Читать книгу The Seven Sisters of Sleep. Popular History of the Seven Prevailing Narcotics of the World онлайн

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The latter plant is one of the earliest described. Homer speaks of the poppy growing in gardens, and it was employed by Hippocrates, the father of physic, who even particularizes two kinds, the black and the white, and used the extract of opium so extensively, as to be condemned by his contemporary Diagoras. Dioscorides and Pliny also make mention of it; and from their time, it has been so commonly used, as to be incorporated in all the materia medicas of subsequent medical writers.

Plutarch tells us that a poison was administered to Aratus of Sicyon, not speedy and violent, but of that kind which at first occasions a slow heat in the body, with a slight cough, and then gradually brings on consumption and a weakness of intellect. One time when Aratus spat up blood, he said, “This is the effect of royal friendship.” And Quintilian, in his Declamations, speaks of this poison in such a manner as proves that it must then have been well known.

The infamous acts of Locusta are noticed by Tacitus, Suetonius, and Juvenal. This poisoner seems to have been a type of such a character as the traditions of a later age embodied in the person and under the name of Lucretia Borgia.