In circlets trip the velvet ground.
But ah! if there Apollo toys,
I tremble for the rosy boys.
Among the vast productions of the ancients, that included poetry and memoirs, biographies and chronicles, essays and dialogues, there are anecdotes, references of various kinds, subtle hints and mere verbal references to domestic or social life, from which we may glean items that are relevant to our present purpose.
This is the case with Plutarch, the Greek philosopher and biographer. He had a long, productive span of life, extending from c. 46 A.D. to 120 A.D. Primarily he is a biographer, and he is commonly so known. But he also produced a series of literary, political, religious, and ethical studies that are comprehensively included under the heading of Moralia.
One of these pieces consists of marriage precepts, Advice to Bride and Bridegroom: Polianus and Eurydice. It is, as Plutarch himself states, a compendium of marital conduct, and is packed with high ethical counsel, sober injunctions, sprinkled and reinforced with pertinent comments, apothegms, and anecdotes. Yet the matter of amorous stimuli is confronted straightforwardly and adroitly. The bride, Plutarch enjoins, should, according to the wise old statesman Solon, nibble a quince before getting into bed. It was an old tradition that quince, and particularly quince jelly, exercised erotic effects. Plutarch continues:
Fishing with poison is a quick way to catch fish and an easy method of taking them, but it makes the fish inedible and bad. In the same way women who artfully employ love-potions and magic spells upon their husbands, and gain the mastery over them through pleasure, find themselves consorts of dull-willed, degenerate fools. The men bewitched by Circe were of no service to her, nor did she make the least use of them after they had been changed into swine and asses.
Evidently the normal procedure in Plutarch’s day was to employ the love-potion without hesitation. It must have been highly popular, a regular instrument of amorous stimulation. Further, in addition to sexual excitation, the potion manifestly induced other and less acceptable results, and it also intruded on normal physiological and emotional conditions. It was, in short, a malefic instrument. The most wholesome advice, then, that Plutarch could now offer was to shun such adventitious amatory aids, to rely primarily on the inherent amorousness of the two marrying partners.