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"), and wicked to the point of sacrilege (e.g. "She never beseeches the gods, nor does she call the divine with a suppliant hymn"). 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. Indeed, she delights in otherwise heinous and macabre acts involving corpses (for instance, "when the dead are confined in a sarcophagus […] then she eagerly rages every limb. She plunges her hand into the eyes, delights at digging out the congealed eyeballs, and gnaws the pallid nails on a desiccated hand.").