the most absurd prejudices of the day, his
readers are entertained with stories that might pretty
nearly represent the sentiments of the seventeenth century.

Gibbon observes of the Roman superstition on the authority of
Petronius, that it may be inferred that it was of Italian rather
than barbaric extraction. Etruria furnished the people of Romulus
with the science of divination. Early in the history of the
Republic the law is very explicit on the subject of witchcraft.
In the decemviral code the extreme penalty is attached to the
crime of witchcraft or conjuration: 'Let him be capitally
punished who shall have bewitched the fruits of the earth, or by
either kind of conjuration (_excantando neque incantando_) shall
have conjured away his neighbour's corn into his own field,' &c.,
an enactment sneered at in Justinian's _Institutes_ in Seneca's
words. A rude and ignorant antiquity, repeat the lawyers of
Justinian, had believed that rain and storms might be attracted
or repelled by means of spells or charms, the impossibility of
which has no need to be explained by any school of philosophy. A
hundred and fifty years later than the legislation of the
decemvirs was passed the _Lex Cornelia_, usually cited as
directed against sorcery: but while involving possibly the more
shadowy crime, it seems to have been levelled against the more
'substantial poison.' The conviction and condemnation of 170
Roman ladies for poisoning, under pretence of incantation, was
the occasion and cause. Sulla, when dictator, revived this act
_de veneficiis et malis sacrificiis_, for breach of which the
penalty was 'interdiction of fire and water.' Senatorial
anathemas, or even those of the prince, were ineffective to check
the continually increasing abuses, which towards the end of the
first century of the empire had reached an alarming height.[21]

[21] It will be observed that _veneficus and maleficus_ are
the significant terms among the Italians for the criminals.

A general degradation of morals is often accompanied, it has been
justly remarked, by a corresponding increase of the wildest
credulity, and by an abject subservience to external religious
rites in propitiation of an incensed deity. It was thus at Rome
when the eloquence of Cicero, and afterwards the indignant satire
of Juvenal or the calm ridicule of the philosophic Lucian,[22]
attempted to assert the 'proper authority of reason.' To speak
the truth, says Cicero, superst