet (Plin.
hn 28.20). Witches are not mouthpieces of the gods ; they repeat,  
selectively and relentlessly, the version of future events that suits

them. In the literary representations of witches’ carmina the sup-
posedly persuasive or binding effects of repetitive oral chanting
are imitated and transformed into an array of different kinds of
textual echoes or « second spells ». 2 Among these echoes can be
     
found interactions with other works, intertextualities, as well as

more striking intratextualities, repetitions within the same work,
sometimes within the same speech. 3 Most interestingly, despite  
1 This brings carmina rather closer to the kind of performativity identified in

speech-act theory, as outlined by Austin 1975 : « The issuing of the utterance is the per-
   
forming of an action » (p. 6). On the role of performativity in magic more generally
 
see Faraone 1995 ; Graf 1997, pp. 206-215 ; Lowrie 2009, p. 330.
   
2 Ogden 2001 describes the pointed use of wholesale repetition in Imperial Roman
necromancy as the « second spell » (p. 176). Ogden’s evidence for this is culled largely
   
from the texts discussed in this paper, particularly the episode of Lucan’s Erictho,
but he assumes that it reflects specific contemporary historical practice. I argue that
not only is this kind of repetition a peculiarly literary phenomenon, but it is also one
with a longer literary heritage than that identified by Ogden. Duncan 2001 agrees that
literary tradition is vital to the presentation of witches within poetry. She argues that
the Hellenistic period in particular saw its written culture trying to create a sense of
continuity with the past by using scenes of witches casting spells to reflect an older
oral performance culture, reinvigorated by its transferral from the traditionally pub-
lic and male domain into a more personal and female arena.
3 The witches’ carmina offer a prime representation of intratext as it is formulated

42 Emily Pillinger
the witch-authors’ efforts to exert control through deliberate rep-
etition, the echoes in their carmina often also encompass or inspire
repetitions that were apparently unintended by the witch. The
effects of these uncontrolled echoes spin out beyond the stated
goals of the carmina, producing meaning for other protagonists,
or for the readers outside the text. 1 The witches’ authorial con-
 
trol, therefore, ultimately turns out to be rather less assured than

their authorial intent.
This paper considers the voices of a limited selection of witches,
looking at their role in poetry ranging from Virgil to Lucan, via
Horace, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid. 2 In all these texts the dif-
 
ferent levels of intent and control displayed by the witches in their

carmina proves to interact with, and comment upon, the poetry
that contains their compositions. In the witches’ repetitive carmina
authorship is fragmented or usurped, canonical authority is un-
dermined, and the re-appropriation of previously fixed words is
the place where real poetic power lies. The witches’ insistent rep-
etitions can create an atmosphere of sterile closure that attempts
to stifle further interpretations of their carmina. At the same time
the repetitions can also suggest the presence of multiple different
authors behind the text and seem to grant the validity of as many
different readings. In all cases, the carmina demonstrate a subver-
sively speculative attitude toward the role of readers in identifying
and assessing the effectiveness of the poetic repetitions. Ultimately,
just as the witches’ curses assert an individual vision of the future
in defiance of the laws of the gods and the preordained narratives
in which the characters live, so the shared literary style of the
witches’ carmina explores a desire for a specific sort of control over
poetry and its interpretation by future readers.
by Sharrock 2000 : « It is the hypothesis of intratextuality that a text’s meaning grows

   
not only out the readings of its parts and its whole, but also out of readings of the
relationships between the parts, and the reading of those parts as parts, and parts
as relationship (interactive or rebarbative) : all this both formally (e.g. episodes, di-
 
gression, frame, narrative line, etc.) and substantively (e.g. in voice, theme, allusion,
topos, etc.) – and teleologically. » (pp. 6-7).
 
1 Most of this paper will be framed in terms of Hinds’ circumspect description of

a reader-constructed authorial intention, a perspective that allows considerable room
for manoeuvre and maps neatly onto the notions of authorship found in the carmina
and the poems that describe them. See Hinds 1998, esp. p. 49.
2 On the wider literary picture in prose as well as poetry see Graf 1997, pp. 190-204.
Worth particular notice is the witch in Heliodorus Aethiopica 6.14-15, whose repetitive
rituals are remarkably similar to those discussed in this paper.

2. Carmina within Carmina : The First Steps

in Eclogue 8
This paper does not attempt to begin at the beginning of the tra-
dition (where would that be ?) but starts with what is already a
 
« second spell ». 1 Just before the passage by Pliny quoted above, in

     
which he describes what people are looking to achieve with a spell,

Pliny claims that Theocritus, Catullus and Virgil have all written
literary versions, imitationes, of love spells. 2 What Pliny fails to
 
mention is the fact that these poems clearly relate at least as much
to each other as they do to any purportedly ‘real-world’ spells. The
song quoted by Alphesiboeus in Virgil’s eighth Eclogue is based
on Simaetha’s song in Theocritus’ second Idyll. Moreover, Clausen
finds it highly probable that the poem of Catullus known by Pliny
was a translation of Idyll 2, and suggests that Catullus’ translation
might have been the initial inspiration for Virgil’s version. Indeed
Clausen suggests that Virgil may have produced his own close
translation of Theocritus’s second Idyll early in his career, perhaps
in imitation of Catullus’ translation, only later rewriting the mate-
rial into his eighth Eclogue. 3  
According to Clausen’s (speculative) reconstruction of the pro-

cess lying behind Eclogue 8, Virgil was responding to a Greek song
as well as to at least two Latin translations, one of which he had
composed himself. This means that the practice of rewriting ma-
terial, already fundamental to Virgil’s overtly Theocritean bucolic
project, would have been given an extra spin in this particularly
self-conscious poem. Certainly the changes between one witch’s
poem and another would have been all the more pointedly related
to the notion of authorship and reception. Duncan has already ar-
gued that Theocritus’ Simaetha should be read as a poet-figure. 4  
1 On the difficult and often misguided effort to identify the ‘first’ in a tradition
see Rosenmeyer 2006, pp. 435-437 ; Konstan 1998, pp. 133-134 ; Thill 1979, pp. 1-5 ; Du
     
Quesnay 1979, p. 37.

2 Plin. hn 28.19 hinc Theocriti apud Graecos, Catulli apud nos proximeque Vergilii incan-
tamentorum amatoria imitatio.
3 Clausen 1994, pp. 233-239, using this theory to explain away accusations of « a  
certain incoherence or forced unity in the poem as a whole » (p. 233).  
4 Reading Theocritus, Duncan 2001 outlines several compelling reasons why we

should view magic and poetry as interlinked activities : « Both are highly structured
   
forms (metrical, repetitive, or at least alliterative, and sometimes including a refrain,

as in Idyll 2) which are uttered aloud ; that is, both are dependent on the performance
 
of a special kind of discourse for their efficacy. Both poetry and magic invoke gods for

44 Emily Pillinger
Virgil’s retelling of her story constructs an even closer connection
between witch and poet.
Theocritus’ second Idyll consisted entirely of Simaetha’s mono-
logue. Virgil’s eighth Eclogue, by contrast, embeds the girl’s song
in a carefully contrived pastoral setting, and thus records a debt to
Theocritus’ bucolic settings even as it subsumes Theocritus’ origi-
nal within a new narrative frame. The Virgilian scene is set by an
anonymous narrator, then shepherds perform two long Theocri-
tean songs : it is therefore « a fiction of voice within a fiction of
   
voice ». 1 Damon sings the first song, based on Theocritus’ Idyll 3,

   
and Alphesiboeus sings the second, the version of Simaetha’s song

from Idyll 2. Alphesiboeus delivers the entire piece in the character
of Virgil’s love-crossed girl, using the first-person without intro-
duction or explanation. 2  
Effer aquam et molli cinge haec altaria vitta

verbenasque adole pinguis et mascula tura,
coniugis ut magicis sanos avertere sacris
experiar sensus ; nihil hic nisi carmina desunt.
 
ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnin.

carmina vel caelo possunt deducere lunam,
carminibus Circe socios mutavit Ulixi,
frigidus in pratis cantando rumpitur anguis.
ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnin.
(Verg. Ecl. 8.64-72)
Bring water and dress the altar with a soft ribbon
and burn the thick foliage and male incense,
so that with magic rituals I may attempt to overturn
my partner’s intact emotions ; nothing is missing now except the spells.
 
Draw back home from the city, draw back Daphnis, my spells.
Spells for sure can draw down the moon from the sky,
with spells Circe transformed the comrades of Ulysses,
in the fields the cold-blooded snake is burst open by chanting.
Draw back home from the city, draw back Daphnis, my spells.
assistance and support, as Simaetha does in this poem. Both kinds of discourse posi-
tion themselves, and talk about themselves, as forms of power over an audience that
is ‘enchanted.’ And the similarities can be analyzed in either direction : poetry uses
 
the language of magic to describe its effect (thelgei), and magic uses the techniques of
poetry to effect what it describes. » (pp. 47-48).
 
1 Breed 2006, p. 36.

2 On the novelty of the first person voice in Theocritus’ second Idyll see Goldhill
1991, p. 262.

The first hint at the role of rewriting in this poem comes in the
passage’s immediate repetition of the word carmen. From the very
beginning of her song the girl draws attention to her enchanting
verses, her carmina, the aspect of her magic-making whose power is
most closely associated with the poetry in which it is described. As if
to demonstrate this in action, the word carmen is then inserted into
a self-referential refrain which continues to the end of the poem. 1  
The refrain further emphasizes the connection between poetry and

spells by imitating the rhythmic chanting used to bewitch audienc-
es of poems and subjects of witchcraft. This is a formal feature ad-
opted from Theocritus’ original, with the word carmina replacing
Theocritus’ reference to the magic charm of the spinning bird, the
i\ugx («Iugx, e{lke tu; th`non ejmo;n poti; dw`ma to;n a[ndra). In Theocri-
tus’ refrain the girl’s address to an i\ugx ties the chanting repetition
to a magic practice whose repetitive whirling is a material means
of drawing back the girl’s lover. However, the word i\ugx was also
used metaphorically by writers as early as Aeschylus and Aristo-
phanes, so Theocritus’ usage already hints at a double effective-
ness achieved by synthesis of the material and the verbal charms. 2  
A similar conflation can be seen at work in Catullus’ adoption of

a repeated refrain in poem 64 : currite ducentes subtegmina, currite,
 
fusi. Here the repetitive material practice is the Fates’ allegorical

whirling of the fusi, the spindles that measure mortal lives, but
the physical measuring is paralleled by the Fates’ song, which ver-
bally constructs Achilles’ destiny from within Catullus’ narrative.
While Catullus’ fusi foreshadow Virgil’s more obviously pro-
grammatic carmina, his use of ducentes anticipates Virgil’s ducite,
though ducite appears to respond more directly to Theocritus’ im-
perative, e{lke. In Eclogue 8 the verb is addressed to the spell in the
refrain and also picked up in the description of spells’ powers : car-  
mina vel caelo possunt deducere lunam. Deduco has long been identi-
fied as a programmatic Latin verb describing Callimachean advice
1 Barchiesi 2009 notes that this refrain offers a moment when the « four different
 
concentric voices » come together and « the magical charm and the poetic song be-
   
come one and the same » (p. 241 n. 26).

 
2 lsj, s.v. i\ugx A. 2. Johnston 1995 describes the interaction of the iynx and the
poetic voice in Pindar Pythian 4, drawing on the significance of the word’s cognates :  
ijuvzw ; ijugmov~ ; ijukthv~ (« shout, cry out » ; « shout, cry » ; « singer »). She also reports the
                   
ancient tradition that the iynx was originally a nymph whose mother was Echo. This
connection is significant since at least as far back as Callimachus Epigram 28 Pf. Echo
represents a « trope of mannered repetition, within texts and between texts » (Hinds
   
1998, p. 8).

46 Emily Pillinger
to poets, that they should write ‘finely drawn-out’ poetry rather
than weighty, ponderous productions. 1 In Eclogue 8 the spell’s ca-
 
pacity to fulfil its author’s hopes, namely to ‘draw back’ the girl’s
lover, spins out of the whirling refrain to describe spells’ more gen-
eral capacity to influence the natural workings of the cosmos, here
to ‘draw down’ the moon. These cosmic and erotic activities are
both explicitly linked to a sophisticated form of Hellenistic poetry.
This does not mean that spells are consistently associated with any
specific poetic genre either here or in other texts ; the reference to
 
Circe’s epic spells within Virgil’s pastoral world makes this clear. 2  
Nonetheless Virgil’s overtly Hellenistic carmen makes the clear

point that a spell is, and should be treated as, a poem.
In Virgil’s poem the co-dependency of magical carmina and po-
etic carmina underpins the work’s intratextual resonances. From
the girl’s first discussion of the power of her carmina her audience
is invited to read outwards : her spells are contained within her
 
own poetic description of her rituals, this poetic description is con-

tained within a song delivered by Alphesiboeus, and Alphesiboeus’
performance is part of the duet which is contained within Eclogue
8. The narrator refers to his own poetic creativity when he turns
outwards to his patron and asks him to accept the songs the pa-
tron had requested : accipe iussis / carmina coepta tuis (Ecl. 8.11-12). 3
   
From this narrator’s introduction the audience is also encouraged

to read inwards. The narrator begins with a laudatory description
of the abilities of Damon and Alphesiboeus :  
…quorum stupefactae carmine lynces,

et mutata suos requierunt flumina cursus…
(Verg. Ecl. 8.3-4)
…by means of whose song the lynxes were struck dumb,
and the rivers changed their courses and were calmed…
The lines describe the pastoral poets’ skills in terms of an Orphic
power to invert the behaviour of nature, but the description also
echoes the powers the girl attributes to magic carmina at the begin-
ning of her own song. Indeed all the poets within the poem reflect
1 One of its most obviously programmatic uses appears at Verg. Ecl. 6.5. See
Clausen 1994, pp. 174-178, 180.
2 Duncan 2001, p. 51 points helpfully to the various poetic programmes with which
magic can be associated, noting that Callimachus himself calls his poetic enemies by
the name of the mythical wizards, the Telchines.
3 Clausen 1994 summarises the debate over the identity of the dedicatee of Eclogue 8.

on the unusual authority of their poetic creations : the narrator  
considers the abilities of his shepherds, Alphesiboeus those of his

young witch, and the girl those of her spells. Nor do the spells sig-
nal the end of this authoritative chain : the girl’s spells are intended
 
to bring back her lover, Daphnis, the central figure of pastoral po-
etry who plays a part (alive or dead) in six of the ten Eclogues. So
the power of the girl’s quoted carmina reaches outside the bounds
of the poem in which they are constructed, allowing the girl to
challenge Virgil’s creative role and lay claim to a construction of
events beyond her poetic remit. 1  
In the microcosm of Eclogue 8 intratextual echoes create the

impression that each of the creative forces in Virgil’s poem is de-
pendent upon all the other creative forces in the poem. The biggest
change that Virgil made to Theocritus’ poem was to create this
patchwork of authors, and then to make the girl’s carmina effec-
tive. Simaetha’s song had been in vain, but for Virgil poetic co-
dependence, the production of a pointedly « second spell », leads
   
to success and closure. At the end of Eclogue 8 the girl modifies

her refrain : parcite, ab urbe venit, iam parcite carmina, Daphnis (Ecl.
 
8.109). The spells seem to have initiated the return of her lover.
Though Daphnis’ return remains outside the poem, this anticipa-
tion of his return is an important rewriting of Virgil’s Theocritean
predecessor. Virgil had moved Simaetha’s spell into a pastoral con-
text, and now his girl’s spell draws Daphnis away from the city
to join her. 2 He thus asserts and celebrates the power of the net-
 
work of influences both within his work and stretching beyond it :  
the multiple voices of Simaetha, Theocritus, Aphesiboeus and the

poet-narrator lying behind the girl’s song lure in both Daphnis and
the external audience.
3. Canidia’s Control in Horace ’ s Epodes

Canidia, the witch in Horace’s Epodes and Satires, is a more tortured
and complex figure. Like the girl in Virgil’s Eclogue 8, Canidia uses
1 Breed 2006 reads this as part of a wider pattern in the Eclogues : « the consistent
   
inadequacy of pastoral’s represented speakers to contain all the significance of their

words » (p. 38). For more on the importance of the external reader in the Eclogues see
 
Conte 1986, pp. 100-129.

2 ��
This displacement of Daphnis mirrors the geographical and generic displace-
ment of Gallus in Eclogue 10, where Gallus is also identified with Daphnis in yet an-
other overstepping of the normal boundaries between literary traditions. See Conte
1986, pp. 104-108.

48 Emily Pillinger
witchcraft to try to bring back a love-interest, but this is only one
of the many uses to which she puts her magic knowledge. Canidia
is not a girl in love who turns her hand to magic, but rather a
witch who happens to have been spurned in love ; her influence  
over her lover Varus in Epode 8 is only one manifestation of her

craft. Like Virgil’s young girl, Canidia is invested in the power of
carmina, but Canidia also dramatizes much more explicitly the way
in which her specialized knowledge provides a means of influenc-
ing the future. Virgil’s witch stands as only one part of a network
of intratextual compositions, a network in which poetic characters
echo each other. Only from the external perspective of Virgil, or of
readers, can the nexus of echoes within the poetry be fully appreci-
ated. Horace’s Canidia and the characters she influences, on the
other hand, create their own intratextual compositions. These are
poet-figures who are capable not only of reworking each others’
text, but of reworking their own text. In doing this they exert a far
greater control over the meaning and effect of their words, with an
apparently corresponding diminution in Horace’s power. 1  
In Horace’s Satires Canidia is mentioned mainly in passing, and

where she does have a larger role, as in Satire 1.8, she is compre-
hensively and comically routed. 2 It is in the Epodes that her skills
 
are showcased ; appropriately enough, if the title of the collection

 
plays on the Greek word for a spell, ejpw/dhv. 3 Canidia has been read
 
as an alternative poet-figure for some time now, and her magi-

cal modus operandi has been specifically identified with Horace’s
1 On Horace’s shifting power in the Epodes see Fitzgerald 1988.

2 In Satire 1.8 Canidia and Sagana threaten the domain of a wooden Priapus but
are sent flying by his fart ; in Satire 2.8 Canidia appears in the last line to exemplify
 
the horrors of Nasidienus’ dinner. At Sat. 2.1.48 Canidia’s aggression is contrasted

with that of the invective poet, for her weapon is poison, not words. Her presence
in this poem is minimal but not insignificant, since it is here that Horace debates
with Trebatius the dangers of mala carmina (2.1.79-86), playing on the confusion over
whether the mala carmina prohibited in the Twelve Tables were hostile incantations
or invective poems (or both) and whether they are described as mala because they are
morally or aesthetically bad (see p. 40 n. 1, above). See LaFleur 1981, esp. n. 73 ; Lowrie
 
2009, pp. 332-336.

3 Some recent commentators have dismissed the possibility of this pun on the
grounds that Horace always refers to his epodes as Iambi, and that the title Epodi is not
attested until late antiquity. Nonetheless, with Archilochus’ Iamboi and Epodoi provid-
ing such a strong influence on Horace in his early poetry (numeros animosque secutus /
Archilochi, Hor. Epist. 1.19.24-25), it is not unreasonable to hear both the terms ejpw/dov~
and ejpw/dhv echoing around the work. For a convincing argument in favour of the pun
see Barchiesi 2009, p. 241 n. 24, and for further discussion of Horace’s relationship
with Archilochus see Harrison 2001.

iambic project : « Canidia embodies an indecorous poetics against
   
which Horace tries to define his own practice, particularly in the

Epodes ». 1 The name Canidia in particular has been taken as a sig-
   
nal to the witch’s role within the Epodes. Oliensis lists a multiplic-
ity of associations with the name, identifying canities, « grey-hair,  
old age » ; canis, « dog » (like Scylla, derived from skylax, « puppy ») ;
             
Canicula, the « Dog-star » ; and canere, « to sing, chant, compose,

       
prophesy ». 2 All the associations suggested here contribute to the

   
layers of Canidia’s characterisation, but the connection with ca-

nere is made more emphatic when considered alongside the names
of Canidia’s colleagues in witchcraft, Sagana, Veia and Folia, de-
scribed at some length in Epode 5. Mankin connects Sagana with
the word saga, « witch », which is itself connected with the adjec-
   
tive (prae)sagus, « foreboding, portending ». 3 The name Veia can be

     
connected with the Etruscan divinity Veiouis, and therefore stands

to evoke a religion the Romans perceived as devoted to haruspicy
and superstition. Finally Folia, whose name suggests « leaves » and    
in this context of learned and foreseeing women may be associated

either with the oracular responses given by the rustling « leaves »    
of the famous oak tree at Dodona in Greece, or with the leaves

on which the Sibyl at Cumae was supposed to have inscribed her
prophecies. All these women are invested in knowledge of how to
access or control the future.
Canidia and the other witches also identify the importance of
song in both revealing and causing future events. Folia is described
as singing, with the traditional effect of bringing down the moon :  
quae sidera excantata voce Thessala

lunamque caelo deripit.
(Hor. Epod. 5.45-46)
She who tears down the stars, bewitched by her Thessalian voice,
and the moon from the sky.
1 Oliensis 1991, p. 110. See also Barchiesi 2009, esp. pp. 241-242.
2 Oliensis 1991, p. 110 with n. 6. Oliensis acknowledges that only canities is a legiti-
mate etymology because of vowel quantity (the long a in the first vowel of Canidia),
but she also points the way forward to a more flexible approach to associations : « Ho-    
race was a poet, not a linguist ». Watson 2003 identifies several puns on the names
 
Canidia, Sagana and Folia, regardless of syllable quantities.

3 Mankin 1995, p. 118, directing us to Cic. Div. 1.65 where the connection is made
explicit : sagire enim sentire acute est ; ex quo sagae anus, quia multa scire volunt, et sagaces
   
dicti canes. is igitur, qui ante sagit, quam oblata res est, dicitur praesagire, id est futura ante
sentire.

50 Emily Pillinger
Nonetheless only Canidia gets to chant in the Epodes, to assert her

power in her own voice. Indeed Canidia’s speech is so marked that
it even throws her silence into significant relief. Horace demon-
strates his distance from the authorship of Canidia’s carmina by
claiming to be ignorant about her compositions, asking not only
what she said but what she did not say : quid dixit aut quid tacuit ?
   
(5.49). Yet this distance between Horace and Canidia is closed

when their poetic voices are compared, and Canidia is shown to be
as learned as Horace. The same spell to bring down the stars that
Folia is described as casting in Epode 5 is given a bookish slant in
Horace’s plea to Canidia in Epode 17 :  
per atque libros carminum valentium

refixa caelo devocare sidera,
Canidia, parce vocibus tandem sacris
(Hor. Epod. 17.4-6)
and by the books of spells powerful enough
to unfix the stars and call them down from the sky,
Canidia, stop at last your ritual chantings…
Canidia’s book-learning makes her a fitting match for the educat-
ed Horace. As Freudenburg notes in his discussion of Canidia’s
presence at the cena Nasidieni in Satire 2.8 : « The odd thing about
   
Horace’s scapegoats, his excoriated ‘others,’ is that they routinely

look rather like himself, sometimes remarkably so, threatening
his identity (or the reader’s construction of it) rather than setting
it neatly in relief ». 1 Canidia’s apparent command of Horace’s ar-
   
eas of expertise invites her readers to question how much control

Horace has over her carmina, and, by extension, how much control
Canidia has over Horace’s work.
The power dynamic between Canidia and Horace is played out
through various means, one of which consists of a regular rework-
ing of different areas of the Epodes in an effort to provide the final
word. In Epode 5, when Canidia is chanting over a boy she has
buried and is starving as part of her magic rituals, she spells out
her poetic programme :  
a ! a ! solutus ambulat veneficae

   
scientioris carmine.
1 ��
Freudenburg 1995, p. 217. Freudenburg is discussing Nasidienus here, but his com-
ment embraces Canidia.

non usitatis, Vare, potionibus,
o multa fleturum caput,
ad me recurres, nec vocata mens tua
Marsis redibit vocibus :  
maius parabo, maius infundam tibi

fastidienti poculum…
(Hor. Epod. 5.71-78)
Ah ! Ah ! He strolls around, released by the spell
   
of a more knowledgeable witch.

Varus, you creature destined for much weeping,
not with common potions
will you come running back to me, nor called by Marsian chants
will you come to your senses :  
I shall prepare something stronger, shall pour a stronger drink

for you, since you are so picky…
In this passage Canidia describes herself as responding to a carmen
external to the Epodes. Canidia’s spell is intended to reverse, or to
cap, a spell by someone more knowledgeable (scientioris), a spell
that has led her lover astray. This is an intertextual gesture, but
constructed only through Canidia’s own speech. Canidia’s potion
in response to this imagined original will not be common (non us-
itatis … potionibus) nor will her carmen be that of the traditional
Marsian chants (Marsis … vocibus), but she uses these terms to char-
acterise the magic that she will improve upon, and will make even
stronger (maius). 1 While Canidia repeats the word maius for em-
 
phasis, and, like the refrain in Eclogue 8, to reflect the chanting of

a magic spell, the repetition primarily points to the way in which
Canidia presents her magic carmen in terms of its relationship with
previous carmina. It is by drawing attention to commonalities, to
repetitions of the earlier activity, that Canidia marks out her poten-
tial for improvement and domination over both her lover and the
1 The programmatic weight of this term is drawn out in Seneca’s tragedies, most
strikingly in descriptions of Medea’s plans for vengeance : maius his, maius parat /
 
Medea monstrum (Med. 674-675) ; quaere poenarum genus / haut usitatum (Med. 898-899) ;
   
scelus est Iason genitor et maius scelus / Medea mater (Med. 933-934). The motif in which
past acts of vengeance are amplified is also dramatised in Seneca’s Thyestes (which
Horace anticipates with his reference to Thyesteas preces at Epod. 5.86 ; see below). Sei-
 
densticker 1985 explores this metapoetic theme of competitively inflated vengeance

in the Thyestes, making the important point that the trope marked by the term maius
applies equally to Seneca’s desire to surpass his predecessors and to his characters’
desire to surpass their predecessors ; in other words he finds in Senecan drama the
 
same blurring of the lines between protagonist and author as found in the texts under
discussion here.

52 Emily Pillinger
previous practitioners of witchcraft. Yet the original spell by the
more learned witch has no apparent existence outside Canidia’s
speech. 1 Canidia is therefore the source of the very material she
 
claims to be reworking.
In the case of this spell in Epode 5, Canidia’s aim is that of the
girl in Eclogue 8 : to use her expertise to exert some influence over
 
the future. In both cases the effectiveness of the carmen is not un-
equivocally proven or disproven, but Canidia’s is more immediately
challenged. In Epode 5 Canidia’s technique of ‘learning’ from the
example of others proves instructive, and before the poem ends her
methods are turned back upon her. As Barchiesi notes, « the con-  
text requires that everything be reversible. Everything must be able

to spin in both directions like Canidia’s rhombus (17.7). A ‘palinode’
is a double-edged term : the action of reversal lends itself to new
 
reversals ». 2 The young boy Canidia has buried in the ground has
   
two speeches in the poem. In the first, with which Horace intro-
duces the poem, the boy beseeches the women to spare him. This
proves futile, and the centre of the poem is devoted to Canidia’s
witchcraft. At the end of the poem, however, the boy returns, and
this time he has transformed his earlier style of speech, reworking
it into his own curse :  
sub haec puer iam non ut ante mollibus

lenire verbis impias,
sed dubius unde rumperet silentium
misit Thyesteas preces :  
« venena magnum fas nefasque, non valent

 
convertere humanam vicem ;  
diris agam vos ; dira detestatio

 
nulla expiatur victima :  
quin, ubi perire iussus exspiravero,

nocturnus occurram Furor
petamque vultus umbra curvis unguibus,
quae vis deorum est manium… »  
(Hor. Epod. 5.83-94)

At this point the boy, unlike before when he tried with soft words
to appease the wicked women,
1 Following a similar line of argument Breed 2006 discusses passages in the Ec-
logues of ‘quoted’ song, which also have no evident ‘origin’. Breed concludes that they
invite readers « to consider a broad analogy between the representation of speech and
 
the imitation of previous texts as conjoined manifestations of imitatio » (pp. 20-21).

 
2 Barchiesi 2009, p. 237. On the power dynamics of these inversions see Oliensis
1997, pp. 68-101.

but still uncertain how to set about breaking the silence,
delivered these Thyestean prayers :  
« Poisons may have great power to pervert right and wrong,

 
but they cannot avert human retribution ;  
I shall harass you with curses ; my horrifying hatred

 
cannot be expiated by any sacrifice.

Indeed, following your death sentence, when I breathe my last,
I shall come as a nocturnal Fury
and lunge at your face, as a ghost, with curving talons,
since this is within the power of the gods of the underworld… »  
The boy is inexperienced and unsure about how to challenge the

silence he has submitted to until this point in the poem ; he reflects
 
Horace’s baffled awe at Canidia’s power over speech and silence.

Then the boy shows that it is possible to learn from Canidia. He
sees the power Canidia holds over fas nefasque, but he appeals to a
different influence over the future. His «Thyestean prayers», a ref-
erence to the curses hurled by Thyestes at his brother Atreus after
realizing that his brother had fed him his own children, represent
an appeal to the ancient justice of mythology, in which the crimes
and literature-about-crimes of one generation are repaid and re-
played by the next. The repetition of diris … dira echoes Canidia’s
maius … maius, with all the same effects Canidia’s chant created,
but this time the cursing spells are turned back upon the witch
who inspired them. These curses are even upheld by the same
chthonic powers that uphold Canidia’s spells : the boy no longer
 
appeals to the gods above, to Jupiter and Juno (Lucina) as in lines

5-8, but focuses on the power of the underworld gods and on his
own influence after death, transformed, as he describes himself,
into a personification of Furor. 1 Where Canidia was capable of re-
 
working a text she herself constructed in order to create a more

powerful carmen, the boy she hoped to manipulate has proved him-
self capable of the same technique. The boy has managed to recast
Canidia’s spells in his own curse, and in doing so has also trans-
formed his own speech from that of an innocent young victim to
that of a Fury who will cast his shadow over Canidia well into the
future. The boy hopes and eventually ensures that it is his voice
that articulates the final lines in the poem.
The boy may have the last word in Epode 5, but the issue remains
1 This may be a deliberate evocation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 1184-1197, where

Cassandra describes the Furies who live over the house of Agamemnon and sing the
story of the house’s snowballing sins, beginning with the deaths of Thyestes’ sons.

54 Emily Pillinger
at stake in the face-off between Horace and Canidia in Epode 17.
Horace begins the poem in an abject state, acknowledging and
surrendering to Canidia’s learning : iam iam efficaci do manus scien-
 
tiae. His emphatic position in the present, iam iam, implies a trans-
formation from a resistant position in the past, and indeed it turns
out that it is the cumulative effect of past spells that has created
this debility :  
ergo negatum vincor ut credam miser,

Sabella pectus increpare carmina
caputque Marsa dissilire nenia.
(Hor. Epod. 17.27-29)
So I am beaten and so pitiable that I believe what I previously denied,
that Sabellan spells are resounding in my chest
and my head is splitting open with Marsian chant.
The nenia is a poem explicitly associated with funerals and with
settling the spirits of the dead. 1 It appears that Horace is beyond
 
hope, in the same position as the boy in Epode 5 : Canidia is in the

 
process of putting an end to him. At this point Horace, rather than

launching into a curse, claims to be willing to do anything to es-
cape his domination by Canidia, and asks what she wants of him :  
effare : iussas cum fide poenas luam,

 
paratus expiare, seu poposceris

centum iuvencos, sive mendaci lyra
voles sonari, « tu pudica, tu proba
 
perambulabis astra sidus aureum ».  
(Hor. Epod. 17.37-41)

Speak : since I shall faithfully pay whatever penalty you command,
 
ready to expiate the insult, whether you demand

one hundred bulls, or whether you wish to hear resound
on a mendacious lyre, « You are chaste, you are honest,
 
and you shall walk about the galaxies as a golden star ».  
In this statement Horace appears to offer an unqualified submis-

sion to Canidia, enabling her speech within his poem with his com-
mand : effare. In fact, however, he promises not only to echo her
 
demands but also to echo an earlier poet. When he offers to per-

jure himself with a mendax lyra, he offers to quote a poet who was
1 For discussion of the nenia and the purported witchcraft of the Marsi (as in Hor.
Epod. 5.76 quoted above) see Habinek 2005, p. 246. On this passage Barchiesi 2009
notes that « Horace’s surrender could not be more total » (p. 234).
   

equally capable of perjuring himself to win back his poetic domi-
nance. Catullus, in poem 42, tries to force a woman accused of
stealing his poetry notebook to return it to him by roundly abusing
her. In a repetitive sing-song he writes :  
« moecha putida, redde codicillos !

   
redde, putida moecha, codicillos ! »    
(Catull. 42.11-12)
« Withered old whore, give me back my writing tablets !
   
Give me back, withered old whore, my writing tablets ! »    
Catullus repeats the chant six lines later, but this too proves ineffec-
tive. So Catullus acknowledges the need to transform his speech :  
mutanda est ratio modusque vobis,

siquid proficere amplius potestis :  
« pudica et proba, redde codicillos ! »

     
(Catull. 42.22-24)
You must change your method and manner,
if you are going to make any more progress :  
« Chaste and honest lady, give me back my writing tablets ! »

     
When his status as a poet is under threat, Catullus willingly re-

writes his own poetry. Horace picks up exactly the same flattering
language in his attempt to soften Canidia, turning Catullus’ pudica
et proba into tu pudica, tu proba. 1 Both invective poets will reform
 
their language when their dominant status is, even if only briefly,
overturned. In Horace’s case, he signals his willingness to offer a
reworked poetic self by making an intertextual reference to a poet
undergoing exactly the same process.
The exchange is yet more complicated for Horace, however. It
was Canidia who first introduced the idea of reworking one’s own
work in the Epodes, and it is really Canidia’s carmina, not Horace’s,
that were under external threat. As she indignantly points out, it is
the fact that Horace has been echoing her songs that makes her an-
gry : he has become a pontifex of witchcraft in his own right and has
 
repeated them out of context, taking them from a private ritual

into public.
inultus ut tu riseris Cotyttia
vulgata, sacrum liberi Cupidinis
1 This echo is also discussed in Oliensis 1991, p. 115 ; Barchiesi 2009, pp. 237-238 ;
   
Lowrie 2009, p. 109.

56 Emily Pillinger
et Esquilini pontifex venefici
impune ut urbem nomine impleris meo ?  
(Hor. Epod. 17.56-59)

Do you think that you can get away with exposing our Cotyttian rites,
the rituals of free love, and laughing at them ?  
And, you chief priest of Esquiline witchcraft,

do you think that you will go unpunished for filling the city with my
name ?  
The competitive echoes and poetic re-creations that have being go-
ing on within the Epodes have ended in a deadlock. Canidia refuses
to respond to Horace’s attempts to mollify her, claiming that her
ears are blocked to his prayers. Instead she enforces her final words
on the end not only of the poem, but of the collection as we have
it. 1 She curses Horace, threatening to punish him with her pre-
 
sence for the rest of his life. Then she sums up her powers, and
ends with a curious question : plorem artis in te nil agentis exitus ?
   
(Epod. 17.81) – « should I weep for the fact that my art has no effect
 
on you ? ». This final line is pointedly ambiguous. Is Canidia point-

   
ing to how little she cares that she is powerless over Horace, or
is she pointing to the very impossibility of her turning out to be
powerless against him ? The ambiguity must be deliberate. On the
 
one hand Canidia has no part to play in the rest of Horace’s œuvre :  
there is no evidence of her haunting his poetry after the Satires and
Epodes, so readers cannot know if her curse came true or not. On
the other hand she has become a symbol for the way in which new
poems can aspire to offer the last word in a tradition, quite literally,
by demonstrating the power of rewritten material. She has taught
her skills to the young boy, and to Horace, such that although she
ultimately becomes a victim of her own knowledge, that know-
ledge echoes on beyond the final words of the Epodes.
4. Learning to Love the lena

There are traces of Canidia’s magical and literary skills in the lenae,
the elderly procuresses from New Comedy who re-emerge in po-
1 ��
Oliensis 1991 emphasises how significant it is that Canidia’s voice ends the collec-
tion, returning to the point in Oliensis 1997, p. 96 to stress not only the importance
of Canidia’s final words, but also the power of the silence Horace imposes on those
words : it is he who puts an end to the iambic game. It is worth noting here that Ca-
 
nidia also ends the second and final book of Horace’s Satires, but there she is only an
image conjured by the diners.

ems of Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid. 1 The rhetoric of love elegy
 
is far removed from that of invective, but the lena’s role in love el-
egy involves a threatening element of appropriation and repetition
of the lover-poet’s work, just as Horace and Canidia did battle for
the same poetic territory. The striking aspect of the lenae in love
elegy is that their witch-like characteristics are constructed, and
quite openly so, by the imaginations of the narrative lovers in the
poems. 2 The poets, who have been displaced in their mistresses’
 
affections by the machinations of the lenae, become vengeful curs-

ing figures through the very act of characterising their competitors
as witches.
Tibullus gives a lengthy example of such a description in his first
book of elegies. He introduces a callida lena (1.5.48), whose arrival
he believes will lead to his downfall : in exitium … meum. Tibullus
 
turns the tables immediately by proceeding with what effectively

amounts to a curse on his own part, in which he wishfully draws
down upon the lena many of the grotesque features normally iden-
tified with witches, particularly those involving the dead. In the
course of Tibullus’ exercise in the subjunctive mood he becomes
seduced by his own rhetoric, such that by the end of the passage he
calls the lena from line 48 a saga, a witch, in line 59. A reader might
be forgiven for forgetting that the equation of the two has been
constructed purely by Tibullus’ vivid imagination. Both Propertius
and Ovid create similar confusions. The fifth poem of Propertius’
fourth book begins with a four-line curse directed at his lena, then
moves into what looks like a traditional description of a witch : she  
is shown casting spells upon the moon and tearing out the eyes
of crows in a kind of voodoo intended to blind husbands to their
wives’ infidelities. At the end of the poem the narrator returns to
hurl another curse at Acanthis. 3 Acanthis’ quoted speech between
 
1 On the presence of elements from the comic stage in Roman elegy see Leo 1912,
pp. 143-157 ; Currie 1981 ; Griffin 1985, pp. 198-210 ; Yardley 1987. For more specific dis-
     
cussion of the comic predecessors of the elegiac lena see Gutzwiller 1985 ; Myers 1996,
 
esp. pp. 3-4. On the didactic function of the lena from comedy to elegy see Gibson
2003, pp. 17-21.
2 This is not even to broach the issue of the poetic construction of the narrative
lovers themselves. For this see Kennedy 1993, esp. ch. 1. Here I am simply suggesting
that the construction of the lenae as witches should be read as occurring at one fur-
ther remove from the ‘reality’ to which the poems lay claim.
3 ��
The question as to whether the end of the poem is really still a curse or a descrip-
tion of an already-dead or almost-dead Acanthis remains a matter for debate. See

58 Emily Pillinger
these sections, however, contains absolutely no indication that the
woman is a practitioner of witchcraft. In Amores 1.8 Ovid displays
exactly the same inconsistency. In the early description of his lena
he asserts her knowledge of magical arts. He includes plenty of
ugly detail, but he also leaves some room for readers to question
the narrator’s characterisation of the lena. Ovid intersperses his
direct statements with interjections assuring us of his trustwor-
thiness as a narrator : si qua fides … suspicor, et fama est … fors me
 
sermoni testem dedit… (Am. 1.8.11-21), but the cumulative effect of

these protestations and claims to external sources is to make Ovid’s
good faith look all the more suspicious. After his dubious descrip-
tion Ovid quotes a lengthy speech by the lena, but, just as in the
case of Propertius’ speech by Acanthis, this direct speech reveals
nothing but a mercenary inclination on the part of the lena : there  
is no evidence of witchcraft. By the time Ovid issues his final curse

against the lena (Am. 1.8.113-114) he has ceased even to accuse her of
witch-like behaviour.
All these elegiac lenae are characterised, therefore, as witches,
but their characterisation is always carefully phrased to make
readers doubt the truth of the poets’ accusations. It is at the poets’
moments of vulnerability that they construct these alternative
magical figures. An entertaining analogy can be found in Ovid’s
purely speculative response to his literal (rather than poetic) im-
potence :  
num mea Thessalico languent devota veneno

corpora ? num misero carmen et herba nocent ?
   
sagave poenicea defixit nomina cera

et medium tenuis in iecur egit acus ?  
carmine laesa Ceres sterilem vanescit in herbam,

deficiunt laesi carmine fontis aquae,
ilicibus glandes cantataque vitibus uva
decidit, et nullo poma movente fluunt.
quid vetat et nervos magicas torpere per artes ?  
(Ov. Am. 3.7.27-35)

Surely my body is not feeble from the magic effects of Thessalian poi-
son ?
 
Surely it’s not that spells and weeds are harming me in my

pitiable state ?  
Or has a witch fixed and cursed my name on purple wax
Shackleton Bailey 1956, p. 244 ; Fedeli 1965, p. 169 with Fedeli 1987 ; Goold 1966, pp.
   
81-82 ; Hutchinson 2007, pp. 138-139.

 

and driven fine pins into the middle of the liver ?  
Damaged by a spell Ceres shrivels into a sterile weed,

waters in a spring fail when damaged by a spell,
acorns from the oaks and grapes from the vines when enchanted
all drop off, and with nobody shaking them the apples fall.
So what’s to stop my impotence being down to magical arts ?  
Ovid’s plaintive question points to the fact that ‘magical arts’ are
simply a means of characterising a challenge to his normal pow-
ers. 1 This is not to say that the lenae do not pose a real threat to
 
the lover-poets. By offering the elegiac mistresses an alternative

and more mercantile approach to love, they do threaten the rela-
tionship of the lovers and, by extension, the fundamental prem-
ises on which love elegy stands. Moreover, their poetic voices be-
come increasingly dominant as their character develops through
the genre. As Myers writes, « In Propertius and Ovid the lena has
 
quite literally taken away their voices and become primary nar-
rator ». 2 The poet and procuress are playing the same game, with
   
the result that they replicate Horace and Canidia’s iambic cap-
ping of each other’s poetic techniques : « In cursing the lena, the
   
poet attempts to reassert his poetic and male potency over her
opposition ». 3    
The lena is a dubious witch, then, but she is as much of a poet as

Canidia. In Ovid’s description the programmatically loaded terms
carmina and ars reinforce the poetic attributes of the lena :  
illa magas artes Aeaeaque carmina novit

inque caput liquidas arte recurvat aquas
(Ov. Am. 1.8.5-6)
She knows magic arts and Aeaean spells,
and by her art she redirects running waters towards their source
Propertius hints at Acanthis’ learning at the climax of his venom-
ous description of her, at the point in the poem where her voice
is about to take over in a demonstration of the kind of advice she
gives to young girls. The text here is extremely corrupt, but I give
here Goold’s drastically emended lines : 4    
1 Ovid draws a closer relationship between his own carmina and the power of
magical carmina at Am. 2.1.23-28. On Ovid’s relationship with magic in his Ars amato-
ria, and for some further thoughts on the relationship between carmina and elegy, see
Sharrock 1994, esp. pp. 61-86. 2 Myers 1996, p. 8. 3 Ibidem, p. 11.
4 Goold 1990. The approach to emending this couplet depends largely on where
the lena is considered to begin her speech ; as a result some editors have made use of
 

60 Emily Pillinger
exercebat opus tenebris, ceu blatta papyron

suffossamque forat sedula talpa viam
(Prop. 4.5.19-20)
She exercised her work in the shadows, like a bookworm drills
through papyrus, or a diligent mole through its dugout path
In his bold reconstruction of these lines Goold has Acanthis work
as if she were in a library of sorts, burrowing through texts ; she  
is both completely immersed in them and yet also a force for their
destruction. Her competitive relationship with the poet is also
constitutive of the genre, in a distinctively elegiac fashion that
nonetheless displays some of the iambic principles of slander and
counter-slander. In the same way that the iambic persona mirrors
the cursing witch, so, as Myers persuasively suggests, the lenae
are of fundamental importance to the genre of love elegy be-
cause they are invested in the same exercise as the lover-narra-
tors : namely, in winning over the mistress. « The counter-ego is
   
revealed as alter ego in the power of her carmina and artes, magic
spells or poetry ». 1    
Despite their common goals, the witch-lena and the poet-lover

always retain a vital antagonism regarding poetics : the lena can-  
not but denigrate the lover’s carmina. Myers suggests that this is
because the witch represents an anti-Callimachean aesthetic, but
her reading does not take into sufficient account love elegy’s con-
cern to align poetic production with gender politics. By contrast,
Gutzwiller argues that Acanthis’ speech in Propertius’ fourth book
– a fourth book in which Propertius’ mistress Cynthia is (mostly)
dead – reveals Acanthis to be « an older version of what the reader
 
the intertextuality between these lines and the passage in which Dipsas begins her
speech in Ov. Am. 1.8. On the relative chronology of the two poems see Courtney
1969, pp. 80-87, and for the use of this relationship in reconstructing Propertius’ text
see Kershaw 1998. Heyworth is certain some, though not many, lines have been lost in
the middle of this apparent couplet, offering a coherent but lacunose version : exerce-
 
bat opus uerbis : « tu blanda peruris *** saxosamque terat sedula turba uiam ». See Heyworth
     
1999, pp. 87-89. Hutchinson offers a conservative reading, like Goold postponing the
lena’s speech until v. 21 exorabat opus uerbis ceu blande perure / saxosamque ferat sedula
culpa uiam. Despite these persuasive suggestions Goold’s extravagant zoo of book-
worms, papyri and moles remains attractive, attuned as it is to the combination of
grotesquerie and learnedness that characterises the poetics of the literary tradition in
which Propertius is working.
1 ��
Myers 1996, p. 10. It is worth noting that at Tib. 1.2.42-66 a witch’s skills are em-
ployed to help the lover, but this witch appears not to be a lena.

knows Propertius will abandon Cynthia to become ». 1 This argu-    
ment may be pushed further. The lena is not just invested in the
same task as the lover, but she has actually learned from her experi-
ence as an elegiac mistress, and is now producing a transformed, if
warped, version of the lover’s poetry. The textual emendation that
makes Acanthis like a bookworm in papyri is beautifully logical :  
what the lovers want to see as magical carmina are in fact simply
an informed response to everything the bookworm witch-lena has
absorbed from her previous literary experience. She even quotes
an earlier poem by Propertius. 2  
This reading might seem to emphasise only the threat the lena
poses to elegiac poetry, since she stands as the figure of a mistress
who has proved the transient nature of elegiac love : she destroys  
all the illusions the lover-poets create in their erotic Neverlands.

Yet love elegy is still invigorated by her presence in two important
ways. Firstly, she offers a new voice to be added to the lover-poet’s ;  
not her own, but that of the young mistress still waiting for guid-
ance. Acanthis suggests :  
in mores te verte viri : si cantica iactat,

 
i comes et voces ebria iunge tuas.

(Prop. 4.5.45-46)
Change yourself to match your man’s behaviour : if he launches into a
 
song
go along with him and drunkenly join your voices together.
The mistress who takes Acanthis’ advice will be capable of singing
alongside her man as his comes, from a position of equal knowl-
edge. The ‘written woman’ identified by Wyke – the woman
whose role was « that of a fiction which may be finished » – will no
   
longer be subject to helpless manipulation by the poet-lover. 3 She  
will now be able to seduce and to compose poetry on her own ac-
count by processing the knowledge fed to her by the lena, the pre-
1 Gutzwiller 1985, p. 111. In the same way Armstrong 2005 suggests of Ovid’s Ars
amatoria that « the praeceptor is in many ways the poet-lover of the Amores grown a
 
little older and more experienced » (p. 48).

 
2 Prop. 4.5.55-6 = 1.2.1-2. Janan 2002 points out this correspondence and comes to
some similar conclusions regarding Acanthis’ poetic role : « Acanthis is Book 4’s true
   
Muse in so far as she summarizes its inspiration. Book 4, like the bawd’s ironic quote
from the Monobiblos, insistently charges its readers to resift Propertius’ earlier work
from a more disenchanted perspective » (p. 188). For another example of a witch pass-
 
ing on her learning to young girls see Ov. Fast. 2.571-582.

3 Wyke 2002, p. 53.

62 Emily Pillinger
viously ‘written woman’ who now has the weight of poetic experi-
ence behind her. Canidia constructed a rival’s spell to which she
responded ; Acanthis constructs a young mistress’ poem to which
 
she will contribute.

It is because of this kind of overtly self-conscious move that
Gutzwiller sees both Propertius and Ovid as moving « toward the  
exposure from within, and thus the death, of a genre that is intrin-
sically one-sided ». 1 Perhaps it does signal the winding-down of the
   
genre, but in her second major contribution to the love elegists’

work, it transpires that the lena also shows the way to a new cre-
ative field. Myers’ suggestion that the lena may stand for an anti-
Callimachean genre becomes newly interesting in the light of a
passage from Ovid’s description of his witch-lena :  
…oculis quoque pupula duplex

fulminat, et gemino lumen ab orbe venit.
evocat antiquis proavos atavosque sepulcris
et solidam longo carmine findit humum.
(Ov. Am. 1.8.15-18)
...also a double pupil flashes in her eyes
and light comes from a twin eyeball.
She calls forth great-grandfathers and their grandfathers from their an-
cient tombs
and splits open the solid earth with a long spell.
The one genre Propertius and Ovid protest is beyond their pres-
ent capacities, but may lie in their future, is epic. 2 In this passage  
Ovid describes his witch splitting the earth with what could well
be identified with epic style, with a longum carmen : exactly what  
Callimachus condemns the Telchines for enjoying. 3 In this context  
the witch’s resuscitation of « great-grandfathers and their grandfa-

 
thers » refers not only to necromancy, but also to the retelling of

 
the great stories of old ; the material of epic. It appears that a pre-
 
scient Ovid anticipates, or brings about, the very role for the witch
that Lucan eventually writes.
1 Gutzwiller 1985, p. 112.

2 E.g., Prop. 2.10.7-12, Ov. Am. 3.15.17-20. Courtney 1969, p. 80 notes the echo of
Propertius’ fulminat illa oculis (Prop. 4.8.55) in Ovid’s oculis quoque pupula duplex / ful-
minat, giving further evidence for the closely interwoven programmes of the two
poets. For more on the literary relationship between Prop. 4.5 and Ov. Am. 1.8 see
O’Neill 1999.
3 Callim. Aet. fr. 1.3 e}n a[eisma dihneke;~. Compare also the programmatic perpetuum
… carmen of Ov. Met. 1.4.

5. Epic Fail: Erictho in Lucan ’ s Bellum Civile

The tradition of witchcraft in Latin poetry reaches a high point
with the character described as « a witch’s witch » : Erictho in Lu-
     
can’s Bellum Civile 6. 1 It is a shocking section of the epic, even by

 
Lucan’s standards, containing the kind of material that led to the

epic being so vehemently condemned (and celebrated) for a per-
ceived monstrosity of form and content. 2 In this pyrotechnically  
intertextual and genre-bending passage, Lucan produced a piece

of poetry that turned out not only to be influential on later au-
thors, but also to be profoundly alert to the way in which this influ-
ence might function. 3  
The main protagonists, Pompey and Caesar, are finally muster-

ing at Pharsalus, in Thessaly, for the pivotal battle of their civil war.
Pompey’s son, Sextus Pompeius, is anxious to know his fate, but
he rejects the traditional prophetic seats of the oracles and other
legitimate religious rituals, siquid tacitum sed fas erat (6.430) – « any-  
thing silent but divinely sanctioned ». 4 Instead, Sextus goes to con-

   
sult Erictho. Her transgressive activities dominate the rest of this

most extravagant and gothic of scenes, in the course of which she
resurrects a recently dead corpse with her spells and gives it a voice
with which to tell Sextus his future.
The scene involving Erictho is one of the longest and most de-
tailed descriptions of ancient necromancy in practice. The passage
1 Johnson 1987, p. 20. Erictho is also « eine Hexenkarikatur » according to Korenjak

   
1996, p. 23. See Graf 1997, pp. 190-204 for discussion of Erictho in relation to literary
tradition and to magical papyri.
2 The inspired introductory rhetoric of Johnson 1987 describes a poem « as depress-
 
ing as it is hilarious » (p. xii). Even Lucan himself anticipates this response in pro-
 
grammatic moments such as 6.436 ficti quas nulla licentia monstri / transierit, quarum
quidquid non creditur ars est.
3 Bartsch 1997 describes Lucan’s « apparent mixture of blindness and foreknowl-
 
edge where the epic’s future events – and indeed its future receptions – are con-
cerned » (p. 96). The steady stream of creative responses to Lucan’s epic becomes
 
a flood in the case of this particular passage. One of the most famous responses to
Erictho was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Dowden’s Life of Shelley (1886) shows that
Mary Shelley read Lucan after Frankenstein was published in 1818, but it also indicates
that her husband was reading the epic as far back as 1815, and he may have shared his
enthusiasm with her. Shelley wrote to a friend : « I have begun also the Pharsalia. My
   
opinion on the relative merits of Lucan and Virgil is not less unpopular than some of
the others I entertain. » Letters, vol. 1, 444. For discussion of other classic interpreta-
 
tions of Lucan’s Erictho see Ahl 1976, p. 131 n. 14, and Martindale 1993, pp. 69 ff.
4 Translations of Lucan owe a debt to Braund 1992.

64 Emily Pillinger
is made all the more striking because its composition reworks, with
particular panache and perversion, one of the holiest cows in Latin
literature. The nekuia in the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid is reduced
in Lucan’s hands from spiritual rites introducing a mystical glimpse
of Rome’s glorious future history to a grotesque ritual introduc-
ing a warped and limited vision of Rome’s past and present, with
Rome’s heroes fighting their own civil war in the underworld. 1  
Perhaps most interestingly, however, it also relates closely to the

scene in Bellum Civile 5 in which Appius consults Phemonoe, the
Pythia at Delphi, a scene which is in turn modelled on the Sibyl’s
prophecy in the Aeneid. 2 Two important issues arise from this con-
 
nection. Firstly, both passages contain a clear metapoetic aspect,

signalled by the concept of the visionary poet, the vates. The term
vates in Bellum Civile 5 is used to describe the poetic efforts of both
Phemonoe and Apollo. 3 It then reappears in Bellum Civile 6 to de-
 
scribe both the witch Erictho and the corpse who gives the proph-
ecy. Clearly the problematic issue of Lucan’s fragmented narrative
authority is at stake in both passages. Secondly, the Erictho scene
demonstrates a strange case of imitative triangulation. If Phemo-
noe’s prophecy in Bellum Civile 5 owes much in its own right to the
Sibyl’s prophecy in Aeneid 6, what of the fact that Erictho’s proph-
ecy in Bellum Civile 6 owes much to both passages, to the Sibyl in the
Aeneid and to Phemonoe in the previous book of the Bellum Civile ?  
The author appears to be reworking a master-text and his own text

at the same time ; he is using simultaneously an intertext and an
 
intratext. Moreover, his intratextual source is also modelled on his

intertextual source, meaning that he is in fact reworking a master-
text at one and two removes concurrently.
The usual response to the confusion of influences in Erictho’s
scene is to point to the significance of the opposition between le-
1 Both catalogues of heroes are relative to the moment of ‘prophecy’ in which

they are contained : the figures in the Aeneid post-date the moment of prophecy and
 
are awaiting their turn to live their lives in the world above, while those in the Bellum
Civile pre-date the moment of the corpse’s narrative. See Feeney 1986.
2 Masters 1992, pp. 180-196 ; O’Higgins 1988 ; Ahl 1976, pp. 130-133.
   
3 This metapoetic dimension is made all the more pointed in the Delphic scene by
Lucan’s decision to give his Pythia the name Phemonoe. This recalls the legend that
Apollo’s first priestess at Delphi invented the hexameter (Plin. hn 7.205 ; Plut. De Pyth.
 
or. 402D), a priestess who is named Phemonoe in a later version of the story (Paus.
10.5.7). Lucan’s interest in the notion of poetic ‘origins’ and ‘repetitions’ is therefore
evidently also at play in his treatment of this more authoritative line of literary tradi-
tion.

gitimate prophecy, as represented by Virgil’s Sibyl and by Lucan’s
earlier Pythia, and illegitimate magic practice, as illustrated by
Erictho herself. At the end of his chapter on Erictho Masters writes :  
« The Delphic oracle is the traditional form of prophecy, resting on

 
its laurels, its reputation, but now inert and useless ; contrast the  
highly effective, destructive art of Erictho, whose violence and

wickedness so clearly parallels that of Caesar. Contrast too the fact
that although her art is as ancient as oracular prophecy, none the
less this is a tradition she rejects, improves, innovates on… ». 1 This    
is inarguably true, as far as it goes, but by focusing only on the

prophetic traditions Erictho’s art opposes it is easy to undervalue
the tradition her work actively respects and furthers. The final sec-
tion of this paper will, therefore, address Erictho in the light of the
poetic tradition constructed by the witches represented in Virgil,
Horace, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid. 2  
The Erictho scene is introduced by a lengthy excursus on the

land of Thessaly. 3 This plays an important part in presenting
 
Erictho as part of a tradition of literary witchcraft. Lucan sets his

necromantic scene in a spatial context that locks the episode into a
series of stories through time, beginning from the area’s first emer-
gence ; it provides a sort of literary pedigree rooted in the land. 4
   
Erictho’s story is poised between the mythological past generated

by Thessaly, and a historical future which will be decided by events
at Pharsalus. An extended geographical description associates the
region’s rivers with the different mythological events occurring
by or in them. The narrator also sweeps through a survey of the
mythological past of the land itself, alluding to characters whose
stories were connected to Thessaly, such as Pentheus, Achilles, and
Jason. Towards the end of his description of the area the narrator’s
language becomes loaded with the rhetoric of a failed Golden Age :  
1 Masters 1992, p. 214. See also Connor 2000, pp. 66-69 ; Danese 1992 ; Gordon 1987,
   
p. 237.
2 This paper only addresses the literary tradition of witches, so it does not discuss
the necromancy engineered by Tiresias in Seneca’s Oedipus. Nonetheless this passage
must have influenced Lucan’s necromancy and demonstrates yet another application
of a « second spell » : instat et Stygias preces / geminat sacerdos, donec in apertum efferat /
     
vultus opertos Laius (Sen. Oed. 621-623).

3 ��
Compare the lengthy description of Delphi before Phemonoe’s scene with Ap-
pius in Bellum Civile 5.
4 Nicolai 1989 offers a detailed examination of Lucan’s Thessaly, focusing on its
identification with the Iron Age and hence its perversion of the aurea saecula pre-
dicted by Anchises at Aen. 6.791.

66 Emily Pillinger
he points out the innovations of agriculture, sailing, metal-work,
coinage, all of which are associated with a drive towards warfare :  
quod populos scelerata inpegit in arma (6.406). In addition to this the

excursus is continually punctuated with references to the inevi-
tability of the coming war, which emphasises the dark teleology
driving the place’s history. The description begins with Pompey
described as reaching Emathia (Thessaly), a land « the Fates were  
preparing for war » – bello quam fata parabant (6.332), and bearing
 
the « seeds of Mars » : hac tellure feri micuerunt semina Martis (6.395).
     
Then at the end of the passage this inevitability invades the minds
of those camping there :  
hac ubi damnata fatis tellure locarunt

castra duces, cunctos belli praesaga futuri
mens agitat, summique gravem discriminis horam
adventare palam est, propius iam fata moveri.
degeneres trepidant animi peioraque versant.
(Luc. 6.413-417)
When the leaders had pitched camp in this land
damned by the Fates, a foreboding feeling about the war to come
troubles each of them, and it is clear that the grave time of a critical
turning-point
is approaching, and the Fates are moving closer and closer.
The degenerate souls tremble in fear and prepare for worse to come.
The « seeds » of warfare implicate the land in producing the events
   
that are to come, and it is degeneres animi – men who are defined by
their inferiority to their predecessors – who are acutely aware of
this. Sextus Pompeius will, of course, prove to be one of the least
worthy progeny, at least unworthy compared with his « Great »    
father : Magno proles indigna parente (6.420). 1 Henderson writes,

   
« Progress through Lucan defames the ‘success’ of ‘succession’ –

 
history’s story of the winners – into ‘successiveness’, failure to es-

cape ‘successors’ ». 2 The rivers were engaged in a constant process
   
of merging and re-forming according to their mythological associ-

ations ; the land and the people drawn to it are engaged in a strange
 
form of generation, or rather degeneration, of their own.

The land itself represents a strong creative streak, albeit a fairly
ghastly creativity. Lucan has already presented the land as having
1 Although Dick 1963 points out that historically it was Pompey the Great who was
interested in magic, not his son. On the term degener as signalling a perverted mode
of succession see Hardie 1993, pp. 89-90, 109. 2 Henderson 1998, p. 176.

given rise to a series of mythological tales. Next he describes
it as providing, physically, the material for the illicit works of
witches :  
Thessala quin etiam tellus herbasque nocentes

rupibus ingenuit sensuraque saxa canentes
arcanum ferale magos.
(Luc. 6.438-440)
Indeed the land of Thessaly produced from its rocks
both poisonous herbs and stones which would hear
magicians chanting their deadly secret craft.
The rare verb ingigno, « to cause to grow », is cognate with the more
   
common noun ingenium, the traditional term for literary or po-

etic talent. 1 The land is portrayed as generating the herbs used by
 
its indigenous magicians by means of a verb that emphasizes the

herbs’ poetic, rather than medicinal, value. Moreover, the fact that
the rocks listen to the resultant incantations inverts the tradition
of rocks as deaf to all speech and, as in Eclogue 8.1-5, connects the
Orphic power of poetry with the creative power of witchcraft. In
the Thessaly of the Bellum Civile the land and its native inhabitants
are mutually implicated in a creative process.
The unique power of Thessaly and her witches’ productions is
illustrated in their relationship with the gods :  
inpia tot populis, tot surdas gentibus aures

caelicolum dirae convertunt carmina gentis.
una per aetherios exit vox illa recessus
verbaque ad invitum perfert cogentia numen,
quod non cura poli caelique volubilis umquam
avocat.
(Luc. 6.443-448)
The impious spells of that dreadful tribe influence the ears
of the gods in heaven, deaf to so many peoples, so many tribes.
That single voice travels through the distant reaches of the aether
and brings with it constraining words to the reluctant divinity,
whom concern for the heavens and the whirling sky
never distracts.
The terms employed by Horace and the love elegists to describe
curses directed against their witches are here applied to the witch-
1 old, s.vv. ingigno, ingenium.

68 Emily Pillinger
es themselves. The boy who cursed Canidia said diris agam vos, and
claimed that his was a dira detestatio. Here the witches themselves
are defined by the same term : theirs is a dira gens, which exerts its
 
control through venomous words : diris verborum … venenis (6.501).

 
The control over the future that cursing (and cognates associated
with the word for cursing) brings about is placed entirely, and sole-
ly, in the hands of the witches, and its power is ratified by the fact
that it can compel the single deity, or numen, who is supposed to be
in control of the cosmos.
The narrator of the Bellum Civile expresses great bewilderment
at the gods’ susceptibility to the witches’ spells. Indeed, as Feeney
notes, « the operation of the divine remains consistently beyond
 
the knowledge of the poet ». 1 The forces of witchcraft are no less

   
mysterious. Their power is described as beyond what can be cre-

ated in horror fiction, and their own art is beyond belief :  
…ficti quas nulla licentia monstri

transierit, quarum quidquid non creditur ars est.
(Luc. 6.436-437)
…no bold attempts at invented horror
can surpass them, whose art is whatever cannot be believed.
The witches as a group represent the end, the breakdown, of tra-
ditional ‘art’, since they cannot be comprehended by, or subsumed
within, any new work. Their arts seem to be invulnerable to re-
workings of any kind. Erictho, however, shows that this is not the
case, for she always goes one step further. Her first entry into the
epic has her vehemently condemning the work of the other witch-
es, the dira gens, as too respectful. Her work is truly innovative,
branching out into new rites : inque novos ritus pollutam duxerat ar-
 
tem (6.509). Erictho is in the process of creating a new form within

her tradition. 2 The lenae may have threatened to pervert the elegy
 
in which their poetry was contained ; Erictho threatens to pervert

 
the traditional form of epic in which she is contained. Her proph-

ecy and her poetry are both supposed to cap those of the tradi-
tional prophets of epic in the previous book, to show a new way to
1 Feeney 1991, p. 278.

2 Inque novos ritus pollutam duxerat artem echoes Ovid’s introduction to his Meta-
morphoses : In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora (Met. 1.1-2). Ovid also
 
describes his move towards creating a new form within a tradition while closely align-
ing form with content : magical transformations take place in the stories, as well as
 
in their telling.

present these themes. So, when Sextus comes across her sitting on
a rock, she is described as follows :  
illa magis magicisque deis incognita verba

temptabat carmenque novos fingebat in usus.
(Luc. 6.577-578)
She was trying out words unknown to magicians and the gods
of magic and was shaping a spell for new purposes.
There could be no more explicit description of Erictho’s carmina,
or of her poetic programme more generally. 1 Her work involves
 
rehearsal, it involves neologisms, and it involves turning an old

technique over to new purposes. Even the first noun, magis, « to  
the wizards », may be intended to echo the adverb meaning « to a

   
greater extent, more », recalling Canidia’s maius… maius… in Hor-

 
ace Epode 5. Erictho’s carmina are about taking something given

and creating from it something more powerful, more effective. It
is no wonder that the gods are described as responding to her with
particular reference to their fear of a repetition :  
omne nefas superi prima iam voce precantis

concedunt carmenque timent audire secundum.
(Luc. 6.527-528)
The gods above acquiesce in every crime at the first sound
of her praying and they dread to hear a second spell.
Or, « they dread to hear another poem ».
   
Erictho, unlike Canidia, is delighted to have been sought out due

to her fame, and she offers her services unreservedly to Sextus.
She also, however, acknowledges some restrictions to her pow-
ers. Prophecy is, for her, only a second best to cursing : normally  
she would be capable of delaying, if not changing, the dictates of

fate. In this case she is locked into a series of events, a causarum
series, stretching from the beginning of time, which means that
fortune constrains even her abilities. Yet her powers may be redi-
rected : according to the evidence of the witches in earlier litera-
 
ture, her greatest work is likely to come in the wake of a tradition,

and tradition is, surely, a causarum series of sorts. As the scene for
the necromancy is set we are already given hints at the importance
1 See Masters 1992, pp. 214 f. Masters reads this phrase as programmatic, but he
prefers to fit it to a Pompeian-Caesarian poetic dichotomy and to ignore the earlier
tradition of witches as innovators.

70 Emily Pillinger
that doubling, repeating, the use of the past in the pursuit of the
future, will all play in the passage to come. It is Erictho’s skill that
ensures that the night’s darkness is doubled, noctis geminatis arte
tenebris (6.624). Events are carefully placed in a liminal space that
could look either forwards or backwards. The corpse Erictho has
chosen seems to have been killed in the battle of Pharsalus, which
is not due to take place until the following day. 1 Sextus, Erictho
 
and the dragged corpse then begin the necromancy in the space
between the underworld and the world above, a place that has no
light except that provided by spells, numquam nisi carmine factum
/ lumen habet (6.647-648), and which leaves the narrator confused
about whether souls are coming up or witches are descending : 2    
…nam, quamvis Thessala vates

vim faciat fatis, dubium est, quod traxerit illuc
aspiciat Stygias an quod descenderit umbras.
(Luc. 6.651-653)
…For although the Thessalian seer
can apply violence to the Fates, it is unclear whether she sees the Stygian
shades by dragging them up to her, or by descending to them.
Erictho’s physical preparations for the necromancy are as gory as
the first descriptions of her had portended. She is also explicit about
the ‘secondariness’ that is bound up in the raising of a corpse. She
promises Sextus that the corpse’s new life is on its way : iam nova,  
iam vera reddetur vita figura (6.660). She then opens up the corpse’s
body with a second set of wounds, volneribus … novis (6.668). Fi-
nally, after all her medications, comes her voice :  
tum vox Lethaeos cunctis pollentior herbis

excantare deos confundit murmura primum
dissona et humanae multum discordia linguae.
(Luc. 6.685-687)
Then her voice, more powerful than any poisonous plants
when it comes to enchanting the gods of Lethe, at first pours out
mumbling that is dissonant and completely unlike human speech.
Once again her spells are presented as far more important than her
herbs and poisons. Her mutterings are at first incoherent, an undif-
1 O’Higgins 1988, pp. 218 f.

2 This may also be read as a conflation of the nekuiai represented in Odyssey 11 (in
which Odysseus calls up the dead) and in Aeneid 6 (in which Aeneas descends to visit
them in the underworld).

ferentiated mass of sounds. Then she begins to make order out of
this chaos, producing a single voice. Just as the unique collective
voice of the witches could force the gods to listen, the single voice
of Erictho, made up as it is of a collage of background influences,
manages to reach the underworld :  
tot rerum vox una fuit. mox cetera cantu

explicat Haemonio penetratque in Tartara lingua.
(Luc. 6.693-694)
there was one voice behind so many sounds. Soon she articulates the rest
in Haemonian chant, and her speech reaches Tartarus.
Erictho then makes her plea to the gods of the underworld.
What happens next, Masters describes as « a minor hitch in the
 
preparations ». 1 This, in the scheme of the necromancy as a whole,

   
is an understatement. The soul Erictho has summoned comes out

of the underworld only to panic at the prospect of revisiting the
life he has left. He is not invested in these poetics of repetition.
Erictho, however, is furious at this delay imposed by the fates, at
the apparent resistance of the gods to her voice : vocisque meae se-
 
cura (6.730). So she is forced to rework her previous text, to operate

within the spaces created by her previous spells :  
perque cavas terrae, quas egit carmine, rimas

manibus inlatrat regnique silentia rumpit.
(Luc. 6.728-729)
and through the hollow cracks in the earth, which she had made with
her spells,
she barks down at the ghosts of the dead and breaks the silence of their
kingdom.
Erictho’s first carmen had been composed out of a jumble of earlier
carmina. This second carmen requires Erictho to repeat herself, to
rework her first carmen. Just at the moment when she seemed to
have broken away from the tradition of witchcraft, to have estab-
lished, finally, that she could provide ‘the last word’ without any
need for repetition, she has to repeat herself according to the tra-
dition of all the witch-figures who have preceded her. This theme
of reworking an external and an internal source is what Masters
and O’Higgins saw in Lucan’s work when they examined Erictho’s
intertext with Virgil’s Sibyl and intratext with Lucan’s Phemon-
1 Masters 1992, p. 198.

72 Emily Pillinger
oe. But this time the effect is even more claustrophobic, for she is
repeating not another text, or another character’s words, but her
own spell. This is the second poem that the gods were so afraid to
hear.
This final repetition seems to have its effect. The corpse’s voice
is activated, a voice over which the dead man has absolutely no
control except to reply to the witch : vox illi linguaque tantum /
 
responsura datur (6.761-762). Erictho dominates the revelation of

the future as thoroughly as if she were the mouthpiece herself.
Though infuriated by her need to submit to the tradition in which
witches rework their own spells, she also demonstrates its power.
Indeed she draws an explicit contrast with the ambiguities of the
traditional prophets, who do not rely upon the (literary and literal)
ghosts of the past to reconstruct the future :  
« …tripodas vatesque deorum

 
sors obscura decet : certus discedat, ab umbris

 
quisquis vera petit duraeque oracula mortis

fortis adit. ne parce, precor : da nomina rebus,
 
da loca ; da vocem qua mecum fata loquantur. »

   
addidit et carmen, quo, quidquid consulit, umbram

scire dedit.
(Luc. 6.770-776)
« …An obscure response is appropriate
 
for the tripods and seers of the gods : let him leave secure in knowledge,
 
he who seeks truth from the shades and bravely approaches the oracles
of harsh death. Do not spare yourself, I pray : give names to things,
 
give places ; give a voice by which the Fates may speak with me. »
   
She added a spell as well, so that whatever she asks, she guarantees
the shade will know the answer.
The corpse duly responds to Erictho’s request, providing a full or
unsatisfactory prophecy, depending on the reader’s expectations. 1  
The final episode that follows the prophecy certainly continues to

play on a desire for, and frustration of, any sense of closure. Part
of Erictho’s persuasion of the corpse to speak included a promise
that he would never again be resuscitated in such a way. She claims
that with a Stygian spell, Stygio cum carmine, she will effectively
ensure that he is never bewitched, cantata, again. Sit tanti vixisse
iterum (6.768) – « Let having lived a second time be worth this », she
   
offers. This may seem like an uncharacteristically generous move
1 Ahl 1976 is satisfied, Masters 1992 is not.

of the vicious witch, but in fact it ensures that, though she had to
repeat her own spells in the course of the necromancy, they will
not now be repeated by anyone else. So the ‘death’ of the corpse
is ensured :  
carminibus magicis opus est herbisque, cadaver

ut cadat, et nequeunt animam sibi reddere fata
consumpto iam iure semel.
(Luc. 6.822-824)
There is need of magic spells and poisonous herbs, so that the corpse
may fall dead, and the Fates are unable to restore his soul
with their control over him now used up once and for all.
It appears that Erictho has finally had the last word, but even here
ambiguity remains. Before the corpse finished his prophecy, he had
pointed to yet another prophecy in the future :  
tu fatum ne quaere tuum : cognoscere Parcae

 
me reticente dabunt ; tibi certior omnia vates

 
ipse canet Siculis genitor Pompeius in arvis.

(Luc. 6.812-814)
You, do not ask for your destiny : the Parcae will let you know
 
even though I hold back ; a more reliable seer,

 
your father Pompey himself, will prophesy everything to you in the Sicil-
ian fields.
The corpse’s role is over, but he has promised that there is at least
one more prophet to come : Pompey himself. 1 There are also new
   
corpses in the making, plenty more necromantic material, as the

preparations for the battle at Pharsalus continue. Just as Canidia’s
final word against Horace at the very end of the Epodes was an
ambiguous statement of poetic control, so is Erictho’s attempt to
stymie any later appropriation of her innovative poetics.
1 The prophecy referred to here never materializes in the Bellum Civile, which rein-
forces the work’s impression of constantly deferred completion. This may have been
an accident resulting from Lucan’s failure to complete a more ambitious epic narra-
tive that stretched as far as Sextus’ defeat in the Sicilian War of 36 bc, as argued by
Thompson 1964. The absence of the prophecy promised by the corpse is nonetheless
consistent with the epic’s disorientating refusal to offer any straightforward resolu-
tion of foreshadowed themes, so it need not be seen to contradict the shape of the
text as we have it. See Masters 1992, pp. 199-204, particularly on the way in which the
corpse’s prediction of a Sicilian prophecy plays with readers’ expectations of a narra-
tive based on Pliny’s story of Gabienus haunting Sextus in Sicily (Plin. hn 7.178-179),
or on Anchises’ appearance to Aeneas in Sicily in Verg. Aen. 5.700-702.

74 Emily Pillinger
6. Conclusions
Finding echoes within the Bellum Civile is nothing new. Masters
writes about repetitions in the prophecy scene in the fifth book of
the epic : « such echoes work to produce that paranoiac atmosphere
   
so important to Lucan’s vision : scenes echo one another because

 
they can echo one another, because nothing is so dissimilar or di-

vided that it cannot be a mirror of something else ». 1 But this is not
   
enough to explain the wider theme of repetition and innovation

contained within the poetic tradition dealing with magical car-
mina. Representations of witchcraft in classical literature are ideal
metapoetic episodes, where works can uncover or reflect on their
own creative process. In particular, the tradition thematises the
way in which one poetic voice relates to another, either across dif-
ferent works or within the same piece, either parading deliberate
repetitions or slipping into indistinct and indeterminate echoes. So
what was, or is, the overall effect of these repetitions in the poems
considered in this paper ?
 
On the one hand the repetitive aspect of witches’ carmina serves

to enact the constant reshaping and improving a poem undergoes
during its production. It creates an impression of divided author-
ship, whether this represents the multiple voices of an influential
tradition or the multiple approaches a single poet takes to his or
her work over time. Either way, this is to some extent clearly a
productive process in which different versions of a poem collabo-
rate in the development of the final piece’s enchanting magic. The
success of such a poem celebrates the power of the last voice in a
tradition over the bewitched reader, but this power comes from a
skilful manipulation of many other voices.
On the other hand the dubious ritual activities of the witches
make their alignment with any poetic project open to suspicion. In-
deed a poem’s representation of the process by which it came into
being may be seen as not celebrating, but unpicking the mysteries
of an influential poetic tradition, and as destroying any impression
of textual authority in a poem. The gods, the audience at large, do
not necessarily want to hear the poem twice, or at least they do not
want to see the palimpsest of multiple drafts and voices.
There is a further way in which the repetitions of carmina can be
read as representing a subversive poetic tactic. It may be argued that
1 Masters 1992, p. 107.

they make a threatening move against the creative efforts of future
interpreters. Poets are engaging in a speculative exercise on what
people in the future might make of their works when they allow one
or more of their characters to repeat and rework different passages
of their own text. More controversially, these reworkings offer po-
ets a chance to forestall divergent future readings : it allows them to
 
pre-empt any transformation of their work before it even happens

and to attempt to impose a final repetition upon their own text. The
fact that this is a problematic appropriation of the role of future
readers and writers may be seen in the ambivalent, often combative,
relationship created between the poetic personae and the witches
used to portray this kind of overly controlling poetic behaviour.
The intertextual and intratextual repetitive poetics practised by
the witches in this chapter can be described as an attempt to sub-
vert the contingency of literary reception. They acknowledge that
the creative process cannot stop with the end of each poet’s work,
but they continue to try to direct readers, to intimidate poetic de-
scendants. Nonetheless the witches’ reworkings, their appropria-
tion of the role of poetic successors, ultimately represent their
recognition of the value and power in new creative interpreta-
tions. Horace acknowledges one of the ways in which poets make
themselves unpopular when he says to Augustus, loca iam recitata
revolvimus irrevocati (Epist. 2.1.224) : « without being asked, we go
   
back over passages we have already performed ». 1 The poet most

   
devoted to the labor limae, to applying the erasing file to his own
works, points to a universal fact in the writing of poetry : the first  
person capable of tapping into the creative force that comes from
rehearsing and reworking tired material is the original author of
that very material.
Balliol College, Oxford
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Sommario
Peter Kruschwitz, How to Avoid Profanity in Latin : An Ex- 
ploratory Study 9
Emily Pillinger, « And the gods dread to hear another poem » : The
     
Repetitive Poetics of Witchcraft from Virgil to Lucan 39

Laura Jansen, Ovidian paratexts : editorial postscript and readers
 
in ex Ponto 3.9 81
Alessia Bonadeo, Martem … aequare canendo (Stat. silv. 5, 3, 11) :  
divagazioni sulla concezione della poesia nelle Silvae 111

Giuseppina Magnaldi, Vsus di copisti ed emendatio nel De Pla-
tone di Apuleio 153
corpo minore
Maria Grazia Bonanno, Archiloco risanato (fr. 128 W2) 175
Giuseppe Lentini, L’idillio 2 di Teocrito e il ‘genere’ oaristys 181
Marco Romani Mistretta, Percussus amore : un caso di interte-
 
stualità incrociata ?
 
191
Andrea Cucchiarelli, Nonae Decembres. Un’interpolazione in
Hor. carm. 3, 18, 9-16 203
Luca Paretti, Suetonio ‘lessicografo’ : un nuovo frammento
 
223
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per l’analisi dei testi classici

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Condirettore : Rolando Ferri (Università di Pisa).

Comitato scientifico : Alessandro Barchiesi (Università di Siena-Arezzo),

Maurizio Bettini (Università di Siena), Maria Grazia Bonanno (Università di

Schmidt (Universität Tübingen), Richard Tarrant (Harvard University).

Roma), Maria Luisa Delvigo (Università di Udine), Mario Telò (University of

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The Repetitive Poetics of Witchcraft

1. Witches’ Carmina : Songs and Spells, Poems

T he canon of witches in classical literature stretches from the

and the carmina they compose tend to be read as straightforward

* Versions of this paper were presented at Princeton University, the Advanced

recent discussions of magic (particularly cursing) as a historical phenomenon see,

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« prophecy ». 1 The lack of firm distinctions between the different

at least in the case of the tradition of literary witches, the very

Twelve Tables turn out to be ‘songs’ regulating ‘songs’ » (p. 340).

2 Lowrie 2009 ; Putnam 2000, pp. 130-150, esp. pp. 132-133.

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The direction of witches’ carmina towards specific goals means

which is designed primarily to influence or direct the gods : al-

selectively and relentlessly, the version of future events that suits

found interactions with other works, intertextualities, as well as

1 This brings carmina rather closer to the kind of performativity identified in

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trol, therefore, ultimately turns out to be rather less assured than

ferent levels of intent and control displayed by the witches in their

by Sharrock 2000 : « It is the hypothesis of intratextuality that a text’s meaning grows

1 Most of this paper will be framed in terms of Hinds’ circumspect description of

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2. Carmina within Carmina : The First Steps

« second spell ». 1 Just before the passage by Pliny quoted above, in

which he describes what people are looking to achieve with a spell,

According to Clausen’s (speculative) reconstruction of the pro-

Quesnay 1979, p. 37.

certain incoherence or forced unity in the poem as a whole » (p. 233).

4 Reading Theocritus, Duncan 2001 outlines several compelling reasons why we

forms (metrical, repetitive, or at least alliterative, and sometimes including a refrain,

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voice ». 1 Damon sings the first song, based on Theocritus’ Idyll 3,

and Alphesiboeus sings the second, the version of Simaetha’s song

Effer aquam et molli cinge haec altaria vitta

ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnin.

1 Breed 2006, p. 36.

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The refrain further emphasizes the connection between poetry and

A similar conflation can be seen at work in Catullus’ adoption of

fusi. Here the repetitive material practice is the Fates’ allegorical

come one and the same » (p. 241 n. 26).

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Nonetheless Virgil’s overtly Hellenistic carmen makes the clear

own poetic description of her rituals, this poetic description is con-

From this narrator’s introduction the audience is also encouraged

…quorum stupefactae carmine lynces,

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considers the abilities of his shepherds, Alphesiboeus those of his

In the microcosm of Eclogue 8 intratextual echoes create the

to success and closure. At the end of Eclogue 8 the girl modifies

work of influences both within his work and stretching beyond it :

the multiple voices of Simaetha, Theocritus, Aphesiboeus and the

3. Canidia’s Control in Horace ’ s Epodes

which is designed primarily to influence or direct the gods : al-  

certain incoherence or forced unity in the poem as a whole » (p. 233).  

work of influences both within his work and stretching beyond it :  

convertere humanam vicem ;  

nulla expiatur victima :  

but they cannot avert human retribution ;  

perambulabis astra sidus aureum ».  

and you shall walk about the galaxies as a golden star ».  

redde, putida moecha, codicillos ! »    

Give me back, withered old whore, my writing tablets ! »    