In the Shadows of the Night
Attacks on Children and Pregnant Women in the Roman World
Abstract
Night presided over both the birth and death of human existence. In the Babylonian world, birth is presented as the passage from darkness to light, from silence to rumour, and a series of incantations seek to counteract the threats to the newborn. In a different cultural context, this contribution analyses various strategies for managing the terror provoked in the Roman world by creatures of the night operating in a liminal context (“betwixt and between” in Turner’s expression), with special attention to the protection of the child from the attacks of the avian witch through various examples: from literary texts such as the Ovidian episode of Carna and Proca (Fast. VI 101-182), to funerary epigraphy, lapidaries (lithica) or Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri.
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