Witches and space in Roman Literature
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Abstract
The Roman witch is a uniquely powerful female figure, capable of threatening the lives and wellbeing of anyone she chooses to make her target. Symbolically, she embodies the idea of the ‘other,’ the essence of everything un-Roman. This dissertation argues that a major symbolic threat witches represent is their ability to disrupt, control, reidentify, and distort space. Major aspects of the witch’s characterization that contribute to her symbolic use are her profound and supernatural connection to nature, her power over liminality, her boundarylessness, and her total spatial access. Her relationship to space undermines the political effort to construct a unified social identity based on spatial organization, because she refuses to adhere to social prescriptions of spatial behavior. She undermines the effect of the project to reidentify space, and she represents the fragility of social constructs of space through the ease with which she transcends supposedly impenetrable boundaries.
This dissertation will look at the witch as a subversive representation of the different challenges that threaten total control over Roman space at the beginning of its imperial transformation and throughout its imperial expansion. Witches pose a threat in many different ways: in Horace and Juvenal they destroy concepts of control over Roman space and menace the stability of Roman place-identity and the spatial existence of individual Romans throughout the empire. In Ovid’s Medea story, the power of the witch to infiltrate space at will and destroy a city or kingdom’s rulership represents the threat of the other. Written several decades later, Seneca’s Medea uses Medea as a symbol of imperial expansion to critique the increasing vulnerability of spatial control that comes with overexpansion; at the same time, her reflection of imperial conquest highlights the fear of the exposure of Roman space to penetration and domination by an outside force. Lucan uses the incredible power and efficacy of Erichtho’s spatial command in Pharsalus to underscore the peril of the imperial system, wherein control of Roman space depends on one individual. While Erichtho and Thessaly have a perfect, mutually defining relationship of place-identity, Lucan portrays Roman identity as lost to the chaos of civil war, and forewarns that the existential crisis of imperial leadership’s impact on Roman identity will be perpetual throughout the course of its empire’s progression. Finally, in Apuleius, witches’ repeated ability to immobilize men and force men into social exile acts as a reminder of the harsh reality of the forced displacement and lack of agency over their own movement for a vast number of those living in imperial space.