With various simples clothes the fatten’d soil.
With wholesome herbage mixed, the direful bane
Of vegetable venom taints the plain;
From Pæon sprung, their patron-god imparts
To all the Pharian race his healing arts.”
Pope’s Homer’s Odyssey, b. iv.
Diodorus Siculus states that the Egyptians laid much stress on the circumstance that the plant used by Helen had been given her by a woman of Egyptian Thebes, whence they argued that Homer must have lived amongst them, since the women of Thebes were celebrated for possessing a secret whereby they could dissipate anger or melancholy. This secret is supposed to have been a knowledge of the narcotic properties of hemp. The plant was known to the Romans, and largely used by them in the time of Pliny for the manufacture of cordage, and there is scarce a doubt that they were acquainted with its other properties. Galen refers to the intoxicating power of hemp, for he relates that in his time it was customary to give hemp-seed to the guests at banquets as a promoter of hilarity and enjoyment. Slow poisons and secret poisoning was an art with which the Romans were not at all unfamiliar. What the medium was through which they committed these criminal acts, can only be conjectured from the scanty information remaining. Hemp, or opium, or both, may have had some share in the work, since the poppy was sacred to Somnus, and known to possess narcotic properties.
The latter plant is one of the earliest described. Homer speaks of the poppy growing in gardens, and it was employed by Hippocrates, the father of physic, who even particularizes two kinds, the black and the white, and used the extract of opium so extensively, as to be condemned by his contemporary Diagoras. Dioscorides and Pliny also make mention of it; and from their time, it has been so commonly used, as to be incorporated in all the materia medicas of subsequent medical writers.
Plutarch tells us that a poison was administered to Aratus of Sicyon, not speedy and violent, but of that kind which at first occasions a slow heat in the body, with a slight cough, and then gradually brings on consumption and a weakness of intellect. One time when Aratus spat up blood, he said, “This is the effect of royal friendship.” And Quintilian, in his Declamations, speaks of this poison in such a manner as proves that it must then have been well known.
The infamous acts of Locusta are noticed by Tacitus, Suetonius, and Juvenal. This poisoner seems to have been a type of such a character as the traditions of a later age embodied in the person and under the name of Lucretia Borgia.