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

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Hence we do not constantly hear of the ad hoc use of philtres, potions, and analogous means of stimulation. Yet their existence is established, and in particular cases they were brought into effective use. Xenocrates, a Greek physician of the first century A.D., as Pliny the Elder records, advised drinking the sap of mallows as a love-potion. Such a philtre, together with three mallow roots tied into a bunch, would inflame the erotic passions of women.

Again, Dioscorides of Cilicia, in Asia Minor, an army physician who flourished in the first century A.D., produced a Materia Medica that treated drugs, remedies, ingredients in a rational, systematic manner. His text became a standard work, used for centuries, in both the East and the West. He recommends the roots of boy-cabbage, soaked in fresh goat’s milk. A good draught of this drink would be productive of intense excitation of the sexual impulse.

Many spices, plants, herbs that were described, either by the encyclopedists and historians or incidentally mentioned in dramatic literature, in occasional poems, anecdotes or in epitomes of legends and folklore, were of such obscurity and rarity that it is no longer possible to ascertain the corresponding modern equivalent. There was, as an instance, satyrion. It is frequently mentioned, both in Greek and Roman contexts. Actually unidentifiable botanically, it may have been analogous to the orchis. In Greek and also Roman antiquity it was reputed to constitute a potent aphrodisiac, and is mentioned in an accepted and traditional sense by writers such as Petronius, who casually alludes to it in the course of his Satyricon as a common erotic aid.