[112] See, e.g., Wordsworth, Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin, p. 446, for an account of simple land measurement which will suffice to illustrate the point made here.
[113] The carmina famosa sung at a triumph by the soldiers had the same origin, but were used to avert evil from the triumphator. The best exposition of this is in H. A. J. Munro's Elucidations of Catullus, p. 76 foll.
[114] Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 19. For the technical sense of defigere, defixio, see Jevons in Anthropology and the Classics, p. 108 foll.
[115] The most familiar examples are Virgil's eighth Eclogue, 95 foll.; Ovid, Met. vii. 167, and elsewhere; Fasti, iv. 551; Horace, Epode v. 72; cp. article "Magia" in Daremberg-Saglio; Falz, De poet. Rom. doctrina magica, Giessen, 1903. There is a collection of Roman magical spells in Appel's De Romanorum precationibus, p. 43 foll. Many modern Italian examples and survivals will be found in Leland's Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition, pt. ii.
[116] Cato, R.R. 160; Varro, R.R. i. 3.
[117] Pliny, N.H. xxviii. 21.
[118] Ib. xxviii. 20. The following sections of this book are the locus classicus for these popular superstitions.
[119] See, e.g., Italian Home Life, by Lina Duff Gordon, p. 230 foll.
[120] Juvenal v. 164. The idea probably arose, as a passage of Plutarch suggests (Rom. 25), from the fact that the triumphator, whose garb was no doubt of Etruscan origin, wore the bulla.
[121] Frazer, G.B. i. 345, note 2, where we learn that gold was taboo in some Greek worships, e.g. at the mysteries of Andania, which sufficiently proves that it possessed potency. Pliny, xxxiii. 84, mentions cases of such potency as medicine, and among them its application to children who have been poisoned.