1Once I was a fig-tree trunk, a useless log, when a carpenter, uncertain whether to make a stool or a Priapus, preferred that I should be a god. 3A god, therefore, I am, the greatest terror of thieves and birds; 4for my right hand keeps thieves in check, and the red stake stretched out from my obscene groin, while a reed fixed on my head frightens off the pestering birds and forbids them to settle in the new gardens. 8Here formerly a fellow slave used to hire a cheap box to carry off the corpses thrown out of narrow cells; 10this stood as the common graveyard for the wretched poor; 11here a pillar assigned a thousand feet of frontage and three hundred of depth to Pantolabus the jester and Nomentanus the spendthrift, so that the monument should not pass to the heirs.
14Now one may live on the healthy Esquiline and stroll on the sunny rampart, where lately sad passers-by looked out on a field hideous with whitened bones, while for my part not so much the thieves and the wild beasts used to haunting this place cause me trouble and toil as the women who twist human minds with spells and potions: these I can in no way destroy or prevent, as soon as the wandering moon has put forth her lovely face, from gathering bones and harmful herbs. 23I myself saw Canidia walking with her black robe tucked up, barefoot and with hair dishevelled, howling with the elder Sagana: their pallor had made both horrible to look at.
26They began to scrape the earth with their nails and to tear apart a black lamb with their teeth; 28the blood was poured all together into a trench, so that from there they might draw out the spirits of the dead, souls to give them answers. 30There was an effigy of wool and another of wax: the woollen one larger, to subdue the lesser with punishments; 32the waxen one stood as a suppliant, like one about to die a slave's death. 33One calls on Hecate, the other on savage Tisiphone: you might have seen serpents and hounds of hell roaming, and the moon, blushing, hiding behind the great tombs so as not to witness these deeds.
37But if I am lying in anything, may my head be fouled with the white droppings of crows, and may Julius and frail Pediatia and the thief Voranus come to piss and shit on me. 40Why should I tell each detail, how the shades, talking back and forth with Sagana, sounded sad and shrill, and how they secretly buried in the ground a wolf's beard with the tooth of a spotted snake, and how a greater fire blazed up from the waxen image, and how I, no unavenged witness, shuddered at the words and deeds of the two Furies? 46For with a noise as loud as a bursting bladder, I, a fig-wood god, farted as my buttock split; 47but they ran off to the city.
48You would have seen, amid great laughter and merriment, Canidia's teeth and Sagana's tall wig falling out, and the herbs and the enchanted love-knots dropping from their arms.