are four paths stretching in as many directions he will be puzzled to know which way to take and will stand debating until dawn compels him to return to the earth, but woe betide the unhappy being who happens to pass by when he is lingering there perplexed and confused. Accordingly after sunset, every sensible person will avoid all crossroads since there are no localities more certainly and more fearfully haunted and disturbed. It will readily be remembered that the Romans were far more precise than we used to be in their definition of cross-roads and employed no less than three terms, biuium when the road branched into two, triuium when the road forked into three, and quadriuium when the intersection of the ways gave four arms. The prophet Ezechiel tells us that Esarhaddon took his stand in biuio when he wished to divine: “Stetit enim rex Babylonis in biuio, in capite duarum uiarum, diuinationem quaerens, commiscens sagittas: interrogauit idola, exta consuluit.” (xxi, 21.) “For the king of Babylon stood in the highway, at the head of two ways, seeking divination, shuffling arrows: he enquired of the idols, and consulted entrails.” Triuia is the common name given to Diana, when as Hecate she was invoked at the cross-ways. Chariclides Comicus in Meineke’s Comicorum Fragmenta, IV, p. 556, has τριοδῖτις, and invokes: Ἑκατή τριοδῖτι, τρίμορφε, τριπρόσωπε.
Varro, De Lingua Latina, VII, 16, writes: “Titanis Triuia Diana est, ab eo dicta Triuia, quod in triuio ponitur fere in oppodis Graecis, uel quod luna dicitur esse, quae in caelo tribus uiis mouetur in altitudinem et latitudinem et longitudinem.” Macrobius, Saturnalia, I, ix, notes: “Dianae uero ut Triuiae uiarum omnium iidem tribuunt potestatem.”
In Wales it was said that witches slept by day under any boulder that might be at a cross-road, and when dusk had fallen they crept forth to steal little children and feast upon their flesh. The gallows was often erected at the cross-roads, and here the criminal hung in chains, and nourished by his rotting flesh the mandrake grew. Many are the superstitions which cluster around the mandrake or mandragora—“the semi-human” as Columella (De re rustica, x, 19) calls it. It was the plant of fertility, the plant of magical virtue and occult power. In Germany it bears the name of the Little Gallows Man, and it was believed that when a murderer or
