Purposes
Spells and incantations were used for a variety of purposes. If a spell was intended to harm someone, the State could interfere to protect him. For instance, it was not unusual for a farmer whose crops had failed to accuse another farmer of having, by a carmen, lured the crops away. Tibullus, in a poem in which he complains that an old woman has bewitched Marathus, takes the opportunity to recount various feats of witches, such as transferring crops from one field to another. Similarly, Pliny the Elder records in Naturalis Historia (XVIII. 41-42) that a certain freedman, Furius, by using better implements and better methods than his neighbor, obtained richer crops from a smaller strip of land. A neighbor compelled Furius to go before the tribes and accused him of having bewitched his field. But when the tribes saw his sturdy slaves and his implements of witchcraft—hoes, rakes, and ploughs—they acquitted him.
Read more about this topic: Carmen (verse)
Famous quotes containing the word purposes:
“What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“Virtuous people are simply those who have ... not been tempted sufficiently, because they live in a vegetative state, or because their purposes are so concentrated in one direction that they have not had the leisure to glance around them.”
—Isadora Duncan (1878–1927)
“Since [Rousseau’s] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)