purification over him.(1159) When Dido in Virgil, deserted by Aeneas, has resolved to die, she feigns to perform certain magical rites which will either win back her false lover or bring relief to her wounded heart. In appealing to the gods and the stars, she stands by the altar with her dress loosened and with one foot bare.(1160) Among the heathen Arabs the cursing of an enemy was a public act. The maledictions were often couched in the form of a satirical poem, which the poet himself recited with certain solemn formalities. Thus when the young Lebid appeared at the Court of Norman to denounce the Absites, he anointed the hair of his head on one side only, let his garment hang down loosely, and wore but one shoe. This, we are told, was the costume regularly adopted by certain poets on such occasions.(1161) (M191) Thus various peoples seem to be of opinion that it stands a man in good stead to go with one foot shod and one foot bare on certain momentous occasions. But why? The explanation must apparently be sought in the magical virtue attributed to knots; for down to recent times, we may take it, shoes have been universally tied to the feet by latchets. Now the magical action of a knot, as we have seen, is supposed to be to bind and restrain not merely the body but the soul,(1162) and this action is beneficial or harmful according as the thing which is bound and restrained is evil or good. It is a necessary corollary of this doctrine that to be without knots is to be free and untrammelled, which, by the way, may be the reason why the augur’s staff at Rome had to be made from a piece of wood in which there was no knot;(1163) it would never do for a divining rod to be spell-bound. Hence we may suppose that the intention of going with one shoe on and one shoe off is both to restrain and to set at liberty, to bind and to unbind. But to bind or unbind whom or what? Perhaps the notion is to rid the man himself of magical restraint, but to lay it on his foe, or at all events on his foe’s magic; in short, to bind his enemy by a spell while he himself goes free. This is substantially the explanation which the acute and learned Servius gives of Dido’s costume. He says that she went with one shoe on and one shoe off in order that Aeneas might be entangled and herself released.(1164) An analogous explanation would obviously apply to all the other cases we have considered, for in all of them the man who wears this peculiar costume is confronted with hostile powers, whether human or supernatural, which it must be his object to lay under a ban.