Canidia
Canidia is a fictional witch who was attacked and also mocked by Horace several times for her activities. She is the main character in Satire 1.8, as well as the fifth and seventeenth epodes . It is also mentioned in satires 2.1 and 2.8 and in the third epode.
In satire 1.8. she digs for bones together with fellow witch Sagana in an old cemetery on the Esquiline , which has now been converted into a garden. The narrator is a wooden statue of Priapus who is so afraid of the witches that she finally has to fart and thereby drive the witches away.
In Epode 5, Canidia and her accomplices Sagana, Veia and Folia kidnapped a free-born boy, from whose liver and bones she wants to brew a love potion in order to win back her lover, old Varus. The poem ends with the boy cursing the witches in the strongest possible way.
Epode 17 consists of a conversation between an unspecified speaker and Canidia. The speaker describes how he is already completely weakened by the spells of the canidia and asks her to release him, but insults her subliminally. Canidia is then tough.
In epode 3, which describes abdominal pain after consuming garlic with comically exaggerated metaphors , the rhetorical question is whether Canidia, for example, prepared the obviously poisoned food.
To what extent the figure of Canidia is based on a real model is controversial. The late ancient Horace commentator Pomponius Porphyrio suspected a real background and identified Canidia with a pharmacist named Gratidia from Naples. Like all such suggestions for Latin real names , this suggestion is prosodically identical to the name in the text. What is certain, however, is that there was at least a belief in witchcraft in Rome at the time, as evidenced by legal prohibitions against witchcraft.
literature
- Bernhard Kytzler : women of antiquity. From Aspasia to Zenobia . Artemis, Munich & Zurich 1994, ISBN 3-7608-1224-4 , p. 44.
Remarks
- ↑ Pliny NH December 30; Cassius Dio 49.43.5; 52.36.2-3