An Overview of Roman Witches

A painting depicting a stereotypical Roman witch: an old hag with supernatural abilities

***The following is a revised excerpt from a larger research project on the evolution of the identity of the witch that I did in the past spring. The first part of this project focuses on Roman witches.

In the past, a learned Roman woman would find herself a social pariah for her intelligence. Most likely, she would also be a skilled herbalist and healer. Men fear that her superior knowledge might give her the power to destroy the entire social order that their nature-given manhood is built upon. So, distorted by history, the woman doctor’s herbs for reversing the course of illness were distorted into a supernatural, dangerous power that can reverse the course of nature in its entirety. In this manner, the misconstrued image of the woman doctor became eternalized in exaggerated folktales, and over time, the witch was born as a product of the patriarchy’s irrational insecurities. 

Consequently, Roman witches were elastic characters. They were described in muddled generic terms like anus, saga, and venefica (hag, wise woman, and poisoner). Maxwell Teitel Paule deems her a “blank canvas upon which to project the fears of the moment, and no consistency is to be found upon which to project the fears of the moment, and no consistency is to be found even in the anxieties that she embodies.” This sentiment, even during Puritan times, remains the same. Witches continue to act as mirrors of their contemporaries’ greatest terrors. Paula Ripat condenses the villainous characterization of witches into what she calls the invidia complex—the ‘envy’ complex.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Ovid assigns invidia a physical form: pallor in ore sedet, macies in corpore toto. / nusquam recta acies, livent robigine dentes, / pectora felle virent, lingua est suffusa veneno; “a woman with a pale face, an emaciated body, and a poisonous tongue, her teeth black with mold and her breasts green with bile.” Ancient philosophers such as Pliny considered envy to overlap with similarly negative emotions, such as anger, greed, lust. Ironically, despite being givers of life, women themselves were thought to be tainted. The common belief was that women in general and particularly witches had a carnal craving for the “health-sustaining elements of the young and, more generally, of men.” In other words, witches had an almost gluttonous desire for those superior, masculine forces of good which their female bodies could not produce. 

In action, invidia holds a similar property to poison. The Ancient Romans believed that the evil forces naturally sought ‘good things.’ Good things, however, were always scarce: happiness, health, wealth, esteem or even body fluids, such as blood, milk and semen. Invidia causes these things to metaphorically or physically dry up. 

Fluidity represented the essence of the living; for example, the figure of Priapus in the gardens “ensured not only the continued presence of produce and animals but also their succulence: goats had milk, lambs stayed fat, calves were plump with blood.” Water, a symbol of healing in Christian religion, could cleanse. In katabasis, water advances the classical hero from one stage of the journey to another. Even in East Asian mythologies, water universally symbolized purity, healing, and truth. The presence of the witch’s invidia puts the vital water into a state of pollution, corrupting the animals’ milk with inedible, congealed fluids, turning their bodies weak and thin, and poisoning their blood. In all cases, invidia is created from the distortion of some aspect of the feminine that is ‘good.’ 

The distortion of the female body in popular depictions of “witchlike” creatures would be to literally cut the female body in half. With Scylla and the harpies, human upper bodies with “life-giving breasts” are countered by bestial and “rapacious” lower bodies. The same reasoning occurs with the proportioning of breast milk vs menstrual blood; the purity vs the impurity. The association of menstrual blood with evil is further reinforced by the fact that during pregnancy, a woman stops menstruating so as to not pollute her child with invidia. So, Pliny’s Historia Naturalis characterizes blood as a “monstrous and great evil,” a catalyst which would make crops barren, kill bees, make metal dull, bleach color, and even make other women have miscarriages. In De Re Rustica, Columella claims that a menstruating girl’s gaze alone will cause the fresh crops to shrivel up (visu quoque suo novellos fetus necabit; “if the fruits are very young, her gaze alone is sufficient to waste the crop”). Does menstrual blood really cause the wheat around it to die? Science doesn’t think so. Superstition, though, will blame anything except for its host, and oftentimes the supernatural simply provided an easier answer.

The two major stereotypes of witches were that they would be aged and lusty. Roman authors liked to depict older women as “foul, drunk, sex-crazed, and malevolently magical.” In the larger context of Roman society, there already existed a stigma that older women were taking up or depriving the male youth of the resources they deserve. In Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, the narrator Lucius disparages an aged woman for alcoholism and declares: Etiamne tu, busti cadaver extremum et vitae dedecus primum et Orci fastidium solum…Quae diebus ae noctibus nil quicquam rei quam merum saevienti ventri tuo soles aviditer ingurgitare—“you last corpse on the funeral pyre, life’s foremost disgrace and Orcus’ sole reject!...Day and night all you do is greedily pour strong drink into your insatiable belly!” 

Besides their moral drought of sobriety, aged women also sought to satisfy their erotic cravings. Meroë, as Socrates introduces her in book 1 of Metamorphoses, is a hag and a temptress who, in coercing Socrates to sleep with her, takes his masculine energy and consequently dooms him to moral ruin. If not for “promiscuous sex,” Ripat writes, then “age would eventually corrupt the female body, rendering it dry, saggy, loose, and gaping, profoundly negative adjectives that are associated with putrefaction and envy.” To cure themselves of their inherent corruption, aged women seek to regain the fecundity of youth through draining the vitalities of young men. The invidia complex is the audience’s projection of their own insecurities and jealousies/invidia about another individual or community onto a fictionalized entity resembling those whom they fear. The invidia complex, at its very core, is a patriarchal paradox.

Ripat, Pauline. “Roman Women, Wise Women, and Witches.” Phoenix 70, no. 1/2 (2016): 

104–28. https://doi.org/10.7834/phoenix.70.1-2.0104.