Envy and fascinum: the harmful gaze in ancient Rome
The fascinum hung beneath the triumphal chariot, children's bullae, the verses of Catullus and Virgil: how the Romans understood and feared envy.
In Latin the word for envy already contains an image: invidere, to look against, to look ill upon. For the Romans envy was not merely a feeling but an action of the gaze that could strike people, animals and property. Alongside it stood the verb fascinare, from which Italian derives fascino and English fascination, and which originally meant to bewitch with a harmful influence. The two notions overlapped and gave shape to a set of fears and defences that is well documented in the sources.
The fascinum, guardian of children and triumphant generals
By fascinum, or fascinus, the Romans meant both the malign influence and the amulet that fought it, usually a phallic image. Pliny the Elder, in the twenty-eighth book of the Natural History, calls it the guardian of infants and of victorious generals: during a triumph, he writes, it was hung beneath the general's chariot as protection against envy. He adds that its cult was entrusted to the Vestal Virgins, a sign of the public value attributed to it.
The obscene character of these amulets was no accident. Varro, in his work On the Latin Language, mentions a «turpicula res», a somewhat indecent thing, hung around boys' necks so that nothing might harm them. The phallic image, linked to fertility and vital force, also served to distract: it drew attention, provoked laughter and so broke the concentration of the dangerous gaze. Many bronze examples have emerged from excavations at Pompeii and across the Empire.
The bulla and childhood
Freeborn children wore the bulla around their necks, a small capsule of metal or leather that could hold amulets. It was gold in the wealthiest families and leather in others, and a boy laid it aside when he put on the toga of manhood, offering it to the household Lares. Ancient sources describe it above all as a sign of free status and a protection for childhood; its link with the evil eye is suggested by the apotropaic function of the objects kept inside.
The poets and the fear of praise
Latin literature preserves lively traces of this sensibility. Catullus, in his fifth poem, urges Lesbia to muddle the count of their kisses so that no ill-wisher can envy them by knowing their number: «ne quis malus invidere possit». To count one's happiness was to expose it. Virgil, in the third Eclogue, has a shepherd lament his thin flock: «nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos», I know not what eye is bewitching my tender lambs.
Praise, too, called for caution. The Romans used the adverb praefiscini, a sort of «no evil eye intended», spoken when saying something favourable about oneself or others, to take the risk out of the sentence. The word already appears in the comedies of Plautus. It is the same reflex that survives in many modern languages, where a compliment is spontaneously followed by a phrase of warding off or of blessing.
The Roman world handed down to Europe both the vocabulary and the objects of the evil eye. The phallic fascinum survived, transformed and made more discreet, in coral horns and apotropaic hands; the bulla found heirs in the blessed pouches sewn onto the clothes of newborn babies. Above all there remained the idea, enclosed in the very word envy, that looking is never a neutral act, and that another person's gaze can weigh on the fortune of the one who is observed.