Satires 1.8 (Fairclough)

Once I was a fig-wood stem, a worthless log, when the carpenter, doubtful whether to make a stool or a Priapus, chose that I be a god. A god, then, I became, of thieves and birds the special terror; for thieves my right hand keeps in check, and this red stake, protruding from unsightly groin; while for the mischievous birds, a reed set on my head affrights them and keeps them from lighting in the new park. Hither in other days a slave would pay to have carried on a cheap bier the carcasses of his fellows, cast out from their narrow cells. Here was the common burial-place fixed for pauper folk, for Pantolabus the parasite, and spendthrift Nomentanus. Here a pillar assigned a thousand feet frontage and three hundred of depth, and provided that the graveyard should pass to no heirs. To-day one may live on a wholesome Esquiline, and stroll on the sunny Rampart, where of late one sadly looked out on ground ghastly with bleaching bones. For myself, ’tis not so much the thieves and beasts wont to infest the place that cause me care and trouble, as the witches who with spells and drugs vex human souls: these in no wise can I bring to naught or stop from gathering bones and harmful herbs, as soon as the roving Moon has uplifted her beauteous face.

My own eyes have seen Canidia walk with black robe tucked up, her feet bare, her hair dishevelled, shrieking with the elder Sagana. Their sallow hue had made the two hideous to behold. Then they began to dig up the earth with their nails, and to tear a black lamb to pieces with their teeth; the blood was all poured into a trench, that therefrom they might draw the sprites, souls that would give them answers. One image there was of wool, and one of wax, the woollen one the larger, to curb and punish the smaller; the waxen stood in suppliant guise, as if awaiting death in slavish fashion. One witch calls on Hecate, the other on fell Tisiphone. You might see serpents and hell-hounds roaming about, and the blushing Moon, that she might not witness such deeds, hiding behind the tall tombs. Nay, if I lie in aught, may my head be defiled by ravens’ white ordure, and may Julius and the weakling Pediatia and the thief Voranus come to water and befoul me! Why tell each detail—how in converse with Sagana the shades made echoes sad and shrill, how the two stealthily buried in the ground a wolf’s beard and the tooth of a spotted snake, how the fire blazed higher from the image of wax, and how as witness I shuddered at the words and deeds of the two Furies—though not unavenged? For as loud as the noise of a bursting bladder was the crack when my fig-wood buttock split. Away they ran into town. Then amid great laughter and mirth you might see Canidia’s teeth and Sagana’s high wig come tumbling down, and from their arms the herbs and enchanted love-knots.