But all the power and the elaborate ritual prescribed by the sorceress were of no avail. Æneas returns not, and the broken-hearted Dido finally stabs herself and dies.
Many prodigies are interspersed throughout the early history of Rome, and most of the acts of these people were surrounded with a halo of superstition natural at the time, and doubtless largely exaggerated. Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan all allude to the belief in and the practice of sorcery and magic by the Romans.
In the eighth eclogue of Virgil we have a detailed description of a Roman sorceress. She is introduced by the poet as giving directions to her assistant as to the working of certain charms. Her object (a common one apparently at that time) is to recall Daphnis, whom she calls her husband, to return once more to her arms. The assistant is directed to burn vervain and frankincense, and the highest efficacy is ascribed to a solemn chant, which is capable of calling down the moon from its sphere or making the cold-blooded snake burst in the field, and was the means by which Circe turned the companions of Ulysses into beasts. The image of Daphnis is then ordered to be thrice bound round with fillets of three colours, the assistant at the same time repeating the words, “Thus I bind the fillets of Venus,” and then paraded about a prepared altar.
An image of clay and one of wax are placed before the same fire; and as the image of clay hardens, so does the heart of Daphnis harden towards his new mistress; and as the figure of wax softens, so is the heart of the ex-lover made tender towards the sorceress. A sacred cake is then broken over the image, and crackling laurels burnt before it. She prays that as the wanton heifer pursues the steer through woods and glens till at length, worn out with fatigue, she lies down on the oozy reeds by the banks of the stream, and the night dew will not even drive her away, so Daphnis may be led on after her for ever with inextinguishable love. The relics of his belongings are then buried beneath the threshold. She bruises poisonous herbs of resistless virtue, which had been gathered in the kingdom of Pontus, herbs which enabled him who gave them to turn himself into a hungry wolf prowling amidst the forests, to call up ghosts from the grave, and to translate the ripened harvest from the field where it grew to the lands of another. The ashes of these herbs are cast over her head into the running stream, while she must not look behind her.
At length the sorceress begins to despair and cries, “Daphnis heeds not my incantations, heeds not the gods”. She looks again, and perceives the ashes on the altar are glowing and emitting sparks of fire. Her faithful house dog barks before the door. “Can these things be,” she exclaims, “or do lovers dream what they desire? It is not so! The real Daphnis comes; I hear his steps; he has left the deluding town; he hastens to my longing arms!”
In the works of Horace an interesting description of a witches’ incantation is also given, the details of which it is instructive to compare with those given by other writers.
Four sorceresses are assembled in conclave, the chief being Canidia, with three assistants, in order to work a charm by means of which a youth named Varus, for whom Canidia had conceived a passion, may be compelled to reciprocate her affections.
Canidia, with the locks of her dishevelled hair twined round with venomous and deadly serpents, orders the wild fig tree and the funeral cypress to be rooted up from the sepulchres on which they grew, and these, together with the egg of a toad smeared with blood, the plumage of the screech owl, various herbs brought from Thessaly and Georgia, and bones torn from the jaws of a famished dog, to be burnt in flames fed with perfumes from Colchis. One assistant, whose hair stands stiff and erect like the quills of the sea-hedgehog or the bristles of a hunted boar, sprinkles the ground with drops from the Avernus, while another, who is reputed to have had the faculty of conjuring the stars and moon down from heaven, assists in other ways.
The fourth witch is busy digging a hole with a spade, in which is to be plunged up to his chin the beardless youth stripped of his purple robe—the emblem of his noble descent—and naked, that from his marrow, already dry, and his liver (when at length his eyeballs, long fixed on the still renovated food which is withheld from his famished jaws, have no longer the power to discern), may be concreted the love potion from which the witches promise themselves the most wonderful results.