Battle of the Hexes:

The Influences of Nature, Power, and the Female Body

on Depictions of Witches in Latin Literature of the Early Empire

Rebecca Hachamovitch

This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of

Master of Letters in Classics at the University of St Andrews
Under the supervision of Dr Nikoletta Manioti.
 i

Abstract
This dissertation argues that the characterisation of witches in early Imperial Latin literature
derives from Roman perceptions of the female sex and the threats it poses if not properly
contained. Through an anthropological lens of sexed power dynamics pitting dominant-male-
civilisation-Rome-order against submissive-female-nature-foreign-disorder, the argument
progresses through a re-examination of literary depictions of witches in terms of their
appearance, character traits, behaviour, and magic. Whereas it is more commonly accepted that
the Roman witch is characterised by her inversion of idealised women’s traits, this thesis offers
an alternative but compatible interpretation, in which perceptions of female anatomy inform
the respective negative and positive characterisations of witches and exempla.
Word Count: 14,953
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Table of Contents
Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... i
Abbreviations of Primary Sources ........................................................................................... iii
Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1
Chapter 1: Perceptions of the Female Body and Its Inherent Character .................................... 3
Chapter 2: Witches’ Appearances and Personalities ............................................................... 10
Chapter 3: Magic Praxes, Corruptive Threat, and ‘Taming’ the Witch ................................... 18
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 28
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 29
Primary Text Editions .......................................................................................................... 29
Secondary Scholarship ......................................................................................................... 31
 iii

Abbreviations of Primary Sources

Celsus, Med. Celsus, De Medicina
Columella, Rust. Columella, De Re Rustica
Hor., Carm. Horace, Odes
Hor., Epist. Horace, Epistulae
Hor., Epod. Horace, Epodi
Hor., Sat. Horace, Satirae
Joseph., BJ Josephus, Bellum Judaicum
Lactant., Div. Inst. Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones
Liv., AUC Livy, Ab Urbe Condita
Luc., BC Lucan, De Bello Civili
Lucil., Sat. Lucilius, Satires
Lucr. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
Mart. Martial, Epigrammata
Non. Nonius, De Compendiosa Doctrina
Ov., Am. Ovid, Amores
Ov., Ars. Ovid, Ars Amatoria
Ov., Fast. Ovid, Fasti
Ov., Her. Ovid, Heroides
Ov., Met. Ovid, Metamorphoses
Ov., Rem. Am. Ovid, Remedia Amoris
Ov., Trist. Ovid, Tristia
Petr., Sat. Petronius, Satyrica
Plin., HN Pliny (the Elder), Naturalis Historia
Plut., Mor., Con. Prae. Plutarch, Moralia, Coniugalia Praecepta
Priap. Carmina Priapea
Prop. Propertius, Elegiae
Sen., Benef. Seneca (the Younger), De Beneficiis
Sen., Ep. Seneca (the Younger), Epistulae
Sen., Helv. Seneca (the Younger), Ad Helviam
Sen., Med. Seneca (the Younger), Medea
Stat., Theb. Statius, Thebaid
Tac., Hist. Tacitus, Historiae
Tib. Tibullus, Elegiae
Verg., Aen. Vergil, Aeneid
Verg., Ecl. Vergil, Eclogues
 1

Introduction
Before black cats and broomsticks, before eye of newt and toe of frog, the witches of
the ancient world cut a different figure. In the early Roman Empire, which saw a surge in texts
depicting witches, these characters could range from the local woman crafting love spells to
the eldritch hag shrieking necromantic incantations, their variety matched in the many Latin
words for practitioners of witchcraft.1 Despite this diversity, Roman witches were often reviled
by those who believed genuinely in their magic2 and, more colourfully and consistently, by
many renowned Latin authors whose works perpetuated a flexible yet identifiable stock witch
character.
Arguing that these witches often embodied the characteristics least encouraged for
Roman women is hardly novel;3 where an exemplum might be beautiful, domestic, and
maternal, for instance, a witch would be ugly, wild, and child-snatching. This literary trend is
often discussed in terms of its social and political functions, namely how it informs its audience
of proper and improper behaviour using positive and negative portrayals respectively in a
didactic-dissuasive capacity. Many of these discussions, however, focus on the inverse
relationship between idealised virtue and witchery rather than on the non-fictional Roman ideas
about sex which underlie the two.4 Frequently, these analyses assume that the characterisations
of the witches are derived from the exempla, which are implicitly treated as the base image of
woman from which the anti-woman (the witch) is constructed. Rather than striving to debunk
the popular witch-exemplum relationship, I will instead add nuance by considering another
influential aspect of Rome’s understanding and expectation of women: physical sex. This
dissertation re-examines the commonly depicted characteristics of witches to explore the
possibility that those characteristics are the inverse of virtues because of the underlying notions
of inherent sex differences which inform both witch and exemplum.
Anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s 1974 article “Is Female to Male as Nature is to
Culture?”5 provides a valuable preface for this exploration of Roman thought about the inherent
nature of the female sex.6 Its simplified premise is that

the universal subordination of women observable in all human societies is directly related to an
equally universal perception that women are more closely related to the processes of Nature
than men and thus of a lower transcendental order, inasmuch as Culture by definition asserts
itself as not only distinct from, but superior to, Nature, which it transforms and manipulates
through the powers of human consciousness…several factors contribute to the general
association of women with Nature, foremost among them women’s physiological subjugation
to the natural rhythms of menstruation, childbirth, lactation, and other processes more related
to the survival of the species than to her personal comfort as an autonomous individual. 7

1
Paule 2014 surveys these terms, of which venefica (poisoner), saga (wise-woman), and anus (old woman) are
most pertinent to this dissertation. He stresses that these terms do not clearly denote different types of witches.
2
E.g. CIL 6.19747, epitaph of child snatched by witches condemning the cruelty of witchcraft. Cf. Ogden 2002,
119 for commentary.
3
Blum 2017-18; Ripat 2016; Lowe 2015; Paule 2014; Richlin 2014, esp. 202; Pollard 2008.
4
Ripat 2016 and Spaeth 2014 both briefly touch on the relevance of female anatomy to witches.
5
Ortner 1974.
6
Its premise has interested multiple classicists since its publication: Lowe 2015, 70ff; Spaeth 2014; Hubbard
2009; Sutherland 2003; Carson 1999, 84-6; Skinner 1997, 138; Richlin 1995, 187-8; Wyke 1994, 139; Myerowitz
1985, 109-11; Rubino 1974, 162-8.
7
As summarised by Hubbard 2009, 255. Ibid. n. 13 notes that Ortner later altered her stance, but “maintains the
basic validity of her original association between nature/culture and female/nature.”
 2

Despite Ortner’s broader original scope, Spaeth defends the value of this paradigm conflating
men’s bodies and assumed character traits with civilisation and dominance, and respectively
conflating women’s bodies with nature and its submission to civilisation specifically “for
understanding the role of the witch in Classical literature.”8 Rome’s tendency to polarise
various power dynamics along the line of dominance/submissiveness and to blend together
each side’s members (i.e. associating masculinity with dominance and Roman-ness or
femininity with submissiveness and foreign-ness) permeates much of Roman art and literature.9
Ramsby and Severy-Hoven explain well how “opposing categories largely mapped in the
sexual plane onto those of active and passive, penetrator and penetrated,” describing the set of
opposing categories as an “array of intersecting hierarchical relationships.”10 Though not the
point of their discussion, their analysis of the mapping of sexed power dynamics onto abstract
concepts of national interest is helpful for presenting Ortner’s sexed nature/civilisation
paradigm as another “hierarchical relationship” in Rome. In the context of this paradigm, it is
assumed from its dominance that civilisation can tame nature to suit its needs (agriculture,
mining, taming animals), just as it is assumed that Rome can tame foreign nations to suit its
needs (territory, taxes, conscription), and just as it is assumed that man can tame woman to suit
his needs (domestic labour, sex, child-bearing). When nature is untameable, it is a threat to
civilisation; when foreign nations are untameable, they are a threat to Rome; when woman is
untameable, she is a threat to man.
It is through this lens of woman-nature-submissive and man-civilisation-dominant
associative alignment that this dissertation approaches the Roman witch. I will first consider
the role of the female body (and Roman men’s perception of it) in both idealised and
discouraged characteristics of the sexes. This will lay the groundwork for Chapters 2 and 3 to
focus specifically on depictions of witches as anti-exempla in the context of Roman men’s
perceptions of sex-based inherent traits.

8
Spaeth 2014, 44.
9
E.g. Ov., Trist. 4.2.43-6, anthropomorphising the defeated Germania as a defiant but maesta woman in chains
under unconquered male Rome’s foot. Cf. Ramsby and Severy-Hoven 2007.
10
Ramsby and Severy-Hoven 2007, 46.
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Chapter 1: Perceptions of the Female Body and Its Inherent Character

This chapter will first examine Roman male perceptions of different aspects of
women’s bodies, including menstruation/fluid excretion, genitalia, and appearance; next, it will
seek to connect the female ideals and counter-ideals to Ortner’s nature-civilisation sexed
dichotomy, exploring the evidence about the necessity of nature’s/women’s submission to
civilisation’s/men’s designs and the perceived threat posed by the inversion of that order;
finally, it will connect these issues of anatomy to the behavioural and characteristic virtues and
values idealised for Roman women, as well as the counter-ideals discouraged.
Though not a practical source for sweeping conclusions about all Roman men’s
perceptions of the female body, the attitudes represented by the elite male authors of the early
Empire lend key insight into the opinions of the same demographic responsible for the literary
depictions of witches and the disgust directed towards specific aspects of their anatomy.
Menstruation, as simultaneously a single-sex experience yet an omnipresent phenomenon,
offers a logical starting place for this discussion. It is impractical to suggest that Roman men
would have been unfamiliar with the reality of menstruation, given the lack of discreet hygiene
products for it and menarche’s significance in signalling girls’ entrance into fertility.11 Despite
its commonality, however, male authors largely depict menstruation as something disgusting,
animalistic, and/or supernaturally dangerous.12
By far the most prolific Latin author on the subject, Pliny characterises menstruation
(profluvium) as malum in muliere,13 violentia,14 monstrificum,15 warning of the potency of
menstrual blood to ruin man-made goods (wine, mirrors, blades, gardens, purple dye) and to
upset nature (killing insects and plants, making ants reject corn, turning dogs rabid),16
repeatedly emphasising its power for magical practices.17 Similarly, Columella shares the
beliefs that menstruating women can devastate crops,18 Tacitus corroborates the belief in the
blood’s ability to cut bitumen,19 and Seneca’s invective accusation that Mamercus Scaurus
consumed his slave’s menstrual discharge necessarily rests on his and his audience’s disgust at
the idea.20 In considering Columella’s specification of the danger posed to “phallic
vegetables”21 by the mere glance of a menstruating woman,22 together with Pliny’s assertion
of intercourse with a menstruating woman as potentially lethal23 and his description of the
feminine vis of menstrual power,24 Lennon aptly connects the sexed significance of these
perceived threats as “not only to agricultural fertility, but also more specifically to male
potency.”25 The notion of menstruation lending women a feminine power which is particularly

11
Ripat 2016, 109.
12
Lowe 2013, 346-7; Ripat 2016, 110.
13
Plin., HN 7.64.
14
Ibid., 28.79.
15
Ibid., 7.64; 28.77.
16
Ibid., 7.64-5; 28.78-9.
17
Ibid., 7.64 28.77-9.
18
Columella, Rust. 11.3.38, 50.
19
Tac., Hist. 5.6; Plin., HN 7.65, 28.80. Cf. Joseph., BJ 4.8.
20
Sen., Benef. 4.31.3. Cf. Lowe 2013 for black magic and cunnilingus as “rhetorical stereotypes of depravity”
(348).
21
Lennon 2010, 76.
22
Columella, Rust. 11.50.
23
Plin., HN 28.70.
24
Ibid., 28.77.
25
Lennon 2010, 76.
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damaging to masculine power is a cross-cultural phenomenon,26 but relates specifically to

Rome through the lens of the aforementioned sexed alignments.
Insofar as woman-nature-submissive opposes man-civilisation-dominant, the
submission of nature to civilisation (i.e. agriculture, city-scaping) and of woman to man is
proper and natural; however, menstruation is perceived to have the capacity to upset that order,
and that threatens the entire dichotomous paradigm of dominance/submissiveness. By bleeding
in a way which men find disgusting, unstoppable, and unconcealable, the female body (being
less-civilised and closer to nature in its animalistic functions, per Ortner’s paradigm) defies its
alignment with submissiveness and submissive nature. The blood is capable of undoing
nature’s ordinary passivity by affecting animals, of undoing civilisation’s dominance over
nature by ruining crops and manufactured goods, and of undoing man’s sexual dominance over
woman by killing him in intercourse. Pliny and Columella both include descriptions of
beneficial ways to use menstrual power, but the authors’ fearful disgust and overall
condemnation are still blatant and “its usefulness still derived from the destructive qualities of
the blood, which could only be beneficial when carefully controlled.”27
Menstruation is hardly the only aspect of the female body subject to simultaneous
disgust and unease; the vagina itself is exclusively portrayed in derogatory terms and
contexts,28 most commonly characterised either in association with putrescence and death
similarly to menstruation, or as an autonomous, hungry entity separate from the woman to
whom it is attached. In both cases, the negative traits attributed to vaginas, like those of
menstruation, have a common theme of threatening29 civilised male propriety, often suggestive
of nature, wilderness, and death. The ‘hunger’ of the vagina, both for sexual fulfilment and for
fertilisation, appears in Greek and Roman depictions alike as a hunger which could cause harm
if left unfed.30 Martial, ever charming, criticises one woman’s vagina as unable to be sated by
casta Venus and denounces her spending of money on feeding her sexual appetite while her
children apparently starve;31 speculating why another woman refused to bathe with him, he
describes the opening as a mouth and suggests its bottomlessness;32 in one of many mockeries
of cunnilingus, he describes the vagina as the femineum barathrum.33 Multiple Priapic poems
allude to appetite of the vagina as requiring more than the man can offer.34 Arguably, this trope
also appears mythologised in the form of monstrous female hunger, as with the lamia,35 or a
composite figure of a beautiful woman on top and an animalistic yonic lower half.36 The Scylla
of Vergil and Ovid, for instance, is described as having essentially birthed the rabid heads from

26
E.g. Dammery 2016, 99ff.
27
Lennon 2010, 76; Columella, Rust. 10.358-66; Plin., HN 28.78.
28
Richlin 1984, 72. Celsus is the exception, using neutral medical terms and even praising vaginas as mirabilis
(Med. 7.29). Cf. n. 43.
29
Adams 1982, 79 claims the cunnus was not regarded as a threat, but this section shows the literary extrapolation
of a threat from the cunnus’ attributed hunger.
30
Paule 2014, 753; Richlin 1983, 42.
31
Mart., 2.34.1-4.
32
Mart., 3.72.5-6.
33
Mart., 3.81.1. The OLD offers barathrum’s connotations with “infernal regions” and use for body parts,
providing only examples of its application to vaginas. Cf. Lewis & Short for barathrum as an insatiable maw. Cf.
for this theme Mart., 14.70 without explicit reference to genitalia.
34
Priap., 25, 47, 58, 83. Cf. Ripat 2016, 111-3; Richlin 1984, 76; Richlin 1983, 42.
35
E.g. Lucil., Sat. 15.484 (Lactant., Div. Inst. 1.22.13); Sat. 30.1065 (Non., 117.29). Cf. Lowe 2015.
36
Doniger 1995, esp. 27-8 on the division of this composite figure. Cf. Ripat 2016, 108-9; Miller 2016; Lowe
2015, 70-163; Richlin 2014, 252.
 5

her uterus;37 the Harpies are constantly ravenous and oozing discharge from the ventris,38
interpreted to signify menstruation.39 Ovid’s Scylla in particular draws attention to the lack of
control the woman has over her bestial genitalia, how trapped she is by the terrifying mass of
mouths, and how she is at first alienated from them and, trying to escape from them, realises
they are a part of her.40
In these texts, we see an overlap of fears about both the physical form of the vagina and
its inferred insatiable hunger,41 all described in negative terms emphasising the upset of the
sexual power dynamic in which men are dominant and women are submissive. The
characterisation of the organ as having its own wants and needs,42 a hunger and capacity to be
the predator rather than the prey of the mentula, is one which reflects a cultural discomfort with
what defies the hierarchy which regards male bodies as dominant.43 Richlin summarises the
importance of this characterisation of villainous vaginas to the predominance with which it is
applied to older women rather than younger ones, writing that “the negative perception of the
female genitalia precludes their specific association with attractive women,”44 and, in
conjunction with one of the Priapic poems cited above,45 “the threat embodied by the vagina is
abundantly clear. It is to be feared by the personified phallus; it is foisted off onto a repulsive
person, the aged woman, while the attractive boy and girl in 21-5 tempt the reader with only
external parts of their bodies.”46
The importance of the woman’s age to the perceived repulsiveness and threat of her
genitalia is vitally important to this discussion, specifically because of how prevalent the
reviled attributes of female bodies, especially in their old age, are in descriptions of Roman
witches and the threats they pose in contrast to the appealing attributes of younger women’s
bodies.
To that end, there is a distinction of assigned agency to be made between the character
and threat posed by the vagina of the young woman and that of the old woman. The negative
depictions of vaginas as character flaws are predominantly of old women’s, while the young
maidens of the monstrous composite figures are mostly absolved of the blame for their
uncontrollable flawed bodies, which, nonetheless, are dangerous and frightening.47 The adverse
effect older women’s bodies are considered to have on male arousal is a non-negligible factor
in the disgust they elicit/ provoke.48 An old woman’s repulsively-described genitals, on the
other hand, are portrayed as though synonymous with her character flaws: namely, decrepitude,
lust/sexual hunger, and envy.

37
Verg., Aen. 3.426-31, 435; Ov., Met. 14.59-67. Cf. Miller 2016, 318; Lowe 2015, 114-5. Charybdis also fits
Miller’s analysis of classical iterations of the vagina dentata (2016, 316-7).
38
Verg., Aen. 3.216-7. Cf. Adams 1982, 100-2 for use of venter as ‘womb.’
39
Felton 2013.
40
Cf. Miller 2016, 318.
41
Ripat 2016, 113: “Ubiquitously implicit is the idea that women, especially lustful women, live at the expense
of men’s health.”
42
E.g. Mart., 11.71.2.
43
Cf. Adams 1982, 77-8 male genitalia associated with pride and power.
44
Richlin 1984, 77.
45
See n. 34.
46
Richlin 1984, 73.
47
See Miller 2016, 318 for the “psychological impact of this monstrosity on Scylla herself”; Stubbs 1998, 6 for
the Harpies’ change “from stern but graceful wind-nymphs into repulsive and incontinent hags”; Doniger 1995,
27-8 for the composite figure as “human upper bodies with life-giving breasts are countered by bestial and
rapacious lower regions.”
48
Cf. Hor., Sat. 1.2.36; Mart., 7.18; Ov., Met. 15.232-3.
 6

In association with decrepitude and death, words pertaining to decay are often used in
these descriptions: multiple Priapic poems invoke images of putrescence and even worms in
the area;49 in one of many graphic descriptions,50 Martial compares an older woman’s genital
depilation to plucking the mane of a dead lion.51 The dead lion comparison is not the only
derogatory animal metaphor applied to older women’s bodies, as Pliny compares them to
crows52 and Martial in a single epigram53 compares Vetustilla—the name itself a reference to
her age—to grasshoppers, ants, crocodiles, frogs, gnats, owls, goats, ducks, and spiders, before
returning to the associations with death (cadaver)54 and disease (pestilentia),55 two insults to
her genitals,56 and the simultaneous association of her with death, witches, and adultery.57
The invocation of animal imagery, as with its association with menstruation in younger
women, is similarly related to the perceived reversal of power hierarchy. Both the menstruating
woman and the old woman are presented as a threat to the man’s inherent sexual dominance
over them; the menstruating woman because of the potentially deadly blood and her capacity
to use it to invert the power dynamic in which the phallus is more powerful, and the old woman
because her genitals “pit the phallus against the threat of sterility, death, and the chthonic
force”58 and present a sexual dynamic which centres on active female desire pursuing passive
and/or unwilling male acquiescence, essentially an exact inversion of the elegiac pursuits often
romanticised. In addition to being a direct threat to men and the naturality of their dominance
over women, this reversal of sexed power and appetite in old women is often framed as an
indirect threat via their influence on younger women, encouraging them to upset this balance
and manipulate men sexually and romantically:59 a trope directly mirrored in portrayals of
witches, as the next chapter will discuss.
The contrast between menstruating women’s fertility and the infertility of old women
does not seem to pose a paradoxical problem to the disgust directed at the physical realities of
both. The dismissal and vilification of both can arguably be connected to Ortner’s paradigm of
masculine/civilised and feminine/natural, as women’s fertility is often framed in terms of
agricultural fertility and men’s sexual use and impregnation of women’s bodies is likewise
framed as plowing, sowing, and reaping.60 The menstruating woman is fertile but temporarily
‘un-plowable,’ and possesses a power which denies the dominance of man over woman as it
denies the dominance of civilisation over nature; menstrual blood can, as shown above,
apparently directly affect this reversal of man’s/civilisation’s taming of nature by ruining crops
and man-made goods. The old woman is infertile but hyper-sexual, and via direct reference to
her genitals, male authors make explicit the connection between her inability to provide sexual
pleasure or children and the disgust she elicits in men; her body is even described as unfarmable
land in multiple texts.61 Martial is most explicit in how he views the vagina as useless when

49
Priap., 46.10; 57.2; 68.9-10; 83.
50
Mart., 1.20.4; 4.20.4; 6.45.1; 11.43.11-12; 46.10. Cf. Richlin 1984, 71 for decomposition description.
51
Mart., 10.90.10.
52
Plin., HN 7.153.
53
Mart., 3.93.
54
Ibid., 3.93.23.
55
Ibid., 3.93.17.
56
Ibid., 3.93.13 and 27.
57
Ibid., 3.93.14-5: witch imagery implied by women loitering in places of death after dark.
58
Richlin 1984, 113. Cf. n. 17.
59
Prop., 4.5; Tib., 1.5.
60
Cf. Adams 1982, 24-5.
61
Plin., HN 17.35; Columella, Rust. 2.1.2.
 7

not providing either pleasure or offspring, writing that a woman is mistaken if she believes that
her organ is still a cunnus when it ceases to have relevance to a mentula.62 The natural female
body—whether young, fertile, and menstruating or old, infertile, and decrepit—is shown as
having the potential to challenge the natural hierarchy of men’s/civilisation’s dominance if
used in an unnatural way, and is thus a threat to the paradigm. The method for neutralising this
potential threat is internally consistent with this interpretation; the set of idealised virtues and
behaviours consistently outlined and encouraged for Roman women effectively tame and
domesticate the female body and its perceived inherent characteristics in order to be suitable
for men’s use, comparably to how agricultural colonisation of land domesticates the threat of
the wild to be suitable for civilisation’s use.
I will now outline how the commonly recognised characteristics of the ideal Roman
woman effectively sanitise, domesticate, and commodify the aspects of the female body which
would otherwise implicitly threaten male superiority, leaving the women who continue to defy
those set standards to be lampooned and demonised as counter-exempla: as witches. The link
between the flux and mess of female bodies, the weaker or lesser function of their minds, and
the nature of their character contributes to a picture of women as libidinous, envious, irrational,
and inconsistent.63 The ideal Roman woman, however, typically has no sexual appetite of her
own, is easily contented, and is predictable in her simplicity and dedication to her household.
Livy’s Lucretia64 provides an obvious starting point for this comparison; she has no
sexual appetite for anyone but her husband, counteracting the threat posed by the notion of
women’s genitalia as ‘hungrier’ for more than what one man can provide. Moreover, she is
content with her domesticity and does not drunkenly carouse with the other wives, directly
rejecting the undesirable trait of drunkenness as well. Finally, her motivations of protecting her
virtue and upholding the mores of her country are easily understandable and compatible with
men’s. Quite similarly to the division of the female body in half mentioned before with regard
to the composite figures,65 Livy even divides her mind from her body (implicitly her sexual
organs, which are unsurprisingly sanitised so as not to detract from her idealised portrayal) in
showing the men comforting her that the body, not the mind, sins.66 The separation of the
womanly character from the female sex allows her to be virtuous despite her body, which they
all still blame for the rape, allowing the civilised values for which she is praised to supersede
the problem of her sex and absolving her of the faults of her guilty genitals by idolising her
conscious womanhood and punishing her physical femaleness.
This division, as with the composite monstrous figures, is also pertinent to the Roman
value placed on family and motherhood. In the same passage in which Pliny inspires fear of
menstrual blood and describes its ability to turn a dog rabid, he also claims—without disgust
or insinuation of evil magic—that breast milk produced by a mother of a male child can prevent
a dog from turning rabid, though milk from the mother of a girl is good only for clearing facial
blemishes.67 The distinction between the capabilities of the female body to produce in ways
which benefit men/civilisation and to produce in ways which threaten men/civilisation parallels

62
Mart., 10.90.7-8: erras si tibi cunnus hic videtur,/ ad quem mentula pertinere desit.
63
Cf. Carson 1999, 78-85; Lowe 2015, 70: “The belief that female minds and bodies are messier and less
controlled than male ones persisted throughout classical antiquity, and the female body prompted fearful
speculation in various cultural contexts.”
64
Liv., AUC 1.58.
65
Cf. Doniger 1995, 27-8 and quotation in n. 47.
66
Liv., AUC 1.58.9: mentem peccare, non corpus.
67
Plin., HN 28.74-5. Cf. Doniger in n. 47 and 65.
 8

the distinction between virtuous and unvirtuous womanhood in the early Empire. The ideal
woman, when young, is perpetually passive, sexually appealing, and sated, her behaviour
essentially supressing and counteracting any uncivilised parts of her biology.
There is less written on the ideal older woman, frankly because she would likely be
invisible. However, Seneca’s praise for his mother emphasises her pride in her reproductivity
and her appropriately-timed relinquishing of her claims to beauty and sexual appeal with
motherhood and age.68 She does not cling to attempting to be beautiful, unlike other women
whom Seneca condemns for having only that asset, nor does she fight the effects of pregnancy
on lessening her sexual appeal, again unlike others who would either conceal or terminate
pregnancies to remain beautiful. She is praised for knowing that her positively-received
visibility ends when her value transfers from her beauty to her maternity.
The values touted for women are inseparable from the value their bodies can offer
men/civilisation when properly pruned and farmed, and the negative depictions of ‘wild’
female bodies discussed so far contribute to the instruction of these virtues by showing the
threat posed by the undomesticated female. As Richlin succinctly writes, “the fear of female
genitalia per se, along with the use of them as pejorative signs, falls into alignment with the
social function of Roman invective against women. As invective demonstrates the intrinsic
vileness of the female, as it bars certain women from sexual acceptability, so it shows publicly
what the correct place of woman is.”69 The old women who stay visible while ugly, stay sexual,
and stay un-maternal—the women who fail or refuse to domesticate their natural bodies and
minds to the standards and needs of men/civilisation—comprise the majority of witches
depicted in Latin literature. The scarce young witches depicted, mostly derivative characters of
the Greek witches who were more often young and beautiful, are essentially captive to their
‘wild’ bodies controlling their characters (like the composite figures) and all they need is for
their bodies to be tamed and domesticated by men as they were made to be: pati natae, as
Seneca says.70 This is the basis for the rest of this dissertation’s argument.
Returning to Ortner’s nature/civilisation paradigm, in the unaltered female body,
Roman men saw something fundamentally inferior, wild, and disgusting. Encouraged female
behaviours centred on the domestication, exploitation, and sanitisation of that naturalistic
female body; beauty, motherhood, and domesticity are all portrayed opposite to the body’s
disagreeable mammalian traits like bleeding, aging or hairiness, traits which detract from the
ornamental, sexual, or maternal/uxorial image of appropriately ‘tamed’ women. The
demonised/vilified portrayals, on the other hand, are often quite clearly grounded in the
exaggerated/horrific persistence of the inconvenient truths of female biology when left
unrestricted and ungoverned by men; the aforementioned mammalian traits are paired with the
inverses of the aforementioned ideal behaviours. Women’s conflation with nature in opposition
to men’s conflation with civilisation underlays the cultural necessity of domesticating women’s
wild bodies: civilisation must persist over nature. By associating these disgusting traits with
animalistic un-civility, since virtue (as a construct of peak civility) dictates the omission,
minimisation, and sanitisation of the ‘wild’ and ‘threatening’ traits of the female body, this
paradigm renders the ungoverned body as synonymous with the undominated woman, who
necessarily presents a threat to men and civilisation alike (if not synonymously). In the
following two chapters, I will discuss this underlying thesis in terms of descriptions specifically

68
Sen., Helv. 16.3.
69
Richlin 1984, 77.
70
Sen., Ep. 95.21.
 9

of witches. In contrasting these depictions with those of virtuous women I neither seek to
debunk nor to simply reiterate the popular claim that witches’ characterisations are inverse to
social virtue expectations, but will instead add a new layer of nuance to that claim about the
importance of the female body and its nature in the context of the broad negativity of these
depictions.
 10

Chapter 2: Witches’ Appearances and Personalities

Paule writes that “each witch is, in essence, a blank canvas onto which a myriad of fears
and anxieties may be mapped,”71 but the previous chapter has shown that the canvas in
question—the undomesticated female body—is far from blank long before it is shown in
magical contexts. Women’s bodies do not exist neutrally in Roman thought, and, as such, the
fears and anxieties ‘mapped’ onto them ought not to be divorced from the pre-existing fears
and anxieties derived from their form; the femaleness of witches cannot be discounted in
consideration of the tropes pertaining to them. Building on the first chapter’s premise of
perceptions of the female sex as a non-negligible factor in the standards and expectations set
for Roman women, I will now demonstrate that representations of Roman witches are similarly
characterised by sex. Through an exploration of the recurring personal traits attributed to
witches, I will argue that the witch tropes are inextricably tied to male fears about women’s
bodies, sharing that common origin with exemplum tropes rather than deriving from an
inversion of exempla. The first half of this chapter will address the physical appearances of
witches considered against both the exempla to which they are often compared and the male
fears about the female form established earlier. The second half will do the same for witches’
character traits and virtues—or lack thereof—in terms of the character traits perceived to be
inherent in women as a result of their sex.
Literary depictions of witches’ appearance frequently draw attention to their failure to
adhere to the standards of upkeep of natural, mammalian bodily features (hair, teeth, nails) and
connote their inattention to physical appearance with their uncivility. Horace’s witches are
particularly consistent in this. Canidia’s hair is alternately entwined with snakes 72 or
dishevelled,73 her teeth discoloured74 and used to tear apart a raw sheep,75 her untrimmed and
gnawed nails used to dig in the dirt,76 her feet and (implicitly) her groin bare beneath a black
robe;77 Sagana’s bristling hair is comparable to a sea urchin and a charging boar.78 Similar
descriptions abound beyond Horace, including Petronius’ satirical Oenothea likewise having
torn hair and mishappen black clothing,79 Ovid’s Medea practicing magic barefoot, in loose
robes, with her hair unadorned,80 or Lucan’s Erictho tying back her uncombed hair81 with
vipers,82 gnawing her yellow nails,83 ripping into flesh with her teeth,84 and wearing
discoloured robes reminiscent of the Furies.85 This strikingly internally consistent stock
character spans genres, manifesting these same physical traits for the lampooned witch as for
the horrific. The suggestion introduced in the previous chapter that Roman expectations of
feminine presentation relate directly to the domestication of the nature-aligned female body

71
Paule 2014, 746.
72
Hor., Epod. 5.15-6.
73
Hor., Sat. 1.8.24.
74
Hor., Epod. 5.47. In Sat. 1.8.48, she is wearing dentures.
75
Hor., Sat. 1.8.27.
76
Hor., Epod. 5.47-8; Sat. 1.8.26-7.
77
Hor., Sat. 1.8.23. Her robe is cinched up; taken with the multiple other references to bare-groined witches (e.g.
Tib., 1.5.55: currat…inguinibus nudis…per urbem), this reading seems viable.
78
Hor., Epod. 5.27-8.
79
Petr., Sat. 134.
80
Ov., Met. 7.182-3.
81
Luc., BC 6.518.
82
Ibid., 6.656: coma vipereis substringitur horrida sertis.
83
Ibid., 6.542-3.
84
Ibid., 6.549.
85
Ibid., 6.654-5.
 11

and its befitting subjugation to male civilisation is pertinent here; the untamed appearance of
the witch stock character reflects a reproachable denial of this bodily colonisation, the
ungroomed female body overgrown and wild, rather than a simple inversion of the arbitrary,
fluctuating social standards for virtuous women.
The high premium placed on ‘good’ Roman women’s detailed attention to their hair
seems itself a reflection of the domestication of the female body. Women’s hair specifically,
despite being a basic unisex mammalian feature, is a sexually charged feature throughout
Roman representations and its presentation and containment must be considered in the context
of the perceived threat of inherent female sexuality discussed in the first chapter. Bartman
writes that women’s hairstyles and accessories “ensured that women’s coiffures had none of
the lively movements that animated men’s hair… whereas a man’s hair implied his active role,
a woman’s connoted passivity,”86 and discusses the rigid control of women’s hair as a by-
product of the policing of their sex, aptly contrasting the artificial ideal with the abhorred
natural to show that “Roman female coiffures bespeak human intervention.”87 Ovid and Martial
both reference captivos crines,88 strengthening the connection between women’s hairdressing
and the subjection of women’s appearances to cultural rather than natural shapes. To take
cultural standards for women’s appearance as the starting point, the neutral baseline, for
witches’ anti-exempla construction conveniently ignores that these standards are manufactured
in a cultural context in which women’s innate physical sexuality—which their hair frequently
represents—is perceived as a threat needing to be contained. The disarray of witches’ hair, for
this reason, should not be taken as the negative image derived from civilised women’s
arbitrarily positive behaviour; rather, the positive and negative should both be read respectively
as representations of proper and improper domestication of the underlying female animal,
which cannot exist neutrally in Roman thought.
Separately from witchcraft or beauty, dishevelled female hair is strongly connoted with
the funerary tradition, and the expected female performance of mourning is very similar to the
appearance of the witch described above: torn hair, unkempt clothes, use of nails to tear flesh,
and even bare feet in some accounts.89 In relation to this custom, Corbeill argues that the
centrality of the female body as the gateway into and out of the world as its “contribution to
the cycle and flow of existence”90 is reflected in the contrast of fertility with decay as “death is
an area gendered first for women and then by women until the tending of the dead becomes
uniquely marked as women’s work.”91 The intentionally neglected appearance of women in
mourning has been interpreted in various ways, but in the context of this discussion it is
arguable that the public display of the ungroomed female body both invokes the alignment of
death with nature92 and harnesses the distressing image of the ‘wild’ woman to underscore the
distressing loss of the deceased; not unlike the harnessing of menstruation’s power for
civilisation’s/men’s agricultural use.93 The witch’s appearance grounds her exclusively in
death and decay, posed opposite to life and fertility, perpetually eschewing the aspects of

86
Bartman 2001, 3. Cf. Pandey 2018.
87
Bartman 2001, 5.
88
Ov., Am. 1.14.45-6; Mart., 14.26. Cf. Sharrock 1991 for the elegiac idealisations of the female form as artificial
transformations of woman from animal to “art-object.”
89
See Corbeill 2004, esp. 83-4.
90
Ibid., 86.
91
Ibid., 85-6. Cf. CLE 2155.5, interpreted as addressing “the earth (terra) both as fertile mother and as recipient
of the corpse” (Corbeill 2004, 89). Cf. ibid., 91 for a chart comparing steps in birth and death rituals.
92
I.e. lifecycles and return to the earth paralleling birth, as in ritual of depositio.
93
See n. 27.
 12

femaleness which are lifegiving or contributing to male civilisation and the aspects of
superimposed femininity which minimise the threatening visibility of inconvenient female
traits.
This provides a natural bridge into the necessary discussion of Roman witches’
frequently depicted old age. Against the established backdrop of male authors expressing
disgust at old women’s bodies in terms of decrepit flesh, association with decay, and infertility,
the witches’ old age and visual association with death are not coincidental. Most blatantly, anus
on its own can refer to a witch, but the further physical characteristics make explicit the
connection between their bodies, their naturalistic settings, and the threat they are perceived to
pose. In Statius’ Thebaid, virtuous mother Ide is transformed to a witchy figure after she
wanders the battlefield looking to resurrect her sons; the image of the mourning woman
unhinges itself from the constraints of ritual grief and passes into the animalistic and tragically
condemnable,94 as she refers to her potentia matris and uteri fortuna,95 in her grief apparently
regretting the act of giving birth—described in terms of the wild howls (ululata)96 of labour—
and envying the sterile.97 Horace’s witches are referred to as obscenas anus,98 their sallow
complexions make them horrible to behold,99 and one is called a prudens anus who disturbs
graves.100 In the victim’s false praise, Canidia is credited with having given birth to
Pactumeius101 with direct reference to her womb (venter) and an ideal, healthy labour and
birth.102 In this facetious encomium, the speaker’s commentary on her fertility, motherhood,
and health explicitly in terms of her body implicitly underscores just how egregiously
undeserving her character is of that praise. Martial’s invective at 3.93103 “much resembles
Epodes 8 and 12 in comparing the woman’s body to those of animals and includes many other
invective themes as well (age, toothlessness, smell, promiscuity, coldness).”104 The causes for
physical disgust are unsurprisingly identical between magical and non-magical women, the
consistent age-based disdain again suggesting that the stock character of the witch cannot be
read as the neutral blank canvas Paule describes for projecting disgust. Either the female body
of the witch is old and therefore repulsive, or it is young and still has the potential to be salvaged
for male use, as in the case of Medea, whose youth and fertility allows potential for motherhood
and domesticity, but is threatened by the dominant nature of her craft.105
Despite the rife descriptions of the ungroomed and animalistic femaleness of old
witches, any efforts they make to domesticate their own naturalistic bodies to the standards of
male civilisation are nonetheless derided as inappropriate for their age. Just as Martial mocked

94
Cf. McAuley 2016, 319 for the interpretation of this scene as “emblematic of the collapse of a patriarchal
maternal ideology.”
95
Stat., Theb. 3.154-5.
96
Ululare is mostly used for wild women or animals; commonly in reference to mourning (Ov., Met. 3.723, 5.153,
13.571; Verg., Aen. 2.488, 4.168, 4.667) or ritual chanting (Mart., 5.41.3), but also witchcraft and/or Bacchantes
(Ov., Met. 9.643; Verg., Aen. 4.609; Hor., Sat. 1.8.25; Luc., BC 6.690) and wild animals (Ov., Met. 4.404; Verg.,
Aen., 6.257, 7.18; Petr., Sat. 62). Its use here to describe child-birthing screams of a childless mother realigns her
maternal fertility with mourning and death, corresponding to her new witchy-ness.
97
Stat., Theb. 3.157-9. For the witches’ core trait of envy, see n. 63.
98
Hor., Epod. 5.98.
99
Hor., Sat. 1.8.25-6.
100
Hor., Epod. 17.47-8.
101
Cf. Watson 2003, 568 for the implication that she stole (rather than birthed) the child and passed it off as her
own.
102
Ibid., 17.50-1.
103
See n. 53-57.
104
Richlin 1983, 113 n.10 [244].
105
Chapter 3 will address the place of the rarer young witch.
 13

the mature woman for pubic depilation by comparing it to plucking a dead lion’s mane or
stirring ashes on a tomb106 and calling it a pretty thing for Hector’s wife but not his mother,107
Horace mocks Sagana both for her natural hair and for her artificial wig,108 and Canidia both
for her natural teeth and for her dentures.109 In keeping with Seneca’s aforementioned
implication that it is fitting for older women to relinquish their claims to and attempts at
beauty110—like fertility, a virtue for young women not old—the witches are ridiculed both for
their untamed bodies and their pathetic mimicry of grooming.
To that same end, cosmetics, though common, were connoted with witchcraft both
because of their ingredients, which often consisted of poisons and ingredients associated with
witchcraft,111 and because of their ‘deception’ in hiding or transforming the flaws of the female
face.112 The expectations for women’s grooming and the standard of beauty set as the bene
culta puella113 present a no-win situation very similar to the one criticised by modern feminists.
The expectations for bodily self-domestication idealise a woman plucked and primped of any
indications of her mammalian humanness (body hair, sweat,114 menstruation, age115) and
moulded into a waxen representation of her male-desired traits,116 a standard necessarily
impossible to achieve naturally because of its denial of nature, yet the use of artificial products
to achieve it is condemned by the same men whose expectations demand it. Olson summarises
the theme in Latin literature of “surprise intrusions into the private chambers of one’s mistress,
finding her unadorned and therefore repulsive117… a character in Lucian118 states that it is
disgusting to see a woman at her toilette, but it is also disgusting to see her as she rises from
sleep, her adornment not yet in place.”119 Correspondingly, Gibson interprets Ovid’s advice to
women to hide cosmetic practices from lovers120 and Lucretius’ disgust121 as united by “a
common assumption that women in their raw state are unpalatable to men.”122
Evidencing the internal consistency of this thought with the condemnation of the old
witch, Ovid also expresses the negative association of cosmetics with witchcraft via his
character of Dipsas in Amores 1.8 and his focus on the cosmetic palette in 1.12. Dipsas, an
anus123 who can resurrect the dead124 amongst other magical abilities and whose body is
described in sinister context as wizened and covered in plumage,125 advises Ovid’s puella in

106
The same image is used for the witch’s actions in Hor., Epod. 17.47-8. Here again, the association of old
women’s sex and bodies with death is clear.
107
Mart., 10.90.
108
Hor., Epod. 5.27-8; Sat. 1.8.48.
109
Hor., Epod. 5.47; Sat. 1.8.48.
110
See n. 68.
111
Olson 2009.
112
Richlin 1995, 186.
113
Ov., Am. 3.7.1. equates bene culta with formosa.
114
Cf. Hor., Carm. 1.19 with Sutherland 2003.
115
I.e. young women pre-emptively shunning the early signs of aging. Cf. Ov., Met. 15.232-3, in which Helen
herself weeps at seeing wrinkles in the mirror.
116
Cf. Sharrock 1991.
117
E.g. Lucr., 4.1174-91; Ov., Rem. Am. 347-56.
118
Ov., Am. 39.
119
Olson 2009, 304 n. 96.
120
Ov., Ars. 3.209-18.
121
See n. 47.
122
Gibson 2003, 182.
123
Ov., Am. 1.8.2.
124
Ibid., 1.8.17.
125
Ibid., 1.8.14.
 14

the abuse of her beauteous youth and the anticipation of her impending hideous age. In
conjunction with this, Pandey interprets 1.12 to express the “deep masculine fear—here
inscribed on the intermediary vehicle of the tabellae—that the ornatrix’s beautifying arts may
eventually become or conceal the disgusting sorcery of the anus”126 and that the poet “transfers
his suspicion of both mistress and [her maid Nape] onto the surrogate of the tablets, also
personified as feminine and described in terms of evoking bad luck, witchcraft, and curse
traditions.”127 The disgust at the underlying female body, when it fails to be sufficiently
restricted and reworked to serve men’s interests, creates a continuum on which the mistress
and the witch both fit, separated only by age and (subsequently) beauty. Again, the perception
of the female-specific physical attributes of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women is the defining factor
in the determination of both of their characters’ worth to the male narrator. The young woman,
by virtue of her female body, perpetually has the potential to become a witch in her gradual
loss of relevance to men; without social and cultural restraint, she, too, poses a threat.
Ovid’s Dipsas, embodying multiple relevant physical and personal characteristics, can
also offer a segue from the discussion of witches’ bodily traits to the second half of this chapter:
witches’ character traits. It is less straightforward to frame characterisation as a product of
bodily perceptions, but by drawing on the first chapter’s demonstration of how the female body
was perceived to impact women’s inherent character when unrestrained by civilisation (e.g.
‘fluidity’ increasing libidinousness or ‘hungry’ vaginas causing jealousy), this section aims to
show that the personality opposition of the virtuous woman and the witch are derived
respectively from the successful and unsuccessful subjugation of their shared female biological
nature, rather than the witch deriving from the inverse of the virtuous woman. The primary
characteristics in focus will be drunkenness, sexual appetite, and its related jealousy.
To begin with perhaps the most pervasive character trait of the Roman witch,
drunkenness is a staple in Latin depictions of witches, often meriting consideration as its own
sub-trope: the ‘drunken bawd-witch.’128 Ovid’s Dipsas is named for her thirst and has never
seen a sober morning;129 the unnamed witch in the Fasti uses wine for her ritual, then gets
drunk off of what remains in the jug;130 Petronius’ Oenothea, yet another old woman in ugly
black robes with loose hair and vocally bitter about her age, is also named for her love of
drinking;131 Propertius’ Acanthis is characterised by excessive thirst and hungry throughout
her depiction,132 again displaying an exaggeration of a trait attributed to the genitals’ sway over
an uncivilised female body. The link between old women, wine, and witches is so strong and
pervasive that a statue of an anus ebria was suggested to depict a witch based only on her age
and wine jug.133
Connecting this trope back to the issue of whether its origin is in the female anatomy
or the cultural expectations of women, it is easy to conclude that “as the Roman legend fixed
the ‘good’ woman of old as strictly abstinent, the charge of drunkenness in invective against

126
Pandey 2018, 463.
127
Ibid., 462.
128
Cf. Kalleres 2014; Ogden 2002, 125-9.
129
Ov., Am. 1.8.3-4. Dipsas can also refer to a “kind of serpent whose bite causes violent thirst” (Lewis & Short),
again linking a witch’s character with threatening animal traits.
130
Ov., Fast. 2.571-83.
131
Petr., Sat. 133-4. Ripat 2016, 121 translates her name as “Wine-Divine.”
132
Prop., 4.5.
133
Pollard 2008, 143-53 suggests the apotropaic function of the statue against women’s envy. Paule 2014, 748 n.
11 criticises Pollard for making this leap.
 15

contemporary women is unsurprising.”134 However, it could also be argued that even the
sobriety of the exempla is connected to the role of social restrictions placed on women in
controlling and suppressing their bodies’ perceived liability to excessive flux. The Maenads,
famous primarily for their intoxication and resulting occult animalistic frenzies, offer a
different angle on the virtuosity of sobriety via a Roman depiction. Ovid’s description of the
Bacchic women who tear Orpheus apart is remarkably similar to the typical descriptions of
witches, both in wild appearance and savage personal qualities:135 they have tangled hair,
ravaged breasts,136 rampaging bloodlust, multiple animalistic qualities, and jealous resentment
at Orpheus’ romantic rejection. Ovid stresses the situation of the Maenads: immersed in nature,
draped in animal skins, ululating, and, most importantly, simultaneously female, feral, and
antithetical to civilisation. The Greeks did not disparage wine-drinking women as the Romans
did, yet they held similar views about the effects of female anatomy on women’s minds and its
closeness to natural wilderness.137 Ovid’s Roman reception of this Greek story and, more
broadly, the particularly Augustan discouragement of women’s drinking betray a sub-textual
cultural fear that alcohol is conducive to a loss of control over women’s animal nature and
therefore a threat to the male domination and civilisation of the female nature.
Witches’ commonly shown sexual appetite can similarly be linked to the ‘hunger’ of
the vagina and its threat of dominance over woman’s conscious mind and, subsequently, over
that female mind’s natural inclination to submit to domestication. As per the conclusion of the
previous chapter, insofar as it is the natural order that dominant man should conquer/civilise
submissive nature or that dominant Rome should conquer/civilise the submissive foreign, it
should follow that dominant male should conquer/civilise submissive female; women’s usual
characterisation as intrinsically feeble and domestic is because it is in their submissive nature
for their biological wildness to be tamed by men’s civilisation. It is only in disorder, in the
unnatural or supernatural, that that biological wildness defies men’s civilising force and can
resist it; witches embody that disorder.
On that basis, the disturbance of the Roman dominance/submissiveness paradigm is
particularly clear in the issue of activity and passivity in intercourse and its pursuit.138 The
mascula libido139 of Horace’s Folia provides a clear example of how non-passive female sexual
appetite is viewed as male and presented as the first descriptor for this witch. The witches’ plan
to create a love charm from their victim to force Canidia’s male interest to return shows female
sexual aggression; the violent pursuit of the uninterested man reverses the pervasive sexual
dynamic of much of the mythological and elegiac canon.140 The alignment of witches with
procuresses (lenae), as in the cases of Propertius’ Acanthis and Ovid’s Dipsas, though likely
derived at least partially from the love magic services they often provide both in literature and
historically,141 serves in characterising the hyper-sexuality of the fictional witch. This

134
Ripat 2016, 121.
135
Ov., Met. 11.1ff. In the same text, Ovid likens Medea’s appearance to the Bacchantes as she practices magic
(7.258).
136
Cf. Joyce 2014 for the breast as virtuous and fertile in Roman thought, in conjunction with Chapter 1’s
discussion of the woman divided in half, fertile on top, and the power of breastmilk as a foil to menstrual magic
(n. 67).
137
Dean-Jones 2003.
138
Cf. Hubbard 2009 for Roman perceptions of non-magic deviance from the dominant-male/submissive-female
in heterosexual sex.
139
Hor., Epod. 5.41.
140
As discussed in Chapter 1 after n. 58.
141
Ogden 2002, 129; Paule 2014, 749 n. 14.
 16

hypersexuality, particularly in the aged witch character, is pertinent to the witch’s role as
disordered, overgrown female animal rather than anti-exemplum.
The ‘appetite’ of the vagina, however, can be unvirtuous without being disgusting, as
Martial demonstrates in his jibe at the libido of Leda and the naïveté of her cuckolded husband,
in which Leda describes herself as hysterica142 from her need for sex and her youth, sexual
prime, and desirability are cited explicitly;143 this portrayal is comedic and crass, but does not
consider the young woman’s ravenous sex drive to be disgusting or frightening as the old
women’s and witches’ comparable drives consistently are. The repulsion and intimidation
caused by the older female body in sexual scenarios persists independently from the sexual
pudor touted by the exempla for Roman women, and older witches’ sex drives defy the Roman
notion of a natural order in which the sexual woman does not outlast her sexual appeal nor
reproductive value. Petronius’ Oenethea even explicitly acknowledges that her agedness
precludes her from sexual viability in the eyes of the Roman man,144 yet her introduction
features her violent attempt to arouse the narrator nonetheless.
Witches’ awareness of their own unattractiveness, use of love magic, and
incompatibility with the civilised/male world bring us to the final major character trait of this
section: jealousy.145 The trope of the jealous witch can accurately be considered the foil to the
virtuous woman’s non-interference or single-minded concern with domestic and uxorial
demands, but the two could again share a common basis in the containment of the female threat.
Ovid describes the personified Envy herself, Invidia, in many of the same terms as witches and
feral wilderness. Physically, her body is shrivelled and wan, her teeth mouldy, her breast
infused with bile and her tongue dripping venom;146 the haggard body,147 drained complexion,
and foul teeth are all present in the descriptions of aged witches discussed earlier, while the
bilious breast contrasts the fertile one and the venomous tongue is reminiscent of a common
Latin term for witch, venefica. Like many witches, she is shown completely detached from
society, living in squalor, and Ovid combines the recurring, animalistic witch-related images
of feral hunger and snakes by showing Envy eating snake flesh so disgustingly that even
Minerva has to avert her gaze.148 Envy’s presence has some effects on nature in common with
menstruating women and some witches; her step causes plants to wither, her breath poisons the
air,149 and her effect on Aglauros is miserable decay,150 echoing the overlapping associations
of putrefaction with menstrual blood, old women, and witches. Ripat offers a lucid explanation
female body’s significance to envy:

This logic surely lurks beneath the common literary portrayal of aged women as greedy—
especially for fluids, both sexual and alcoholic—an idea that is further predicated on the idea

142
Mart., 11.71.1, here inseparable from its literal meaning of suffering from the effects of the womb. Its Greek
origin makes clear its connotations with female irrationality caused by the ‘wandering womb.’
143
Ibid., 11.71.5-8.
144
Petr., Sat. 134
145
Tib., 1.5.59; Ov., Am. 1.8.70; Ov., Met. 14.1-74; Sen., Med. passim; Verg., Ecl. 8.64-7; Stat., Theb. 1.617-8.
146
Ov., Met. 2.775-7.
147
Ibid., 2.775, macies; the same word describes Erictho at Luc. BC 6.515.
148
Ov., Met. 2.768-70.
149
Ibid., 2.791-2. Erictho has the exact same effect at Luc. BC 6.521-2. Erictho also shares Invidia’s disdain for
civilisation’s prosperity and glee at its suffering. Ovid’s choice of exurit (Met. 2.792) to describe the destruction
of flora is perhaps conspicuous, considering the connotation of sexual longing with burning and the corresponding
“ancient fear that a woman’s sexual demands could cook a man dry” (Sutherland 2003, 70 in analysis of Hor.,
Carm. 1.19).
150
Ov., Met. 2.805-8: miserrima tabe.
 17

that they, now useless, should be dead and have no right to the resources that could sustain
others invested with greater social value…if the envious (and lustful, and greedily thieving)
body was ‘loose,’ then the aged female body was a prototypical image of envy.151

The perceived and artistically exaggerated disgustingness of the female body when left without
male/civilised attention and regulation can be linked directly to the characterisation of witches
as envious and the characterisation of witch-like Envy as female. Jealousy is practically
symptomatic of the unchecked female condition; thus, in accordance with this dissertation’s
overarching argument, it follows that witches (as literary extrapolation of the fear and disgust
surrounding the female body) are so often characterised by their rampant jealousy and exempla
suppress it as part of their adherence to the civilised femininity which suppresses their messy
biological nature.
This chapter has sought to reinterpret the Roman stock character of the witch from
inverting exempla’s virtues to embodying the realised extension of fearsome female
overgrowth when not subjected to the pruning epitomised by the exempla’s ideals. The
pertinent aspects of women’s appearance and character considered ideal are reframed as
standards for cultural ‘terraforming’ of the female animal into the Roman woman, and the
aspects of witches’ appearance and character are reframed as expressions of the uncolonized
female animal left to grow rabid to the point of threatening the presumed-inherent dominance
of civilised man. Accordingly, select standards for women’s appearance suppress, neutralise,
and commodify the same human, mammalian traits which the tropes for witches exaggerate,
and likewise select standards for women’s behaviour suppress and neutralise the traits which
Roman thought considered to be inherent in the female animal and which feature heavily in
Latin descriptions of witches. An important caveat here is that this reframing is neither
universally applicable to all virtues espoused by exempla—Roman women’s culture was
obviously more nuanced and individualistic than the simple reflection of male fears of and uses
for the female body—nor, by that same token, is it mutually exclusive with the interpretation
that parts of the witch trope are in fact derived from the inversion of those virtues. The next
chapter will continue from this notion of the witch as the literary extension of the fear of the
wild-growing female body, focusing now on the relationship between the perceived threat it
poses to the dichotomous power dynamic introduced in Chapter 1 and the magical practices of
the witches.

151
Ripat 2016, 114.
 18

Chapter 3: Magic Praxes, Corruptive Threat, and ‘Taming’ the Witch

The presence and wildness of the fears grounded in female anatomy have been major
features of the discussion so far, but the specifics of these fears have not yet been addressed:
what threat was actually posed? To answer this, we return to the conclusion of the first chapter:
that in the absence of an option of neutrality in the dichotomous dominance/submission
paradigm, the refusal of nature-female-foreign-chaos to submit to civilisation-male-Roman-
order upsets the very fabric of the power hierarchy and therefore threatens the inherent
dominance of the male and of civilisation and must be contained. This chapter discusses not
only the representations of this perceived threat in witches’ ritualistic behaviour and magical
capacities, but also the methods of ‘containment’ implicitly suggested by these narratives. Just
as the previous chapter illustrated how the appearance and character of the stock witch could
be derived from disgust at the untamed female body, here I will first focus on specific ritual
actions performed by witches and their potential connections to the perceptions of the female
body discussed so far. Next, I will address the implications of goals and methods of witchcraft
for the established dichotomous power paradigm. Lastly, I will consider how the perceptions
of women and of power dynamics are configured in witches’ depicted threats and of the
neutralisation of that threat.
The first immediately apparent characterisation of the witches’ behaviour is its
animality. The previously introduced Roman perceptions of the female body as bestial and,
correspondingly, their perceptions of the witch as similarly physically ungroomed and wild
carry further into depictions of witches howling or screeching their incantations and acting in
ways antithetical to civilisation. Erictho’s voice, described simultaneously as more potent than
the drugs themselves and as discordant and significantly differentiated from human speech,
embodies the respective animal noises of dogs, wolves, owls, serpents, and unspecific ferae in
addition to the sounds of various dangerous aspects of weather and nature. 152 Ovid connects
the shrill sounds of the screech-owl (strix) to those of the Roman sub-type of witch, the
striges,153 which he claims take their name from their vocal resemblance to the birds and
practice gruesome disembowelment of and feasting on human babies.154 Tibullus likewise
invokes the strix in his curse against a witch, again featuring the witch’s animalistic shrieking
and feral scavenging alongside dogs.155 Comparably, witches’ transformation of themselves or
others into animals is common,156 as is their control of or familiarity with wild animals.157
Such portrayals essentially close the triangle linking the animality of the uncivilised
female body, the animality of the uncivilised witch, and the uncivilised female body of the
uncivilised witch. In the same vein, witches’ concoctions and rituals could also call for parts
of animals,158 “apparently the more exotic the better,”159 such that blatantly ‘submissive’ forces
(female, nature, foreign) combine in agentive defiance of the paradigm which designates their

152
Luc., BC 6.685-93, 729. She also froths at the mouth like a dog: 6.719 (spumantiaque ora), taken with her use
of actual rabid dogs’ spuma at 6.671.
153
Paule 2014, 745 defines strix in relation to witches.
Cf. Ov., Fast. 6.131-40 for striges as physically resembling owls; Petr., Sat. 63 for striges as human women named
for their actions.
154
Ov., Fast. 6.139-45.
155
Tib., 1.5.49-56.
156
Verg., Ecl. 8, Aen. 7.20; Petr., Sat. 61.2; Stat., Theb. 4.551; Ov., Met. 14.271-90.
157
E.g. predominantly-female animals guard Circe’s house (Ov., Met. 14.255).
158
Luc., BC 6.667-84 (cf. Ogden 2002, 134-5 for outlying Egyptian significance of her ingredients); Ov., Met.
7.262-75; Hor., Epod. 5.19-24.
159
Spaeth 2014, 43.
 19

subordinate places, counterintuitively deriving more power from the more ‘uncivilised’ sources
and thus, unchecked by the imposition of male order, pose a threat to the very claim to
dominance held by Rome, man, and civilisation.
This animalistic witchcraft-related behaviour, though helpfully connecting disparaging
perceptions of women’s uncivilised behaviour160 both to witches and to female alignment with
nature, does not sufficiently provide the necessary direct link between the female sex and
witches’ ritual actions to defend this argument effectively. To establish that link, the discussion
will now turn to the interpretation that specific actions comprising witchcraft rituals constitute
inversions of the female processes which benefit man/civilisation.
For example, ritualistic infanticide and/or child abduction could be read as a witch’s
foil to childbirth and/or motherhood. The practice was the source of sufficiently pervasive fear
about witches that material evidence attests genuine belief in its threat,161 but the depictions by
Horace, Ovid, and Petronius present artistic choices which lend insight specifically into the
literary perception of the threat posed. In one of Canidia’s main appearances, she and the other
three witches prepare an abducted boy for the brewing of a love potion which calls for his eyes
and liver.162 Oliensis interprets the scene to the benefit of this argument, writing that “the witch
demonstrates her unfitness for her assigned role [of surrogate mother] in Epode 5, where, in a
monstrous perversion of mothering, she plants a child in Mother Earth to die.”163 Rather than
nourishing the child, she starves him; rather than protecting him, she harms him; rather than
birthing him164 and granting life, she buries him and grants death. Her ‘perversion’ of childbirth
and motherhood can be connected again to her female sex, not only through the reverse-birth
she, past menopause, gives a boy already born, but also through her motives of lust and envy
as manifestations of vaginal appetite.165 Stratton, connecting Canidia’s actions to Medea’s
infanticide, emphasises that the witches “perpetrate this diabolic ritual with amorous intentions.
They are driven by an insatiable lust that can only be cured by the distilled desire of a murdered
child.”166
Ovid’s old striges, whom he describes as greedily devouring the disembowelled
intestines of abducted infants, are comparable in their exaggeration of the feral hunger and
perversions of childbirth (here consuming the organs of the child rather than expelling the child
from their own organs) and of nurturing (drawing sustenance from the child’s body rather than
providing it). In Petronius’ episode, strigae steal the body of a boy being mourned by his
mother and replace him with a straw dummy.167 Though less directly connected to the female
bodies, the brief account reinforces the trope of child-snatching in conjunction with another
threat posed by the magic-capable female body; arguably an inversion of sexual dominance,
the large and excessively-masculine Cappadocian, who pursues the strigae with a sword and

160
Richlin 1984, 77 connects this broad animal characterisation to their function as anti-exempla: “the use of
bizarre animals in invective against women… [instructs that] inappropriate behaviour removes women from
humanity.”
161
See n. 2.
162
Hor., Epod. 5.
163
Oliensis 1991, 127. Her subsequent contrast of Canidia with Maecenas is complementary to this interpretation:
“If Horace’s subjection to Canidia perverts the proper order of things, his amicable subordination to Maecenas is
an instance of the kind of coupling which holds Roman society together.”
164
Corbeill 2004, 90-1: “Sometime during the birth process at Rome, the newborn was placed upon the ground,”
resembling the practice “of depositio, whereby a dying person, while still alive, is placed on the bare earth outside
the home.”
165
See n. 30-35.
166
Stratton 2007, 82.
167
Petr., Sat. 63.
 20

successfully stabs one in the middle, is immediately sapped of all his strength and seriously
injured—though he penetrated her, so to speak, he is tainted, weakened, and driven mad by her
touch, dying shortly after. The alignment of witches exclusively with the death-related aspects
of femaleness, omitting life-giving properties,168 permeates the depictions of their rituals,
which permit the transformation of birth and fertility into death, of motherhood into sadism or
apathy, and even of death into unholy birth.
Correspondingly, witches’ necromantic rituals can also be interpreted as perversions of
women’s role in mourning. Horace’s witches, for example, collect the bones of the dead169 “in
mimicry of grieving relatives.”170 Erictho’s long and gruesome depiction is rich ground for this
analysis. Before she even begins her main necromantic ritual, Lucan builds her reputation with
a list of her practices, including ripping infants from the womb unnaturally (non qua natura
vocabat)171 and putting them directly onto the altar,172 another iteration of witchcraft distorting
childbirth. A subverted scene of mourning follows immediately, in which Erictho hangs over
the body of a loved one and, while kissing it, cuts off its head, opens its mouth with her teeth,
and murmurs arcane incantations to the Underworld down through its throat.173 Earlier, Lucan
mentions that she buries some people alive, resurrects others by reversing the funeral (perversa
funera pompa),174 and snatches smouldering remains from pyres and torches from the hands of
mourning parents.175 In these introductory glimpses into her power over life and death, she is
not only perverting the life-death processes, but predominantly the female-specific aspects of
mourning. Corbeill writes of Roman funerary custom that “by custom, men arrange for the
worship of the dead as newly created divinities, while the women take up the domestic task of
mourning the dead as formerly living human beings;”176 by this token, Erictho reverses the
female tasks of body-preparation while disrespecting the humanity of the corpse, perhaps
arguably taking on a non-physical reversal of the male role by abusing the ‘newly created
divinity’ of the dead, even killing to create particularly strong spirits to suit her needs.177 She
later specifically aspires to the desecration of respectable Roman ashes, bones, and even the
body parts of Pompey Magnus and Caesar,178 here threatening deviant domination by un-
dominatable female over civilised ritual, over Rome, over male, and over life and death.
This reversal of funeral propriety is particularly apparent in her resurrection of the
soldier, which strongly resembles the traditional preparation of the body. Aside from her dress
and appearance, addressed in the previous chapter, Erictho opens wounds on her selected
corpse instead of closing them, washes away the interior putrid gore rather than the exterior,

168
This same text also indicates the uselessness of appealing to the witches’ maternal instincts, as they are neither
mothers (Hor., Epod. 5.5-6) nor prone to sympathy (13-4, 29, 83-4).
169
Hor., Sat. 1.8.22.
170
Habinek 2016, 27.
171
Luc., BC 6.557.
172
This practice reappears during her speech (6.710-1), when she specifies offering infants’ heads (caput extaque),
emphasising that these infants would otherwise have lived (victurus erat).
173
Ibid., 6.563-8.
174
Ibid., 6.531-2.
175
Ibid., 6.529-37.
176
Corbeill 2004, 93.
177
Luc., BC 6.559-60.
178
Ibid., 6.584-7.
 21

and pumps blood into its veins179 thereby reversing the natural ‘drainage.’180 Lovatt frames
Erictho in specific contrast to the mother of the deceased, writing that she “raises the dead, as
the grieving mother longs to do; she mutilates the dead body rather than tearing her own hair
and cheeks. She is a figure of female power grounded in the toils of death, yet at the same time
a perversion of the lamenting woman.”181 Following Corbeill’s conclusion that “the gestures
of mourning women in ancient Rome—their blood, milk, tears—celebrate the rejuvenating and
life-giving powers of the female body,”182 and insofar as the witch’s image retains only the
associations of the female body with death and disgust, her actions to undo the female-
symbolic, culture-grounded funerary process by creating a sort of birth from death should lead
to the same conclusion drawn in the previous chapter: that the witch figure is the extrapolation
of the threatening aspects of the female sex stripped of its fertile value.
These inversions of the female sex’s supposed nature to submit to men’s/civilisation’s
sex-based expectations of women introduce a broader pertinent theme in the functions of
witchcraft: the inversion of the dichotomous power dynamic already threatened by the
insubordination of witches’ female sex. The most common magic practices depicted emphasise
the witches’ reversal of the dichotomous power hierarchy, both through interruption and/or
reversal of the ‘appropriate’ inherent world order and through control of and/or harm to men.
Manipulation—more specifically, perversion—of nature is a signature recurring feature of
witches’ magic; reversal of rivers’ flow and other control over flora and fauna, drawing down
the moon,183 control of weather and celestial bodies, necromancy, and even arguably love
magic all constitute expressions of immense power which hinge on the disruption of natural
occurrences usually controlled by the gods or otherwise harnessed by men/civilisation.184
Vergil’s Massylian witch can stop rivers, reverse the stars, control ghosts, and tear trees down
from mountains, skills listed immediately before Dido invokes the gods in reassuring Anna of
her disinclination to engage this skillset;185 Ovid references infama spells capable of
compelling crops to move between fields, necromancy, reversal of the Tiber’s course, the
paling of the sun, and the interruption of the moon;186 Tibullus claims to have witnessed a
witch’s power to draw stars down from the sky, reverse the course of a river, command the
dead, and make it snow in summer.187 Thematically, these pervasive forms of witchcraft not
only deny the natural order, but also manipulate it for the witches’ own benefit—exactly as
man/civilisation expects to manipulate (i.e. sex, impregnation, domestic labour, appearance)
the female body for his/its own benefit.188 Their dominance over nature is a dominance
‘naturally’ relegated to man/civilisation but is here wielded by a form of woman/nature which
is itself undominated by man/civilisation. The effect is the insistence upon how threatening
something which defies the dominance/submissiveness paradigm can be; witches are of a world

179
Masters 1992, 192 interprets this as an inversion of sacrifice, though Erictho is unfamiliar with the specifics of
proper sacrifice (6.523-5).
180
Luc., BC 6.538-40 (intimus umor/ ducitur, et tracta durescunt tabe medullae/ corpora) references the process
after interment, later using the same words (taboque medullas) for the corruption she cleans from the corpse’s
insides. Relevantly, the occurrence of ‘drainage’ after death is behind the word ‘sarcophagus.’
181
Lovatt 2016, 283.
182
Corbeill 2004, 106.
183
Cf. Edmonds 2019, 3-4 and passim; Ogden 2002, 236-7.
184
Paule 2014, 751; Ripat 2016, 119; Ogden 2002, 124-5. Love magic is discussed separately in the second half
of this chapter.
185
Verg., Aen. 4.489-93.
186
Ov., Rem. Am. 253-8.
187
Tib., 1.2.41-50.
188
See n. 27 and 93.
 22

in which the subdue-able threat is no longer subdue-able, but instead becomes capable of
massively overpowering the very thing supposed to subdue it. The horror of the witches’ power
to interrupt order189 is then derived from the female body seizing dominance not only over
other submissive elements (wilderness, disorder, flora and fauna), but also over dominant
elements (civilisation, order, humans) and even over elements submissive only to the gods190
(life and death, day and night,191 the weather), demonstrating dominant power which surpasses
that of man/civilisation and renders the male body effectively submissive.
To appropriately frame the next and final section of this chapter, we return briefly to
the conclusions of the previous chapters. Insofar as the witch stock character embodies the
extrapolation of male fears about the female body left unrestrained and the female exemplum
at least partially represents proper domestication of the female animal, the following two
pertinent issues arise: the consideration of the threat of witchcraft as a parallel extrapolation of
the female threats discussed in the first chapter, and the potential of domesticating the witch in
her capacity as an embodiment of the female body. The former has already been partially
addressed in the sections above but will now be connected to the latter via a brief look at love
magic.
The use of love magic, as mentioned earlier in terms of reversal of male-initiated elegiac
pursuit,192 likely contributed to the trope of the sexually aggressive witch and represents an
inherently threatening form of improper dominance over the natural order. Even when not as
violent as the process in Horace’s portrayal, the methods for creating love magic largely hinge
on symbolic or literal manipulation of nature,193 in keeping with the theme outlined above.
Whether compelling attraction, repulsion, or love-related misery, the desired outcome of the
magic frames the agentive witch as the sexually dominant over both the man and the civilised
woman. Multiple poets blame their erectile dysfunction on the malicious machinations of
witches,194 essentially representing the realisation of the threat that the untamed female sex,
embodied by the witch, can subdue male potency and disarm the tool with which they exercise
dominance over the female sex. Disarming the acceptable threat of the male genitals can be
interpreted as mirroring the disarming of the sexed female threat achieved by the physical and
social limitations imposed on women.
Similarly disarming is the abuse of love magic to taint otherwise virtuous love in a
variety of ways to the detriment of the helpless man, notably alleged against Erictho, Acanthis,
and Dipsas.195 Erictho can compel love, sexual attraction, and sexual arousal which are
undesirable and even contrary to fate;196 Acanthis could similarly compel even Penelope to
forget Odysseus and remarry or could blind husbands to their wives’ adultery.197 Ovid’s Dipsas

189
Cf. Henderson 1989, 61, specifically interpreting Horace’s accounts but accurately describing the broad
pattern: witches “figure disorder: collecting (so mock-ordering) anti-matter, dead bones and noxious living
plants…and their rites perform regression, recapture the primitivesque: the voice is a pre-verbal cry, ululation;
their nails scratch a trench, as if before the age of tools, they tear lamb to bites, doing without knives; they will
confuse life with death, summoning up the dead.” (reformatted).
190
Witches’ actions are often described in terms of their affront to the gods. Erictho is repeatedly shown
intimidating the gods: e.g. Luc., BC 6.441-51.
191
Cf. Luc., BC 6.624, 639-48 for Erictho’s creation of deeper dark as she is apparently averse to light. For witches
bringing darkness, cf. Prop., 4.5.19-20; Ov. Met., 14.365-70.
192
See n. 140.
193
Ogden 2002, 236-40.
194
Tib., 1.5; Ov., Am. 3.7.27-38; Petr., Sat. 131.
195
Ov., Am. 1.8.19.
196
Luc., BC 6.452-4; 458-60.
197
Prop., 4.5.7-8, 15, 44.
 23

presents a more devious magical threat to men: the indoctrination of the young, ‘tamed’ woman
into witchcraft and her subsequent abuse of her beauty to harm men.198 To frame this discussion
in terms of the female body, we turn again to the model of the female body as divided at the
waist,199 in which the feared and feral lower half threatens to overtake the tamed upper half if
not properly kept in check by the male-set constraints of society: the ravenous hunger of the
vagina overtaking woman’s mind with libidinousness and jealous greed, the hazardous
putrescence of the menses counteracting the life-giving breasts, the repulsive infertility of old
age overtaking the matronly role of what should be a sexually neutered body. Aged Dipsas,
again as an embodiment of the pernicious aspects of the female sex, threatens to corrupt the
young puella, to un-domesticate her mind, just as the female genitals threaten to do the same.
Dipsas’ urging that the puella take advantage of her youth and beauty raises the
question of how to reconcile the argument so far with the existence of young and beautiful
witches. The sparse appearances of young witches in Roman literature are almost exclusively
comprised of Latin receptions of Greek characters; Spaeth summarises the trend that “Greek
witches are generally depicted as young and beautiful, while the Roman witches are old and
ugly.”200 Medea and Circe are the two principal examples of young and beautiful witches in
Latin literature, but their presence may seem to compromise the core thesis about the impact
of sex perception on witch depictions; why should a young witch pose the same threats or
possess the same capabilities as an old witch? The young woman cannot be so cleanly divided
from the old woman because, as Ovid realises from eavesdropping on Dipsas,201 the young
woman will age, the resources her body can offer—beauty, pleasure, reproduction,
childrearing—will wither, and her body will become “surplus to the phallus’ needs.”202
To ground this distinction between witches in its relevance to female anatomy, Miller
offers a succinct summary that “representations of female reproductive organs portray the
exigencies of sex and reproduction in the form of a feral, dangerous part of the female
body and, by doing so, characterise female sexuality as something that should be feared and
must be tamed: domesticated by intercourse, pregnancy, and childbirth.”203 The threat of an
old witch cannot be neutralised by any of these methods specifically because her aged female
body makes intercourse undesirable and even hazardous to dominate, and renders pregnancy
and childbirth impossible. Simply put, there is no motivation to ‘tame’ the old witch. By
contrast, the rarer young witch, despite posing many of the same sex-derived threats to the
power paradigm, is still sexually and reproductively viable. Although she is unfit to provide
the things for which her domesticated body would be mined so long as she practices magic (i.e.
un-domesticates herself and jeopardises the paradigm), the resources her female body can offer
may be salvageable if her sex can be properly domesticated before she becomes irretrievably
feral and those resources expire. With this model for the domestication of young witches in
mind, Ovid’s Dipsas and puella introduce the perceived threat of the old witch corrupting and
un-civilising the young woman, the threat of the young witch simultaneously corrupting other
young women and beginning to evolve into the old witch, and the cumulative threat both of
these pose to the integrity of the male/civilisation-dominant paradigm.

198
Ov., Am. 1.8.21ff.
199
See n. 30-35 and 165.
200
Spaeth 2014, 46.
201
Ov., Am. 1.8.49-56. Cf. Ripat 2016, 114.
202
Henderson 1989, 61. Cf. Mart., 10.90.7-8 at n. 62.
203
Miller 2016, 314-5.
 24

Continuing in illustration of this interpretation, Plutarch’s warning against love magic

and its detrimental effects on men specifically in describing women of marriageable age
reflects the threat to the sexed power dichotomy when posed by a younger woman:

Fishing with poison is a quick way to catch fish and an easy method of taking them, but it makes
the fish inedible and bad. In the same way, women who artfully employ love-potions and magic
spells upon their husbands, and gain mastery over them through pleasure, find themselves
consorts of dull-witted, degenerate fools.204

He goes on to compare such women to Circe, whose love for Ulysses is shown as directly
connected to his ability to withstand her power.205 Plutarch is not alone in his comparison of
first-century Roman witches to the famous witches of Greek mythology,206 though the pre-
established plots of the Greek witches cannot be ignored in discussing their Roman portrayals.
The outcome of Medea’s and Circe’s mythological stories and romantic entanglements with
heroes—and, therefore, their youth—could not be omitted from their appearances in later
literature, but Roman authors still edit and skew the narratives to correspond with their
contemporary model of witchcraft.
Circe poses a unique challenge, being mythological, young, and often at least partially
divine; her portrayals in Roman literature cannot obscure those core facts of her character, but
also cannot omit her magical abilities, so her youth and beauty are instead reframed as
libidinousness (shifting focus to her sex and its influence on her character) and as deceptively
masking the threat of corruption she poses to men. Horace’s Epistle 1.2 features an eroticised
reference to Circe and her power to do to men the same thing which Plutarch fears love magic
to do: turn men into witless, subservient buffoons (sub domina meretrice fuisset turpis et
excors).207 Immediately following this, Horace speaks broadly of mankind as fruges consumere
nati208 and, in the same generalisation, proclaims, “quaeritur argentum puerisque beata
creandis/ uxor, et incultae pacantur vomere silvae.”209 This again invokes the paradigms
outlined in the first chapter by juxtaposing the interest in a wife for producing an heir and the
taming (pacare) of a wild (literally ‘uncultivated’: inculta) forest by means of the plow. Vomer,
in addition to meaning ‘plow,’ can also euphemistically refer to a penis,210 again aligning
sexually-charged, male/civilised domination over female/natural resources via taming and
reaping, now in the context of a letter warning of detrimental forces to the prosperity of the
civilising ‘born-to-consume’ man.
Ovid subjects Circe’s character to a similar reinterpretation, 211 depicting her such that
“the elemental sexuality of Circe occupies the foreground. The Homeric complexity of
awesome enchantress and benign adviser, of songstress and goddess of the wild, has contracted
to a one-sided emphasis on female passion.”212 He omits the domestic activities such as singing
and weaving which Homer includes, instead placing an enthroned and regally-dressed Circe

204
Plut., Mor., Con. Prae. 139a. Trans. F. C. Babbit, LCL 222. Though the Greek text is not technically within
the purview of this dissertation, Plutarch’s Roman citizenship, address of Roman issues, and chronological setting
preserve his relevance to this discussion.
205
Ibid.
206
E.g. Hor., Epod. 5.24.
207
Hor., Epist. 1.2.25. Cf. Papanghelis 1987, 29.
208
Hor., Epist. 1.2.27.
209
Hor., Epist. 1.2.44-5.
210
Adams 1982, 24. Cf. Lucr. 4.1273.
211
Ov., Met. 14.
212
Segal 1968, 442. Cf. Paule 2014, 752 n. 21.
 25

overseeing her attendants, whose task of sorting magic herbs is explicitly contrasted with
carding fleece and spinning wool.213 The shimmering robe and golden headdress are at odds
with the dishevelled portrait of witches discussed in the previous chapter, but explicable using
the logic behind the sex-based fears informing the disarray of the older witch; if the disgust at
old women’s bodies and their associations with chaos and death influenced the disordered and
mournful appearances of old witches, the fear of the greed-inducing appetite of the vagina
paired with the male anxiety about young women’s deceptive appearances 214 could then yield
a witch untethered from funereal imagery, but still firmly situated in overgrowth, animals,
deception, greed, and unnatural power.
Segal writes of Ovid’s depiction that her magic itself “and its results project the
disordered, irrational state of Circe’s whole being and convey her passion’s blind, wilful
megalomania, its removal from the ordered, regular rhythms of external reality…Inner
rationality finds outward form in magic, which, after all, is the arbitrary, topsy-turvy reversal
of nature’s processes for private aims.”215 Her portrayed penchant for loving men who love
other women and using witchcraft to get revenge216 preserves the typical female-derived
predispositions to aggressive sexual appetites and wild jealousy fuelling the witch’s magic, but
Ulysses’ resistance to her magic suggests the efficacy of the aforementioned method for
domesticating young witches. Circe’s attempt to transform Ulysses is met with his gods-granted
immunity to her magic and his physical dominance over her; the cunning, powerful witch
suddenly becomes a trembling maiden.217 In the next sentence, she immediately takes him to
bed, marries him, and reverses and harnesses her man-harming magic.218 The product of Ovid’s
compromise between Roman witch and Homeric temptress is a dea dira219 who maliciously
abuses her beauty to con men into submission to dumb animality, nature, and disorder—almost
exactly what Ovid fears his puella becoming under Dipsas’ influence—but whom a sufficiently
dominant, civilised male force then subdues and commodifies.220
Differing subtly from his Circe, Ovid’s multiple Medeas221 offer insight into the feared
progression from young woman to young witch to unsalvageable witch.222 The poet is
internally consistent neither in his attitude towards witchcraft nor in his characterisation of
Medea, but between both surviving texts he includes her tragic descent deeper into witchcraft
and disordered dominance. In the Metamorphoses, as Manuwald summarises, “Ovid does not
change the myth; instead he highlights particular items of the traditional story, enhancing the
magic and fanciful aspects…this creates a changing picture of Medea: she starts off as a young
maiden, who is initially governed by the values that play a major role in Roman life, and is
then turned by love in a direction that has her appear as a tricky Colchian woman with magic
faculties.”223 Her witchy nature is immutable despite how sympathetic she is in her love for

213
Ov., Met. 14.261f. Cf. Segal 1968, 439.
214
See n. 112.
215
Segal 1968, 438-9.
216
Scylla and Glaucus: Ov., Met. 13.900-14.69; Canens and Picus: 14.310-434. Cf. Verg., Aen. 7.189-91.
217
Ov., Met. 14.294-6. Cf. Hor., Epist. 1.2.24 attributing Ulysses’ resistance to Circe’s magic to his virile
composure in contrast to his uncivilised and (literally) animalistic companions (sociis stultus cupidusque).
218
Ov., Met. 14.297-301.
219
Ov., Met. 14.278. Alternatively, dea saeva (Verg., Aen. 7.19-20).
220
Like the harnessing of menstrual blood in n. 27. Cf. n. 93 and 188.
221
Ov., Met. 7.1-424; Her. 6 and 12.
222
She may not be old, but her image changes to that of the old witch.
223
Manuwald 2013, 127-8. Cf. Newlands 1997; Walsh 2012, 71.
 26

Jason and subsequent betrayal by him;224 posing Medea as victim to her burgeoning witchcraft
is remarkably reminiscent of the composite-figure woman divided in half and victimised by
her sex,225 corrupted by the uncontrolled hunger of her female body,226 in turn reminiscent of
Circe inciting Scylla’s corruption by magically turning her womb into an animal threat.227
Medea’s example corrupts Hypsipyle228 and her instruction corrupts Pelias’
daughters.229 Ovid’s inflation in the Heroides of Hypsipyle’s role in Jason’s story230 permits
this reading, as Hypsipyle gradually progresses from disapproval for the barbara venefica231
to disdain for Medea’s alleged use of love magic232 to hatred for the witch dominating Jason’s
story233 and to a potent enough jealous anger that she begins to resemble a witch in her violent
curses and even wishes to be Medea to Medea.234 The witch then poses a threat expressed
through her ability to un-civilise ordered nature and people alike. As with Circe, this has the
potential to be reversed; Medea briefly begs Jason to return her to their marriage bed, appealing
as a mother concerned for her children and offering to trade adventure235 for domestic
motherhood.236 A combination of Medea’s jealousy and the fact that Jason’s infidelity renders
him an inadequate male force237 to tame the young witch results in the conclusion of Medea’s
role in the Heroides as she approaches her decision to kill her children, a catalytic choice that
grounds her firmly in anti-motherhood and anti-fertility after which the girl cannot be salvaged
from the witch and the man suffers greatly at her hand.
Witches’ magical actions, corruptive threats, and potential cures can therefore be
connected back to the first chapter’s discussion of Roman perceptions of the female body as
farmable, corrosive, naturalistic, and/or divided at the waist. The witch’s indominable sex
corrupts her own mind and body; in turn, her female-sexed character corrupts other young
women to be similarly dominant; likewise, her magic corrupts men to be submissive and
animal. Perhaps the product of attempted reconciliation of Greek mythical canon with Roman
convention, the plausible salvageability of the young witch’s sexual, uxorial, and/or maternal
potential in contrast to the old witch’s lack thereof serves to show the contingency of the
witches’ characterisation on the degree to which their natural female resources have been
ravaged by overgrowth. The witch’s age may therefore correspond to the extremity of her

224
Newlands 1997 provides a thorough account of Medea’s character transformation in the Metamorphoses but
does not draw the conclusion of weaponised sex.
225
Cf. Miller 2016, 315: “the female reproductive apparatus materialises the slippage that so often occurs between
the normative and the monstrous, the desirable and the abhorrent, and—inasmuch as the womb or vagina is an
active agent over which women may or may not have control—the self and the other.”
226
See n. 30-5 and 165.
227
See n. 40.
228
Cf. Davis 2012, 40-1; see n. 234.
229
Ov., Met. 7.297-349.
230
Davis 2012, 41: “It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Ovid has reshaped Hypsipyle’s myth so that she too
becomes a model for Medea.” Similarly, cf. Blum 2017-18, 177.
231
Ov., Her. 6.19.
232
Ibid., 6.83-4, 97-8, 131. Cf. Blum 2017-18, 182-3.
233
Ov., Her. 6.99-104.
234
Ibid., 6.151: Medeae Medea forem! Cf. Jacobson 1974, 106: “As Hypsipyle, she has maintained her female
nature and failed. Perhaps ‘as Medea’ she will prove more successful.” And Michalopoulos 2004, 95: “Hypsipyle
closes her letter with a curse, which epitomises her gradual transformation from a decent and mild queen to a
vindictive woman who resorts to magic in order to fight against the most powerful witch of all time.”
235
Relevantly, in Ov., Her. 12.163-8 she claims to have lost all powers of witchcraft in her love-distraught
desperation, again illustrating the potential subdual of a witch using her love of a man resistant to her magic.
236
Ibid., 12.188-98. Ovid emphasises her physical bearing of the children.
237
Cf. Blum 2017-18 for corresponding interpretation of non-Ovidian Roman Medeas.
 27

estrangement from civilised order; the old witch is completely overgrown, her sexuality
laughable and her fertility obsolete, but the young witch remains sympathetic in her romantic
and maternal struggles, though she poses the insidious threat of trickery by her capacity to
abuse her youth and beauty for manipulation.238 Transcending the witch’s age, the broad
thematic methods and objectives of witchcraft nevertheless echo the patterns identified in the
first chapter, leading to this interpretation of witchcraft’s symbolic, situational, and sexual
inversions of the paradigmatic power dichotomy as being the literary extrapolation of the
perceived threats posed to the dichotomy by the untamed female body.

238
As Dipsas suggests Ovid’s puella should.
 28

Conclusion
The case for the influence of sex on early imperial portrayals of witches relies on
determining the degree to which Roman perceptions of the female body and Roman depictions
of witches overlap in traits and threats. As the first chapter demonstrated, an examination of
Roman perceptions of the female body and its inherent character yields a pattern of woman
being naturally submissive but her genitals threatening dominance, either over herself or over
man. The vagina’s perceived appetite, pollutive menses, and repulsiveness (especially in old
age) resist the domination to which all things female- or nature-aligned should submit and are
simultaneously seen as a source of many of the vices (i.e. libidinousness, drunkenness,
jealousy) to which women are supposedly naturally susceptible.
Insofar as Ortner’s paradigm aligning female with nature and male with civilisation
applies to sexed Roman thought (which already conflated female with submissive and male
with dominant), the fertile or pleasing aspects of the female body would be comparable to the
field waiting to be plowed and sowed (i.e. civilised) or the puppy waiting to be trained into a
hunting hound; conversely, the disgusting or frightening aspects of the female body would be
the treacherous, ungovernable, barren landscape or the rabid wild beast, both untameable and
therefore threatening the presumed dominance of male over female, of civilisation over nature,
and even of order over disorder. The consequently-righteous imposition of civilised male order
onto the naturalistic, disordered female animal is reflected in the distancing of the good culta
puella from her suppressed mammalian qualities, including but not limited to her cowed
genitals. Women who continued to exhibit physical, characteristic, or behavioural traits
associated with undomesticated animality and/or the corrupting effects of the unsubdued
female sex would likewise be paradigmatically aligned with the half-trained dog chewing
furniture or the field riddled with weeds—the inherent animality or natural wild, the things
subdued for civilisation’s use, encroach on and begin to reclaim civilised ground. Witches, as
the second and third chapter argued, represent the extension of that reclamation to its feared
conclusion: the complete transformation from tamed and harnessed animal back to dangerous
feral beast and the realisation of the perceived threats posed by an inherently submissive but
dangerous force denying its natural submission and instead dominating everything else.
This suggestion does not preclude the popular reading of Roman witches as anti-
exempla. The widely-recognised inverse mirroring of witches and exempla can be combined
with the influence of fears about the unleashed, overgrown female sex on the characterisation
of witches, which this dissertation has focused on establishing. This combination would then
yield the conclusion that the witch’s sex-derived negative traits make her such an exact anti-
exemplum because the female exemplum’s positive traits are, at least partially, derived from the
successful control of her sex’s threats and commodification of its resources. However, that
tangential conclusion may be hasty in the absence of a dedicated analysis of exempla as
demonstrating ideal suppression of their female bodies and corresponding characteristics (i.e.
rather than as simply modelling arbitrarily-sexed behaviour conducive to Rome’s prosperity),
and the suggestion should here be taken only as an option for reconciling this dissertation’s
thesis with the more common interpretation. Regardless of its ramifications for reading
exempla, the primary conclusion of this argument that disgusted perceptions of the female sex
and fear of its potential threats to natural order had a non-negligible impact on witches’
depictions demands the re-examination of suggestions that the witch character is ‘a blank
canvas.’
 29

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