Old and Forgotten Ways

Rome’s first recorded witch hunt, the repression of the Cult of Bacchus, was long past by the time Ovid sat down to pen his epic Metamorphoses .* Thousands had reportedly died for crimes including “secret nocturnal rites,” “private initiations, combining men and women,” orgies, forgery, and murder.** This description fits in nicely with Renaissance descriptions of the Witches’ Sabbath, which should clue us in to the long shadow Rome casts on the European imagination.*** It should come as no surprise, then, that Ovid’s Metamorphoses provides us with an account of a particularly “witchy”° Wicked Witch, in the by-now-familiar character of Medea. Medea, as she appears in the Metamorphoses , is animated by a sense of romantic “frenzy” comparable to Vergil’s Dido. This is not the teenage passion of Apollonius of Rhodes’ Medea, but a violent emotional imbalance that serves as the driving force behind the witch’s maleficium . While her motive for helping Jason and his father may begin w...

Ovid was a poet equal in skill and creativity to Vergil, but without his political acumen. His predator’s handbook, The Art of Love , and a dalliance with Augustus’ daughter eventually landed him in exile. Nevertheless, Ovid’s work survived, and with it, engaging new ways of portraying familiar “witches.” In this article, we will begin by examining two of the “witches” of his experimental epic Metamorphoses : Circe and the Sibyl of Cumae. Metamorphoses is unusual as an epic in that it contains neither a central character nor a central plot. Instead, Ovid drew on the Hellenistic tradition of collecting myths and trying to put them into rough chronological order to create his own mythological history of the world; its primary theme is the ubiquity of Change, metamorphosis .* This means that our familiar “witches” are back but with a distinctly Ovidian touch. Here, witches become purveyors of change.** In the first place is the Odyssey ’s Circe. Given that Circe is named by Hes...

Achilles’ shield is not the only icon of ancient epic that Quintus of Smyrna recreates for his Iliad sequel, Posthomerica . If Homer’s Shield of Achilles makes an appearance, then so must pseudo-Hesiod’s Shield of Herakles. The clash between the two shields and their bearers, as we might expect, is also a clash between opposing views: this time of the relationship between community and individual. As Quintus tells the story, after the deaths of Achilles, Aias, and Hector, the Greeks and Trojans seek new allies to continue the war. The Greeks send Diomedes and Odysseus to Scyros to bring Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus. The Trojans turn to Eurypylus, the grandson of the legendary Herakles, for aid (a possible analogue is Evander the “good man” or “strongman,” the Hercules-worshiping Greek who aids the Trojans in Virgil’s Aeneid ). The ensuing battle between the young heroes and their shields dominates three entire books at the middle of the Posthomerica . We have already seen in t...

Dido isn’t the only character in Vergil’s Aeneid who resorts to necromancy when she hits the end of her rope. Aeneas himself has recourse to that bastion of Roman state religion, the Sibyl of Cumae, when he loses his way. Having disgraced himself by abandoning Dido and his famous “arms,” Aeneas seeks to regain his honor by an act of filial piety in seeking advice from his father. The only problem is that old daddy is quite dead. In order to enter the underworld and consult with his progenitor, he must have recourse to the Roman oracle known as the Sibyl. The Sibyl is a medium who can channel Apollo, but the very violence of her fits and the windiness of her dwelling make it difficult to understand her instructions. Vergil plays the creepy factor of this scene at full force: But the Sibyl … storms with a wild fury through her cave. And the more she tries to pitch the great god off her breast, the more his bridle exhausts her raving lips, overwhelming her untamed heart, bending ...

By the 4 th Century A.D., the Roman Empire was a changed place. The wealthy and well-ordered Hellenistic East was back in control with a new capital at Constantinople and a new Eastern state religion: Christianity. Greek learning was still going strong, revived a century earlier by a movement known as the Second Sophistic. In keeping with the Hellenic spirit of the age, a writer known only as Quintus of Smyrna tried his hand at reviving the epic tradition by writing a learned sequel to Homer, Posthomerica . Following earlier writers like Sophocles and Ovid, Quintus also imagines the contest between Aias and Odysseus for the Shield of Achilles. Unlike Ovid, however, Quintus not only dares to describe the storied shield, but also to add a few telling touches of his own. It takes either great heart or great hubris to try and better Homer. As we expect, Quintus’ shield fails to beat Homer on an artistic level, but one of Quintus’ changes shows that he may have been more interested i...

The Hellenistic kingdoms bound the Mediterranean world together more closely than at any time since the Bronze Age. Rome eventually absorbed these kingdoms into its own empire and added new areas such as Gaul and Briton. As travel and communication became easier than ever before, a new koine emerged: not merely a common Greek language, but a set of common practices and beliefs as well. Magic and witches were not immune from this mass Mediterranean syncretization. The Greeks of the classical age had already begun to work out an organized system of magical practices and practitioners.* The Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Empire added to this system, with the Romans formally outlawing certain magical practices.** The literary tradition followed these trends, with Apollonius of Rhodes’ Medea serving as a template for later Greek and especially Roman writers.*** Keeping a watchful, if friendly, eye over the first of the new cohort of Roman writers was Augustus Caesar’s personal taste-m...

Virgil’s younger contemporary, Ovid, responded to Rome’s civil wars and the rise of Augustus with a poetic epic of his own. In his Metamorphoses , Ovid sets out to tell a mythic history of the world, from its creation down to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar. He draws a stark conclusion about the nature of reality that is more in keeping with Homer than Virgil: that the nature of Reality is flux and change. Writing as a well-educated Roman, Ovid is careful to give the legends surrounding the Trojan War ample space in his epic, and Achilles’ shield features prominently in Metamorphoses . Ovid’s depiction of Achilles’ shield occurs at the beginning of Book XIII, during the contest between Ajax and Ulysses for the arms of Achilles after his death. It is a classically Homeric contest that pits eternal opposites against each other: Ajax’s brawn versus Ulysses’ brain. Ajax’s argument is as forthright as the man himself: he is the greatest fighter after Achilles, and Achilles’ cousin, so...

The vast wealth and intercultural riches of the Hellenistic kingdoms that sprang up from the conquests of Alexander the Great created an artistic explosion across the Mediterranean world. Apollonius of Rhodes, as part of that creative ferment, sought to revive the writing of epic poetry in his four-book Argonautica . In the process, he infused epic with the emergent “genres” of idyll and novel. The result is an epic that revolves around a love story. At the heart of that love story is Medea: teenage witch.* Apollonius inherited the character of Medea from Euripides and plays her witchy credentials to full effect. Medea is made to be Circe’s niece, establishing a family coven right out of the Salem courtroom.** Her coming inspires terror in rural peasants akin to Artemis the night hunter.*** She is a bane to her own family, killing even her brother when he gets in her way.° Medea’s rage is terrifying and full of malicious intent.°° She works her will not only with pharmaka , but...

In the previous post on the Shield of Aeneas, we saw how Virgil moves from the generic scenes of Achilles’ and Herakles’ shields to specific moments in the Roman past in order to express his hope that Caesar Augustus will lead the world into an era of universal peace. Today’s post focuses on the circumstances surrounding the gift of Aeneas’ shield and what they reveal about Virgil’s attitude toward his Greek sources. At first glance, the Aeneid appears strongly anti-Greek. The defeated Trojans, not the Greeks, are the heroes of the epic. Odysseus in particular comes off as a weasel, and we are told that Aeneas’ opponent, Turnus, is a new Achilles. Given how closely the structure of the Aeneid follows that of the Odyssey and then the Iliad , it can give the impression that Virgil is trying to undo Homer by some process of literary alchemy. We should take careful note, then, that at the moment when Aeneas receives his shield and prepares to bear Rome’s future on his shoulders, h...

As we saw in our discussion of Homer’s Circe, the gods of the ancient Mediterranean world practiced magic with wand, cup, and herb.* We have also seen that sons and daughters of the gods, like Machaon, Podilares, and Helen, could employ pharmaka in medicine and hospitality. While each of the figures we have studied so far match aspects of the witches of European folklore, and Circe clearly violates Exodus’ prohibition against necromancy, we have yet to see all these characteristics come together in one person. Today’s subject, Medea, may be the one who takes the title of “First Wicked Witch of the West.”** There are references to Medea in Hesiod’s Theogony , but the first authoritative version we have of her tale is found in Euripides’ play, Medea , performed at Athens in 431 B.C.*** As Euripides tells the tale, Medea had the god Helios as her grandfather.° While this makes her god-blooded, it also places Medea firmly in the mortal realm, even more so than Helen of Troy. Any pow...

We have already seen the long shadow cast by Homer’s Shield of Achilles on his contemporary, Hesiod, and his later detractors, Heraclitus and Empedocles. As the centuries rolled on, Alexander the Great’s conquests exported Greek culture to the east. The Roman Empire absorbed the western-most of Alexander’s successors, along with every bit of Greek culture that wasn’t nailed to the floor. By the closing decades of the millennium, the Roman writer Virgil decided that Rome needed its own epic on the model of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey . Virgil’s Roman culture-hero, Aeneas, like Achilles and Herakles before him, would need his own shield. The circumstances in which Aeneas receives his shield ( Aeneid Book VIII) deliberately recapitulate the circumstances surrounding Achilles’ shield. In each case, the culture-hero is provided with divine arms by his mother, who specifically requests them from Hephaistos/Vulcan so that her son can enter battle at the critical moment of the epic. Aenea...

After considering users of potent herbs, or pharmaka , in previous posts, we turn to a woman whose uses of such drugs are undoubtedly baleful: the bewitching Circe. Indeed, Circe may be the first figure in our study that fits the image of a fairytale witch.* She is a “she,” brews baleful potions that transform men into beasts, and knows the right rituals to commune with the dead. Homer’s world, however, is not a fairytale, and this image of a witch comes with a twist. The hero Odysseus describes his confrontation with the magic-working goddess Circe in Books 10-12 of Homer’s Odyssey . The hero relates how his men fell into her malefic trap: Within the forest glades they found the house of Circe … round about it were mountain wolves and lions, whom Circe herself had bewitched; for she gave them evil drugs … within they heard Circe singing with sweet voice, as she went to and fro before a great imperishable web … She brought them in … and made for them a potion … but in the food ...