effective picture out of the abundant suggestions which the current
stories of such creatures and their doings presented to his hand? The
popular belief in their power, the picturesque conditions under which
their spells were wrought, the wild passions in which lay the secret
of their hold upon the credulity of their victims, offered to the
Roman poet, just as they did to our own Elizabethan dramatists, a
combination of materials most favourable for poetic treatment. But
that Horace had, as many of his critics contend, a feeling of personal
vanity, the pique of a discarded lover, to avenge, is an assumption
wholly without warrant. He was the last man, at any time or under any
circumstances, to have had any relations of a personal nature with a
woman of Canidia's class. However inclined he may have been to use her
and her practices for poetic purposes, he manifestly not only saw
through the absurdity of her pretensions, but laughed at her miserable
impotence, and meant that others should do the same. It seems to be
impossible to read the 8th of his First Book of his Satires, and not
come to this conclusion. That satire consists of the monologue of a
garden god, set up in the garden which Maecenas had begun to lay out
on the Esquiline Hill. This spot had until recently been the burial-
ground of the Roman poor, a quarter noisome by day, and the haunt of
thieves and beasts of prey by night. On this obscene spot, littered
with skulls and dead men's bones, Canidia and her accomplice Sagana
are again introduced, digging a pit with their nails, into which they
pour the blood of a coal-black ewe, which they had previously torn
limb-meal,

"So to evoke the shade and soul
Of dead men, and from these to wring
Responses to their questioning."