One of the main problems with studying love potions from the ancient world is that clearly we lack a physical love potion to study. Further complicating matters is the fact that we also don’t have a serious written account describing how to make a love potion. Instead, we have stories of the disastrous effects of love potions on their targets, or hyperbolic tails of their creation by evil witches. This post will discuss one of the later, an exaggerated story from Horace’s fifth Epode describing the creation of a love potion by four witches.
If we are to read the poem as an actual account of how one might go about making a love potion, it is a horrific process indeed, with the dried liver and marrow of a young boy from a wealthy family being the main ingredient. The boy’s body parts would have to be imbued with a sense of longing or fierce hunger by burying him naked up to his neck in the earth, and placing an enticing meal just out of his reach, with the food being changed a few times per day. We would also conclude that an extravagant ceremony would go along with the preparation of the main ingredients, including burning a variety of magical objects, purifying the house with water and an elaborate but surprisingly colloquial prayer to Night and Diana.
Of course, it is a mistake to read this poem as accurately recounting how to go about creating a love potion. Although some elements of the magic involved could have been a part of this process, the literary genre casts doubt on forming solid conclusions from the poem.
Horace’s true purpose in writing the poem is a matter of opinion, and scholarship on the subject varies widely in its conclusions. In his book Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, Matthew Dicky reads Horace’s Candida (one of the four witches) as being a representation of a general belief that old prostitutes turning to magic in hopes of maintaining their business. He also discusses the implications of a passage from the Satires written under the name of Acro that concludes that Candida is in fact a real person named Gratidia who Horace is mocking. Dicky says that it is unlikely Candida is actually meant to be Gratidia, but if she is, the poem would have to be read primarily as an attempt to discredit and mock her, which casts the authenticity of the actions described into further doubt.
Other scholars see the poem as an attempt to debunk the efficacy of such love potions, basing this conclusion on Candida’s description of her previous ineffective attempts at seducing the man Varus with “the dread poisons of the barbarian Medea.” Still others read Horace as representing himself as the figure of the boy being starved to death, relating this epode to his seventeenth epode where he begs Candida to set him free from her magic. In this reading of the passage Candida represents an older lover who has spurned the young Horace for a man of her own age, perhaps even using him simply as a tool to make the older man jealous.
The figure of the old witch doing nasty erotic magic is also clearly archetype in Latin literature, and much of the magical actions that these witches perform seem to be based more on mockery and a love for the grotesque than anything else.
With this in mind, we begin to see the problems associated with using a passage like this to make conclusions about love potions. That being said, it is still one of the few pieces of evidence we have on which to base conclusions.
For this reason my essay will not focus on the specific magical ingredients or preparation process found in this source but will rather use it to make one general conclusion: that love potions in the ancient world were primarily used for the purpose of procuring sex.
There are some problems with using this poem in even this limited way, yet I believe that overall the passage does lend itself well to this reading.
In a part of her prayer to Night and Diana, Candida says of Varus, the lover she is trying to seduce, “does he lie on a drugged bed and forget all my rivals? Ah! He walks abroad, delivered by the spell of a more knowledgeable witch.” From this we can conclude that Candida’s intentions towards Varus are sexual. Even though it is clear from the poem that she has a pre-existing relationship with Varus, she is still using the love potion in hopes of bringing Varus to her “burning with love for [her] like pitch with its black fire.”
Of course, Horace is the one writing this passage, not Candida, and the words he puts into her mouth represent his thoughts on how one might use a love potion. That being said, it seems clear that to Horace love potions are primarily about sex. This is supported by almost all of the Latin literary sources, where a witch is performing erotic magic, for her most immediate goal is sexual access. This is also true of the defixio, though primarily written by men against women. Although there may be other motivating factors interwoven into this basic purpose, such as marriage, revenge, or economics, the immediate purpose remains the same.
I see the difficulty here, and it’s one that is common to a lot of people in the class: how do you actually rely on any of this material given that we are sorely lacking in context and other materials you can check on.
I wonder if one thing to think about might be whether or not you can think of how people advertised love potions versus what they actually put in them. We saw in our ancient spell/modern version presentations that some modern spellcasters like to throw an aura of mystery around their ingredients. Could the same be true in the ancient world? Gender and class are other factors: would someone like Horace have had any real access to these people/their toolkit, or is he just combining bits and pieces of commonly accessible knowledge with things he thinks are happening?
There’s very little written or attribute to women among this literature to compare with, and to see if you can get another perspective. There are medical texts by women and some alchemic texts, but not in this area (well, that I can think of off the top of my head). You might see if Pliny the Elder mentions any for love potions.
More concretely, in these situations I usually sit down and draw up a list of core things that I think, given the preponderance of sources I have read, are generally likely to be true. I then think about in what authors that information coalesces and why I think they might have more reliable information and if they have anything in common. That helps me come up with a core of information that works as a check on other sources. You can sometimes find that you are more confident about more information than you otherwise think.