In Latin, it is equally impossible, for the most part, to assign separate spheres of activity to magi and venefici. Poisoners and sorcerers are, however, both encompassed under the terms veneficae and venefici, as indeed they are in Greek with pharmakeis and pharmakides. We know too little about the activities of cantatrices to assert with any confidence that they did very much more than intone incantations and perform a few simple rituals in conjunction with their incantations. The evidence such as it is suggests that cantatrix denotes a woman practising a much narrower and more modest range of activities than an epodos in Greek practised. The women called sagae are, however, credited with doing everything from nullifying the effects of a bad dream to summoning up ghosts.

Not all of those on whom the appellations goes, magos, pharmakis, saga or venefica were bestowed will have been given these names because they offered their expertise in sorcery to others. All of these words, with the apparent exception of saga, were employed as terms of abuse. Many women, for instance, who had formed a relationship with a man, whether licit or illicit, will have been denounced as pharmakides or veneficae by distressed relatives or disappointed rivals unwilling to acknowledge that the charms of the woman had won over the man. Men might also be denounced as sorcerers for the same reason or because they had enjoyed success greater than seemed natural. The use of the terms to denounce people will not be the main focus of our attention, because it tells us very little about who witches and sorcerers were.

The most general term in Greek for the procedures pursued by magicians is manganeia or manganeuma. The term does not seem to be related to the words magos and mageia, but there is reason to suspect that most Greeks will have believed that manganeumata took their name from their being performed by magoi. The spells that sorcerers deploy against others are in Greek called pharmaka (sing. pharmakon) and in Latin veneficia (sing. veneficium). In both languages the word is used of poisons, magical substances, spells in which substances and words are used, and perhaps magical formulae. The word philtron in Greek and its calque in Latin amatorium have roughly the same range of meanings, although the terms are restricted to the procedures used in erotic magic. A philtron or amatorium may then be the substance put into food or drink to induce sexual passion in the person who consumes or imbibes it; it may be a substance used as an ointment; it may be a substance accompanied by a spoken spell designed to elicit the same result; and it may be a spoken spell intended to provoke sexual desire.

In Rome, there was a law laid down towards the end of the Republic under which sorcery certainly came to be prosecuted, the Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficiis.

There are extensive indications in the literature of the second century BC and that of the first half of the first century that the Romans had taken over a great deal of magical lore from the Greeks. What they made of it is another matter. Plautus is an especially rich source of information. He brought to a Roman audience the comedies that had been composed and performed in Athens in the late fourth century and in the third century BC. Yet he was no slavish and mechanical translator of the Greek, but displayed a good deal of invention in his writing. In his comedies, veneficus, venefica, and the intensive forms, terveneficus and trivenefica, are used with some frequency. In Latin, these terms cover both sorcerer and poisoner. It is not so much that the terms in one context mean ‘sorcerer’ and in another ‘poisoner’, as that sorcery and poisoning tend not to be distinguished. In Plautus, the context in which the term is used shows in most cases that what we would call sorcery is at issue rather than poisoning. For the playwright, it is generally a term of abuse and is mostly found in passages that are likely to have been composed a novo by the playwright himself. Plautus is not, accordingly, merely taking something from his Greek original that has very little meaning for his Roman audience. He plays on a notion that is thoroughly familiar to the Romans. Now the way in which this group of words is employed is a good indication of how familiar most Romans must have been with various forms of magic-working. They were after all expected to pick up from contexts in which no actual magic is involved why a speaker rounds on someone as a venefica or veneficus.

Finally, the comic playwright Lucius Afranius of the second half of the second century BC has a character in his play Vopiscus declare that if men could be trapped by devices of enticement (delenimenta), every old woman (anus) would have a lover, but in fact youth, a tender body and good character are the drugs (venena) that beautiful women possess; old age finds no enticements. It is easy to discount the lines, since they echo what Menander had said about lovephiltres. Afranius did not, however, as Plautus and Terence did, write comedies whose setting and characters were Greek (comoedia palliata)), but comedies set in a Roman or Italian setting (comoedia togata). If a character in such a comedy can speak about love-philtres, that is a very good indication that love-philtres were known and used in Rome in the second half of the second century BC. Furthermore, the lines create the presumption that love-philtres were the special province of old women.

It is to be concluded that since by the second century BC Rome was in some degree part of the larger Hellenistic world, one aspect of its membership in that wider world was that Greek forms of magic-working along with the social institutions fostering them had become naturalized there. That this was so does not warrant our drawing the inference that in the eyes of the Romans veneficae and praecantatrices engaged in a suspect activity mimicking proper religious observance but which was in fact a perversion of it. The most we can say is that in Plautus veneficus, venefica, terveneficus and trivenefica are used as terms of opprobrium. There are at least two reasons, compatible with each other but sufficient in themselves, why the words should carry so negative an emotional charge: the activities of veneficae fall into the disapproved category of magic; the harmful spells that veneficae sometimes cast make them a suspect group. It is, in sum, impossible to say for certain on the basis of references to magic-working and magic-workers in the second century BC whether the Greek notion of magic had taken root in Rome by that date.

The prevailing opinion is that the law passed in 81 BC by Sulla as dictator against cut-throats and against veneficia (Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficiis) was not originally used to prosecute cases of magic-working as such, although persons who had administered love-philtres (amatoria) that resulted in a death might be prosecuted under it. That the law could potentially be directed not only at poisoners, but at the casting of spells is suggested by the use in it of the highly ambiguous term veneficium. It was an ambiguity of which the Romans were conscious. Two passages in Quintilian’s Institutions of Oratory pay testimony to the ambiguity and to the possibility that the ambiguity could give rise to discussion over the precise scope of the law. Quintilian, in dealing with the part that the definition of a term plays in legal proceedings, gives veneficium as an example of a term over whose meaning there might be debate. What would be in dispute in its case is whether it encompassed the incantations of magicians, even though it was acknowledged that an incantation and a deadly potion were quite different things. Another instance of a problem of the same order that Quintilian cites is whether a love-spell (amatorium) and a venenum should go under the same name—presumably venenum—even though they both have their own names. Since Quintilian does not say what the resolution was to these problems, they may be hypothetical questions that never in fact arose in a court and were never settled by a resolution of the Senate.

Aelius Marcianus, a lawyer of the third century, seems to say that love-philtres (amatoria venena) were not punished under the Lex Cornelia, but only venena intended to kill a man. But since his discussion is concerned solely with the fifth chapter in the law, that dealing with the making, selling or possession of venena intended to kill a man, it may be that all he means is that the Lex Cornelia makes no provision for cases in which death results from the use of a love-philtre. The sentence which follows, which is that there is a senatus consultum relegating to exile a woman who not out of malice but in an inadmirable fashion causes the death of a woman to whom she has given a drug intended to cause conception, does suggest that his interest is in drugs that cause death.