Читать книгу Love Potions Through the Ages: A Study of Amatory Devices and Mores онлайн

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In classical legend, Phaon, a ferryman of Lesbos, was given a potent periapt by Aphrodite, that made him remarkably handsome. The poetess Sappho consequently fell passionately in love with him. According to the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder, author of the Historia Naturalis, Phaon had found a mandrake root that resembled the male genitalia. This root was an assurance of feminine love. Sappho, however, is said, in the version of Ovid’s Heroides, to have flung herself from the Leucadian rock on his account.

Xenophon, the Greek historian who belongs in the fourth century B.C., recounts, in his Memorabilia, a dialogue between the philosopher Socrates and a hetaira named Theodote. The subject is the art of finding and retaining lovers.

Socrates: There are my lady friends, who will never let me leave them, night or day. They would always be having me teach them love-charms and incantations.

Theodote: Are you really acquainted with such things, Socrates?

Socrates: Of course I am. What else is the reason, think you, that Apollodorus and Antisthenes never leave my side? Why have Cebes and Simmias come all the way from Thebes to stay with me? You may be quite sure that not without love-charms and incantations and magic-wheels can this be brought about.