ABSTRACT
When after making these complaints with quivering lip, the lad stood still, stripped of boyhood’s emblems, a youthful form, such as might soften the impious breasts of Thracians, Canidia, her locks and dishevelled head entwined with short vipers, orders wild fig-trees uprooted from the tombs, funereal cypresses, eggs and feathers of a night-roving screech-owl smeared with the blood of a hideous toad, herbs that Iolcos and Iberia, fertile in poisons, send, and bones snatched from the jaws of a starving bitch – all those to be burned in the magic flames. But high-girt Sagana, sprinkling through all the house water from Lake Avernus, bristles with streaming hair, like some sea-urchin or a racing oar; and Veia, by no sense of guilt restrained, groaning o’er her labours, with stout mattock was digging up the ground, that, buried there, the lad might perish gazing at food changed twice and thrice during the tedious day, his face protruding only so much as swimmers, when hanging in the water by the chin – and all for this, that his marrow and his liver, cut out and dried, might form a love-charm, when once his eye-balls, fixed on the forbidden food, had wasted all away. Gossiping Naples and every neighbouring town believed that Folia of Ariminum, the wanton hag, was also there – Folia, who with Thessalian incantation bewitches stars and moon and plucks them down from heaven. Then fierce Canidia, gnawing her uncut nail with malignant tooth – what did she say, or rather what did she leave unsaid!
