Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/408

 392 SORCERY AND OCCULT ARTS. by incantations and sorcery secured the affections of his bride Pudentilla, a woman of mature age who had been fourteen years a widow. Had the court, like those of the Middle Ages, enjoyed the infallible resource of torture, he would readily have been forced to confession, with the attendant death-penalty ; but as there was no charge of treason involved, he was free to disculpate himself by evidence and argument, and he escaped.* The severest penalties of the law, in fact, were traditionally directed against all practitioners of magic. The surviving frag- ments of the Decemviral legislation show that this dated from an early period of the republic. With the spread of the Roman con- quests, the introduction of Orientalized Hellenism was followed by the magic of the East, more imposing than the homelier native practices, arousing the liveliest fear and indignation. In 184 b. c. the praetor L. ]S~aevius was detained for four months from proceed- ing to his province of Sardinia, by the duty assigned to him of prosecuting cases of sorcery. A large portion of these were scat- tered through the suburbicarian regions ; the culprits had a short shrift, and he manifested a diligence which Pierre Cella or Bernard de Caux might envv, if the account be true that he condemned no less than two thousand sorcerers. Under the empire decrees against magicians, astrologers, and diviners were frequent, and from the manner in which accusations of sorcery were brought against prominent personages the charge would seem to have been then, as it proved in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, one of those convenient ones, easy to make and hard to disprove, which are welcome in personal and political intrigue. Kero persecuted magic with such severity that he included philosophers among magicians, and the cloak or distinctive garment of the philosopher was sufficient to bring its wearer before the tribunals. Musonius the Babylonian, who ranked next to Apollonius of Tyana in wis- dom and power, was incarcerated, and would have perished as in- tended but for the exceptional robustness which enabled him to endure the rigors of his prison. Caracalla went even further and xxxix. 11. — Joseph. Antiq. Jud. xix. 12. — Tibull. i. viii. 5-G. — Ovid. Amor. m. vii. 27-35. — Petron. Arb. Sat. — Jul. Capitolin. Marc. Aurel. 19.— Appul. de Ma- gia Orat.
 * Propert. iv. v. 18.— Virg. ^Eneid. iv. 512-16.— Plin. N. H. vin. 56.— Livii