Ancient necromancers were typically male, but in the Roman literary tradition it became common to associate the practice of summoning the dead with women. Homer’s depiction of the central role played by the enchantress Circe in Odysseus’s consultation with Tiresias was an important precedent. Why did this change take place? By assigning necromantic agency to women, Roman authors simultaneously expressed their disdain for this ancient practice and distanced themselves from rites that were increasingly viewed as unsavory and suspicious in their culture. The most vivid Roman portrait of a necromancer at work appears in Lucan’s Pharsalia, an epic poem about the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey in the twilight of the Roman Republic written a century later (c. 61–65) toward the end of Emperor Nero’s reign. On the eve of a battle in Greece, Sextus, the son of Pompey, sought out a powerful witch named Erictho to divine the outcome of the war. At the culmination of a ghastly ritual, Erictho summoned the ghost of a recently slain soldier, compelling it to reanimate its own corpse and binding it with spells to reveal the future. The reluctant ghost then foretold both the defeat of Pompey and the assassination of victorius Caesar.
These wicked rites and crimes of a dire race would be damned as still too pious by savage Erictho, who had applied her polluted art to novel rites. To submit her funereal head to a city’s roof or to household gods is an unthinkable deed. She haunts deserted graves and lurks in sepulchers from which ghosts have been driven, a welcome friend to the gods of Erebus. To hear the gatherings of the silent dead and know the Stygian halls and buried secrets of Dis, neither the gods above nor being alive prevents her.2 Her ill-omened face is thin and filthy from neglect, her features frighten with Stygian pallor, never knowing the light of day; her head droops heavy with matted, knotted hair. Whenever black storm clouds conceal the stars, Thessaly’s witch emerges from her empty tombs and hunts down the nightly bolts of lightning. Her tread has burned up seeds of fertile grain and her breath alone has turned fresh air deadly. She doesn’t pray to gods above, or know the ways to offer entrails and receive auspicious omens. She loves to light altars with funereal flames and burn incense she’s snatched from blazing pyres. At the merest hint of her praying voice, the gods grant her any outrage, afraid to hear her second song. She has buried souls alive, still in control of their bodies, against their will death comes with fate still owing them years. In a backward march she has brought the dead back from the grave and lifeless corpses have fled death. The smoking cinders and burning bones of youths she’ll take straight from the pyre, along with the torch, ripped from their parents’ grip, and the fragments of the funeral couch with smoke still wafting black, and the robes turning to ashes and the coals that reek of their limbs.
But when dead bodies are preserved in stone, which absorbs their inner moisture, and they stiffen as the decaying marrow is drawn off, then she hungrily ravages every single joint, sinks her fingers in the eyes and relishes it as she digs the frozen orbs out, and gnaws the pallid, wasting nails from desiccated hands. With her own mouth she cuts the fatal knotted noose, plucks down hanging bodies, and scours crosses ripping at guts the rains have pounded and innards exposed to the sun and cooked. She takes the nails piercing the hands and the black decaying poison and coagulated slime oozing through the joints. If a tendon resists her bite, she throws her weight into it. Whatever corpses lie out on the naked ground she seizes before the beasts and birds; not wanting to pick the bones with iron or her own hands, she waits and snatches pieces from the thirsty jaws of wolves.
Her hands don’t flinch from slaughter either, if she needs fresh blood, first gushing from an opened throat, if her graveyard feasts demand still-throbbing entrails. So, too, from a belly’s wound, not as nature would do it, a fetus is removed and placed on blazing altars. And every time she needs forceful savage shades, she makes the ghost herself. She finds a use for the death of every man.
She plucks from a youthful body the blossom on its cheek, and her left hand shears off the lock from a dying teen. And at a relative’s funeral the dire Thessalian often bends down over the body and feigning kisses she mutilates the head, opens the clenched mouth with her teeth and, biting the tongue that cleaves in a dry throat, pours her murmurings into the chilly lips, sending commands for secret crimes down to the shades of Styx.
Once Pompey’s son had heard the country’s rumors about her, when night was high in heaven—that time the Titan draws midday beneath our earth—he makes his way . . .
His faithful servants, used to crime, wandered about the grave mounds and plundered tombs and spied her afar, seated on a sheer rock cliff where Haemus slopes down reaching Pharsalia’s hills.3 She was trying out words unknown to magicians and their gods, crafting a spell for strange new purposes. For fearing lest fickle Mars go elsewhere in the world and the land of Emathia lose out on so much slaughter, the sorceress had forbidden Philippi to let the wars pass through, polluting the land with charms and strewing her dire poisons, so that she would have so many deaths for her own and she would enjoy the profit from the world’s blood.4 She hopes to mutilate the slaughtered carcasses of kings and to steal the ashes of the Hesperian nation and the bones of nobles, and to own so many souls. Her passion now and final toil is what she’ll snatch from Magnus’s downcast body, what pieces of Caesar she’ll manage to pounce on.
Pompey’s worthless offspring addressed her first: “Splendor of Haemonia’s ladies, you can reveal people’s fates, and deflect things coming from their course. I pray you, let me learn for certain the end that this war’s fortune is preparing. I’m not some lowly member of the Roman mob, but a most illustrious child of Magnus—either the world’s master, or heir to a mighty funeral. My mind quakes, stricken by doubts; nonetheless, I’m ready for definite horrors. Take away from chance the power to rush down blind and all of a sudden. Either torment divine spirits with questions or spare them and disclose the truth from ghosts. Unlock the abodes of Elysium and call forth Death herself, and force her to confess to me which ones of us she’s hunting. It’s no small task. It’s worth your trouble, too, to ask what way this weighty die of fate is leaning and will fall.”
The evil Thessalian, thrilled to hear her name was famous and well known, responded, “If you’d asked of lesser fates, young man, it would have been easy to rouse unwilling gods and attain your wish. My art can cause delay when the rays of stars have marked one death, or even if all constellations would grant one an old age, we can cut his years in half with magic herbs. But once a series of causes has descended from the world’s first origin and all fates struggle if you want to change anything, when the human race is subject to a single blow, then Thessaly’s ilk admits it—Fortune is stronger. But if you’re intent on knowing events beforehand, there are many easy paths that open onto truth. The earth and skies and Chaos, the seas and plains and crags of Rhodope speak to us.5 But it’s simple—since there’s plenty of fresh dead—to lift one body from Emanthia’s fields, so that the mouth of a corpse just slain and still warm will speak with full voice, and not some deathly ghost with sunburned limbs rasping out things dubious to our ears.”
She spoke, and with her craft redoubled the shadows of night; her dismal head shrouded in squalid mist, she wanders among slain bodies cast off and denied their burial. Straightaway fled wolves, hungry birds of prey pulled out their talons and fled, while the Thessalian selects her prophet; probing entrails chilly with death, she finds the fibers of strong, unwounded lungs and seeks the voice in a body discharged from life. Many fates of slain men already hanging there—which one would she want to call back up to life? If she had tried to raise up all the ranks and return them to war, the laws of Erebus would have obeyed, and that powerful monster would have hauled out of Stygian Avernus a people ready to fight.6 At last she picks a body with its throat cut, takes and drags it by a hook stuck in its fatal noose, a wretched corpse over rocks and crags, then lays it high up under a mountain’s cave, which gloomy Erictho damned with her sacrifice.
The ground sheers off and sinks down nearly to the blind caverns of Dis; it’s hemmed in by a dreary wood with stooping branches, and a yew, which no sun penetrates nor crown beholds the sky, throws shadow over it. Darkness droops inside the caves and, due to long night, gray mold hangs; no light shines, except that cast by spells. The air in the jaws of Taenarus doesn’t sit so stagnant—a dismal boundary between the hidden world and our own, where the rulers of Tartarus wouldn’t fear to let ghosts enter.7 For though the Thessalian witch can ply the Fates with force, it’s doubtful whether she visits with shades of Styx by drawing them up or descending to them.
Clad in motley dress like a Fury’s mottled robe, she bares her face and binds her tangled hair up with a crown of vipers. When she sees the young man’s friends are quaking and he himself is trembling, his fixed eyes staring with the life drained from his face, she says, “Put off the fears your fretful minds have conjured. Now new life in its true form will be restored, so that even the horrified can hear him speaking. If indeed I show you the swamps of Styx and the shore that roars with fire, if by my aid you’re able to see the Eumenides and Cerberus, shaking his necks that bristle with snakes, and the conquered backs of Giants, why should you be scared, you cowards, to meet with ghosts who are themselves afraid?”8
First she fills the chest with boiling blood through new wounds that she opens, then washes out the bowels of putrefaction and liberally applies poison from the moon. To this she adds whatever nature has brought forth in inauspicious birth. She doesn’t leave out froth of dogs afraid of water, nor guts of lynx nor joint of dread hyena and marrow of a stag that had fed on serpents; nor echenais, which hinders ships although east winds strain at their ropes, and eyeballs of dragons, and stones that sound when warmed under a pregnant eagle; nor Arabia’s flying serpent and the Red Sea’s viper that guards the precious oyster, nor the skin that Libya’s horned snake sheds while still alive nor ash the phoenix left on its eastern altar.9 And once she’d mixed together these common banes with well-known names, she added leaves soaked through with evil spells, and plants her wicked mouth had spat on as they grew, and every other poison she herself gave to the world. Last, her voice—stronger than any plant to bewitch the gods of Lethe—pours forth cacophonous murmurs in great discord with the human tongue. It contained the bark of dogs and howl of wolves, the fearsome eagle owl’s and nocturnal tawny owl’s laments, the shrieks and cries of beasts, the serpent’s hiss, and it expressed the crash of waves that beat upon the rocks, the rustle of forests, and thunder from fractured clouds—one voice held all these things.
The rest she then spelled out in a Haemonian chant, piercing Tartarus with her tongue: “Eumenides, Stygian crime and punishments of the guilty, Chaos, greedy to pour disorder on countless worlds, Ruler of the earth, tortured through long ages by Death, delayed for gods, Styx and Elysium, which no Thessalian witch deserves, Persephone, loathing heaven and her mother, and the third part of our Hecate, through whom commerce between the ghosts and me occurs with quiet tongue, doorman of the open halls who throws our guts to the savage dog, and sisters who will spin out threads anew, and you, O ancient ferryman of the burning river, weary by now from bringing shades back up to me.10 Pay heed to my prayers!
“If I call on you with a mouth that’s sinful and polluted enough, if I never sing these songs while still famishing for human entrails, if I’ve often bathed a hacked-up breast still full of soul divine and brains still warm, if any infant whose insides and head I’ve laid upon your platters would have lived if I had not—obey me as I pray!
“We don’t want one hiding out in Tartarus’s chasm, long accustomed to the darkness, but a soul who has just been exiled from the light and is just now descending, who still clings in the jaws of murky Orcus and will, so long as it pays heed to my drugs, go to the ghosts but once.11 For the general’s son let the shade of this one who is now our solider sing all the Pompeian affairs—if civil wars deserve your gratitude.”
With these declarations she lifted her head and frothing mouth and saw stand forth before her the shade of the cast-off corpse, afraid of its lifeless limbs, those hateful confines of its old prison. It dreads to enter that opened chest and guts and innards ruptured by lethal wounds. Poor man, unfairly stripped of death’s last gift—to not be able to die!
Erictho is astounded that Fates are so free to linger, and, angry at the dead, she whips the motionless body with a living serpent, and down the gaping fissures in the earth her spells had opened up she barks at the ghosts of the dead, disturbing their kingdom’s silence:
“Tisiphone! Indifferent to my voice? Megaera!12 Aren’t you driving with your savage lashings through the emptiness of Erebus that hapless soul? Soon I’ll conjure you by your real names and then abandon you Stygian dogs in the light above. I’ll stand guard, hunt you down through graveyards and burial grounds, expel you from tombs, drive you from every urn. And I will reveal you, Hecate, to the gods in your pale, wasting form when you are used to going before them in a different guise, but I will forbid you from changing the face you wear in Erebus. And I will declare what banquets hold you, lady of Henna, under earth’s great weight, by what marriage bond you love night’s gloomy king, what pollution you suffered that your mother, Ceres, would not call for your return. And against you, worst of the world’s rulers, I’ll send the Titan Sun, bursting your caverns open and striking with sudden daylight. Will you obey? Or must I address by name that one at whose call the earth never fails to shudder and quake, who openly looks on the Gorgon’s face, who tortures the trembling Erinyes with her own scourge and dwells in a Tartarus whose depths your eye can’t plumb? To him, you are the gods above; he swears, and breaks, his oaths by the waters of Styx.”
Just then the cold blood clots warmed and nourished the dark wounds, running into veins and to the ends of every limb; his insides pulse, shaking under his frozen chest, as new life creeps back into unused marrow, mingling with death. Every muscle palpitates, every nerve goes tense—then the body rises from the ground, not slowly, limb by limb, but thrown straight up from the earth all at once. He did not yet look alive, but like someone who was now dying. Still pale and stiff, he stands dumbstruck at being thrust back into the world. But no sound comes from his closed mouth; his voice and tongue are only allowed to answer.
“Speak,” said the Thessalian, “at my command and great will be your reward. For if you tell the truth, we promise to make you immune for all ages from Haemonian arts; I will burn your body on such a pyre of logs, with Stygian chants, that your shade will never be summoned by spells of any magicians. Living twice is worth this much! No words or herbs will dare disturb your slumber of long forgetfulness once you’ve died at my hand! Ambiguous sayings are suited to tripods and seers of the gods. But anyone who bravely comes and seeks true oracles of callous death from the shades should leave with certainty. Don’t hold back, I pray—give names to events, give places, and give voice so that the Fates may speak with me.” She added a spell that gave the shade the power to know whatever she asked of it.
Dripping with tears, the wretched corpse said: “Well, I did not see the sad threads of the Parcae since I was called back from the edge of the silent bank. But what I happened to learn from all the shades is that brutal discord troubles the Roman spirits and impious arms have disrupted the quiet of hell. Some leaders have left their homes in Elysium, others come up from sad Tartarus; they have made it clear what the Fates are preparing.
“The blessed shades wore sorrowful faces. I saw the Decii, son and father who offered their souls in battle, Camillus weeping, the Curii and Sulla, complaining about you, Fortune. Scipio mourned that his ill-fated offspring would fall in the land of Libya. Carthage’s greater enemy, Cato, cried for the fate of his great-grandson who would not be a slave. Only you, Brutus, first to be consul after the kings were expelled, I saw rejoicing among the dutiful shades.
“Suddenly, Catiline the menace, breaking his chains, ran riot, thrilled, with the fierce Marii and Cethegi, their arms bared. I saw delighted demagogues, the Drusi, immoderate legislators, the Gracchi, who dared outrageous deeds. Eternal chains of steel bound their hands applauding in the prisons of Dis—a criminal mob demanding the plains of the pious. The landlord of that idle kingdom is opening his gray estates and sharpening his jagged rocks and solid adamant for fetters, putting in order his punishment for the victor.
“Take this solace with you, young man: the spirits await your father and his house in their peaceful hollow and are reserving a place for Pompey’s line in a calm, clear part of that realm. Don’t let the glory of this brief life disturb you. The hour comes that will level all the leaders. Rush into death and go down below with pride, magnanimous, even if from lowly tombs, and trample on the shades of the gods of Rome. Which tomb the Nile’s waves will wash and which the Tiber’s is the only question—for the leaders, this fight is only about a funeral.
“Don’t ask about your fate. The Parcae will grant you knowledge where I am silent. A clearer seer will sing you all, your father, Pompey, himself, in Sicily’s fields, but he, too, will be unsure where to call you, where to drive you from, which tracts or skies of the world he should order you to shun. Unhappy men, beware of Europe, Libya, Asia—O pitiful house, you will look on nothing in all the world safer than Emathia.”
So once he finished the words of fate, he stands with muted face and sad, then asks again for death. She must resort to magic spells and drugs before the corpse will fall, since Fate’s law had been used once and could not take the soul back. Then she heaps up a great wood pyre; the dead man approaches the fire. Erictho left the youth lying on the kindled pile and let him die at last.
She accompanied Sextus back to his father’s camp as dawn’s light drew its colors in the sky; but till they bore their steps safe into their tents, she ordered the night to keep day back; it complied with deep, dark shadows.