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

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The important deduction that follows as a corollary from the above passage is that the love-potion, mentioned without elaborate comment, was already, in the fifth century B.C., a matter of common knowledge and common use.

The plant called anciently telephilon was used by the Greeks for amatory purposes. Botanically, it has been identified with the poppy: and by some, with a kind of pepper tree. Theocritus, the Greek bucolic poet, refers to its use in the third Idyll. A goatherd goes to the cave of his sweet-heart Amaryllis. He tries to re-awaken her former love:

I learned my fate but lately, when upon my bethinking me whether you loved me, not even did the poppy leaf coming in contact make a sound, but withered away just so upon my soft arm.

Lovers were accustomed to guess by the poppy leaf placed between forefinger and thumb of the left hand, and then struck by the right, whether their love was reciprocated. If a loud crack was produced, it was a propitious amatory omen.

Among the ancient authorities the virtues of plants and herbs and spices and their medicinal curative powers and also their amatory impacts were frequently enumerated, described, and classified. In this group belongs Dioscorides, a Greek army surgeon who flourished in the first century A.D. His comprehensive treatise on the subject, De Materia Medica Libri Quinque, was for centuries consulted and used as a standard text. In the Middle Ages the famous Portuguese Marrano physician Amatus Lusitanus produced an excellent edition of Dioscorides. It was published, with numerous woodcut illustrations, at Leyden in Holland, in 1558.