Erichtho

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).

"[6] 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.

[7][8] 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"),[7] and wicked to the point of sacrilege (e.g. "She never beseeches the gods, nor does she call the divine with a suppliant hymn").

[9][10] 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.

[nb 3][24] 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[broken anchor]) prophecy about the fate that lies in store for Pompey and his kin.

6.149) must be properly buried before Aeneas embarks on his underworld journey, Erictho specifically requires an unburied corpse (described similarly as exanimes artus, 720) for her undertaking.

[26]Masters, as Zissos points out, argues that the Sibyl's commands to bury Misenus and find the Golden Bough are inverted and compacted in Lucan: Erichtho needs a body—not buried—but rather retrieved.

Virgil responds in the affirmative, explaining that at one point he had journeyed to the lowest circle of Hell on behest of Erichtho in order to retrieve a soul for one of her necromantic rites.

"[34] Similarly, Rachel Jacoff argues: Dante's rewriting of the Lucanian scene 'recuperates' the witch Erichtho by making her necessary to the Dantean Virgil's status as guide: she thus functions in accord with the Christian providence that controls the advancement of the Commedia's plot line.