Plutarch, the Greek historian and philosopher, in his De Sanitate Tuenda Praecepta, Advice on Keeping Well, tells of an amatory incident:
When the young men described by Menander were, as they were drinking, insidiously beset by the pimp, who introduced some handsome and high-priced concubines, each one of them (as he says),
Bent down his head and munched his own dessert, being on his guard and afraid to look at them.
The inventive genius of man has included in the preparation of love philtres the most heterogeneous items, such as: human fingers, hoopee brains, tobacco, human excrement, snake bones, toads, skulls and intestinal fluids and organs. Horace and Catullus, Pliny the Elder and Apuleius, among the Romans, have frequent occasion to refer to philtres and their ingredients and effects.
So too the medieval and later physicians and demonographers have much to say on the subject: Martin Delrio and Sprenger, Reginald Scott and Bodin, Johannes Muller and Sinibaldus. A Roman recipe, composed by a witch, runs as follows:
Bring the eggs and plumage foul
Of a midnight shrieking owl,
Be they well besmear’d with blood
Of the blackest venom’d toad,