Canidia, Rome’s First Witch
Authors: Paule Maxwell Teitel 
Published: May 2018

Canidia is one of the most well-attested witches in Latin literature. She appears in no fewer than six of Horace’s poems and in three she has a prominent role. Throughout Horace’s Epodes and Satires she perpetrates acts of grave desecration, kidnapping, murder, magical torture and poisoning. She invades the gardens of Horace’s literary patron Maecenas, she rips apart a lamb with her teeth, she starves a Roman child to death, and she threatens to unnaturally prolong Horace’s life to keep him in a state of perpetual torment. She can be seen as an anti-muse: Horace repeatedly sets her in opposition to his literary patron, he casts her as the personification of his iambic poetry, and he gives her the surprising honor of concluding not only his Epodes but also his second book of Satires.

This volume is the first comprehensive treatment of Canidia to date. It offers translations of each of the three poems which feature Canidia as a main character as well as the relevant portions from the other three poems in which Canidia plays a minor role. These translations are accompanied by extensive analysis of Canidia’s part in each piece that takes into account not only the poems’ literary contexts but their magico-religious details.

Canidia: Rome’s First Witch details the different roles Canidia has throughout Horace’s poetry and assesses how understanding the difference in those roles impacts our understanding of Horace’s poems. The introductory chapter establishes Canidia’s status as a fictional witch and explains why her character is best understood as having demonic qualities. The following three chapters address Canidia’s roles in the poems wherein she has a substantial part (Satires 1.8, Epodes 5 and 17, respectively). The final chapter treats Canidia’s appearance in the poems where she is mentioned only in passing (Epodes 3, Satires 2.1, 2.8) to succinctly demonstrate how Canidia’s role there as a generic bringer of misfortune is utterly incompatible with the roles she has assumed previously.

The interpretations of Canidia’s various roles in the central three chapters enable new readings of the poems under discussion: Canidia’s status as a ghostly, liminal creature in Satires 1.8 (somewhat embarrassingly narrated by a farting Priapic statue) recontextualizes the piece as a representation of Horace’s struggle with the genre of satire; the fifth epode, in which Canidia qua child-killing demon torments an abducted child, is rehabilitated from an oddly violent digression in the Epodes to a timely commentary on Rome’s civil wars quite in keeping with the rest of the collection; and finally, Canidia’s role as an Empusa – a monstrous, vampiric creature that can be chased away by insults – in Epodes 17 not only explains Horace’s insult-laden ‘apology’ to her, but also reveals the exchange between the two as a metapoetic depiction of Horace’s departure from the iambic genre.

The concluding chapter uses Canidia’s three appearances as a minor character to reflect on her demonic nature and advocate for interpreting other witches – even well-known ones – in a similar fashion. If reevaluating Canidia can provide provocative and novel interpretations of Horace’s poetry, approaching characters like Medea as she appears in Ovid’s Heroides, or Pamphile in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses may well produce comparable results. As such, the book is part of a larger discussion not only about Canidia, but about the study of ancient witches in general.