In Roman literature, Erichtho (from ) is a legendary Thessalian witch who appears in several literary works. She is noted for her horrifying appearance and her impious ways. Her first major role was in the Roman poet Lucan's epic Pharsalia, which details Caesar's Civil War. In the work, Pompey the Great's son, Sextus Pompeius, seeks her, hoping that she will be able to reveal the future concerning the imminent Battle of Pharsalus. In a gruesome scene, she finds a dead body, fills it with potions, and raises it from the dead. The corpse describes a civil war that is plaguing the underworld and delivers a prophecy about what fate lies in store for Pompey and his kin.
Erichtho's role in Pharsalia has often been discussed by classicists and literary scholars, with many arguing that she serves as an antithesis and counterpart to Virgil's Cumaean Sibyl, a pious prophetess who appears in his work the Aeneid. In the 14th century, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri referenced her in his Divine Comedy (wherein it is revealed that she, using magic, forced Virgil to fetch a soul from Hell's ninth circle). She also makes appearances in both Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 19th-century play Faust, as well as John Marston's Jacobean play The Tragedy of Sophonisba.
In literature
Origin
The character Erichtho may have been created by the poet Ovid, as she is mentioned in his poem Heroides XV. It is likely that the character was inspired by the legends of Thessalian witches developed during the Classical Greek period. According to many sources, Thessaly was notorious for being a haven for witches, and "folklore about the region has persisted with tales of witches, drugs, poisons and magical spells ever since the Roman period." However, Erichtho's popularity came several decades later, thanks to the poet Lucan, who featured her prominently in his epic poem Pharsalia, which details Caesar's Civil War.
Lucan's Pharsalia
In Lucan's Pharsalia, Erichtho is repugnant (for instance, she is described as having a "dry cloud" hang over her head and that her breath "poisons otherwise non-lethal air"), and wicked to the point of sacrilege (e.g. "She never beseeches the gods, nor does she call the divine with a suppliant hymn"). She lives on the outskirts of society and makes her home near "graveyards, gibbets, and the battlefields copiously supplied by civil war"; she uses the body parts from these locations in her magic spells. Indeed, she delights in otherwise heinous and macabre acts involving corpses (for instance, "when the dead are confined in a sarcophagus […] then she eagerly rages every limb. She plunges her hand into the eyes, delights at digging out the congealed eyeballs, and gnaws the pallid nails on a desiccated hand.").
She is a powerful necromancer; while she is surveying dead bodies in a battlefield it is noted that "If she had tried to raise up the entire army on the field to return to war, the laws of Erebus would have yielded, and a host—pulled from the Stygian Avernus by her terrible power—would have gone to war." It is for this reason that she is sought by Pompey the Great's son, Sextus Pompeius. He wants her to perform a necromantic rite so that he might be able to learn the outcome of the Battle of Pharsalus. Erichtho complies and wanders amidst a battlefield to seek out a cadaver with "uninjured tissues of a stiffened lung". She cleans the corpse's organs, and fills the body with a potion (consisting of, among other things, a mixture of warm blood, "lunar poison", and "everything that nature wickedly bears") so as to bring the dead body back to life. The spirit is summoned, but, at first, refuses to return to its old body. She then promptly threatens the entire universe by promising to summon "that god at whose dread name earth trembles". Immediately following this outburst, the corpse is reanimated and offers a bleak description of a civil war in the underworld, as well as a rather ambiguous (at least, to Sextus Pompeius) prophecy about the fate that lies in store for Pompey and his kin.