ition has spread like a torrent
over the entire globe, oppressing the minds and intellects of
almost all men and seizing upon the weakness of human nature.[23]
The historian of 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
justifies and illustrates this lament of the philosopher of the
Republic in the particular case of witchcraft. 'The nations and
the sects of the Roman world admitted with equal credulity and
similar abhorrence the reality of that infernal art which was
able to control the eternal order of the planets, and the
voluntary operations of the human mind. They dreaded the
mysterious power of spells and incantations, of potent herbs and
execrable rites, which could extinguish or recall life, influence
the passions of the soul, blast the works of creation, and extort
from the reluctant demons the secrets of Futurity. They believed
with the wildest inconsistency that the preternatural dominion of
the air, of earth, and of hell, was exercised from the vilest
motives of malice or gain by some wrinkled hags or itinerant
sorcerers who passed their obscure lives in penury and contempt.
Such vain terrors disturbed the peace of society and the
happiness of individuals; and the harmless flame which insensibly
melted a waxen image might derive a powerful and pernicious
energy from the affrighted fancy of the person whom it was
maliciously designed to represent. From the infusion of those
herbs which were supposed to possess a supernatural influence, it
was an easy step to the case of more substantial poison; and the
folly of mankind sometimes became the instrument and the mask of
the most atrocious crimes.'[24]

[22] If the philosophical arguments of Menippus (_Nekrikoi
Dialogoi_) could have satisfied the interest of the priests
or the ignorance of the people of after times, the
_infernal_ fires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
might not have burned.

[23] _De Divinatione_, lib. ii.

[24] _The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire_, xxv. This description applies more to the Christian
and later empires.

Latin poetry of the Augustan and succeeding period abounds with
illustrations, and the witches of Horace, Ovid, and Lucan are the
famous classical types.[25] Propertius has characterised the
Striga as 'daring enough to impose laws upon the moon bewitched
by her spells;' while Petronius makes his witch, as potent as
Strepsiades' Thessalian sorceress, exclaim that the very for