In the Latin poetry of the Augustan age a figure appears who was destined to become the very image of the Roman witch: Canidia. The one who created her, or at least made her immortal, was Horace, who brings her into several of his works, always with grotesque and disturbing features. Reading his verses means entering a world in which satire and horror mingle, and in which the urban magic of Rome takes shape in surprisingly concrete detail.
Who was Canidia?
We do not know whether a real person lay behind Canidia. An ancient commentator on Horace, Porphyrio, claimed that the poet was alluding to a certain Gratidia, a perfume seller from Naples, and that the name had been changed. It is an interesting indication, but not one we can verify. What matters is that Canidia becomes, in Horace's work, a literary type: the witch who acts at night, in places of the dead, for purposes of love and revenge.
Satire 1.8: Priapus' story
The liveliest text is the eighth satire of the first book. The speaker is a wooden statue of Priapus, the god of gardens, set up in the gardens that Maecenas had laid out on the Esquiline. That place had previously been a cemetery for the poor and for slaves: ground full of bones, where witches still roamed at night.
Priapus tells how he saw Canidia and her companion Sagana arrive:
- barefoot, with loosened hair and wrapped in a black cloak;
- they dig the earth with their nails;
- they tear apart a black lamb and pour its blood into the pit, to summon the souls of the dead;
- they invoke Hecate and the Fury Tisiphone, while serpents and hellhounds prowl and the moon hides behind the tombs.
The two figurines
The most interesting detail from a historical point of view is that of the two figurines. Canidia brings with her a larger image made of wool and a smaller one made of wax. The woollen figure seems meant to punish the wax one, which stands in a suppliant pose, like someone about to die.
This scene matches practices documented by the magical papyri and by figurines found by archaeologists: the image stands for the person to be struck or bound, and what is done to the image must happen to the person.
The comic ending
The satire ends with a scene out of comedy. Priapus, frightened and indignant, lets out a noise so loud that his fig-wood splits. The two witches flee into the city in terror: Canidia loses her false teeth, Sagana her wig, and behind them they leave herbs and enchanted cords. Horace thus mocks the fear these figures aroused.
The fifth Epode: horror
Very different is the tone of the fifth Epode, one of the darkest texts in Latin poetry. Here Canidia, together with Sagana, Veia and Folia of Ariminum, has kidnapped a boy. The witches bury him up to his chin and let him starve in sight of food that is constantly renewed, in order to obtain from his body a love potion. Their aim is to win back an old lover, Varus, who has drifted away.
Before dying, the boy hurls a curse at the witches: he promises to return as a spirit to torment them at night, and announces that the crowd will stone them and that their bodies will be left to wolves and birds. The Epode is a savage portrait, in which magic appears as the extreme of cruelty.
The seventeenth Epode: the recantation
The last Epode is a mock retraction. Horace addresses Canidia as a suppliant, begs for mercy, declares that he surrenders to her science and promises to sing her praises. But Canidia replies by refusing all forgiveness and threatening to prolong his sufferings. It is a refined literary game, in which the poet reverses the roles and puts himself in the victim's place.
Canidia's appearances
| Work | Canidia's role |
|---|---|
| Satires 1.8 | Night rite on the Esquiline, grotesque flight |
| Epodes 3 | Her name becomes a byword for poison |
| Epodes 5 | Kidnapping and killing of a boy for a potion |
| Epodes 17 | Refuses the poet's mock recantation |
| Satires 2.1 and 2.8 | Mentioned as a threatening figure |
Why Canidia matters
Canidia shows how the Romans imagined illicit magic: nocturnal, female, tied to places of the dead and to the city's underworld, aimed at love and revenge. Horace uses her to make people laugh and to unsettle them, but the details he chooses, the figurines, the herbs, the blood, Hecate, coincide with what we know from the direct sources of ancient magic.
In short
- Canidia is the witch created or made famous by Horace in the Satires and Epodes.
- In Satire 1.8 she performs a night rite on the Esquiline with two figurines of wool and wax.
- Priapus puts her to flight in a comic scene, with the loss of false teeth and a wig.
- In the fifth Epode she kidnaps a boy to make a love potion, in a scene of horror.
- The character reflects the Roman image of magic as nocturnal, illicit and bound to the dead.
