Among the Roman deities associated with marriage rites and connubial consummations were: Stimula, who aroused the male erotic urges: Strenia, who furnished vigor: Virginiensis, who detached the bride’s zona or girdle: Volupia, who excited voluptuous sensations: Iugatinus, who united the marital partners. Also Domiducus, who conducted the bride to her new home: Munturnae, who presided over her settlement in her new position: and, more intimately involved in the physiological performance, Liber and Libera, Pertunda, Prema, and Subigus.
The Romans represented the male and female genitalia in the shapes of their wheaten-flour loaves. The epigrammatist Martial, in Book 9, 2, alludes to this priapic custom:
Illa siligineis pinguescit adultera cunnis.
The Roman poet Ovid (32 B.C.–17 A.D.) presents the ancient witch Medea in action. She invokes aid in concocting a potion to refurbish old age and induce youthful vigor:
Ye spells and arts that the wise men use; and thou, O Earth, who dost provide the wise men with thy potent herbs; ye breezes and winds, ye mountains and streams and pools; all ye gods of the groves, all ye gods of the night; be with me now. With your help I stir up the calm seas by my spell; I break the jaws of serpents with my incantations. I bid ghosts to come forth from their tombs. Now I have need of juices by whose aid old age may be renewed and may turn back to the bloom of youth and regain its earthly years.
The Roman elegiac poet Tibullus (c. 48 B.C.–19 B.C.) addresses Delia, the girl who scorned him. He has employed magic means to regain her love:
Thrice I with Sulphur purified you round, And thrice the Rite, with Songs th’Enchantress bound: The Cake, by me thrice sprinkled, put to flight The death-denouncing Phantoms of the Night, And I next have, in linen Garb array’d, In silent Night, nine Times to Trivia pray’d.
In one of the Eclogues of the Roman poet Nemesianus, who flourished in the third century A.D., there is a dialogue between two shepherds who discuss their amatory affairs and love spells:
Mopsus: What does it benefit me that the mother of rustic Amyntas has purified me thrice with fillets, thrice with a sacred bough, thrice with the vapour of frankincense, burning the crackling laurels with live sulphur, and pours the ashes out into the stream with averted face, when thus wretched I am every way inflamed for Meroë?