gods. For she
feared that the war might yet be transferred to other than the Emathian
fields. The sorceress was busy therefore enchanting the soil of
Philippi, and scattering on its surface the juice of potent herbs, that
it might be heaped with carcasses of the dead, and saturated with their
blood, that Macedon, and not Italy, might receive the bodies of departed
kings and the bones of the noble, and might be amply peopled with the
shades of men. Her choicest labour was as to the earth where should be
deposited the prostrate Pompey, or the limbs of the mighty Caesar.

Sextus approached, and bespoke her thus: "Oh, glory of Haemonia, that
hast the power to divulge the fates of men, or canst turn aside fate
itself from its prescribed course, I pray thee to exercise thy gift in
disclosing events to come. Not the meanest of the Roman race am I, the
offspring of an illustrious chieftain, lord of the world in the one
case, or in the other the destined heir to my father's calamity. I stand
on a tremendous and giddy height: snatch me from this posture of doubt;
let me not blindly rush on, and blindly fall; extort this secret from
the gods, or force the dead to confess what they know."

To whom the Thessalian crone replied: "If you asked to change the fate
of an individual, though it were to restore an old man, decrepit with
age, to vigorous youth, I could comply; but to break the eternal chain
of causes and consequences exceeds even our power. You seek, however,
only a foreknowledge of events to come, and you shall be gratified.
Meanwhile it were best, where slaughter has afforded so ample a field,
to select the body of one newly deceased, and whose flexible organs
shall be yet capable of speech, not with lineaments already hardened in
the sun."

Saying thus, Erichtho proceeded (having first with her art made the
night itself more dark, and involved her head in a pitchy cloud), to
explore the field, and examine one by one the bodies of the unburied
dead. As she approached, the wolves fled before her, and the birds of
prey, unwillingly sheathing their talons, abandoned their repast, while
the Thessalian witch, searching into the vital parts of the frames
before her, at length fixed on one whose lungs were uninjured, and whose
organs of speech had sustained no wound. The fate of many hung in doubt,
till she had made her selection. Had the revival of whole armies been
her will, armies would have stood up obedient to her bidding