FEMALE POISONERS
One of the commentators on the works of the ancient Greek writers, says, “Among the Greeks, women appear to have been most addicted to criminal poisoning, as we learn from various passages in ancient authors.” The author most frequently quoted is Antiphon, whose discourses on judicial procedure in Athens in criminal prosecutions, which appeared about four hundred and thirty or forty years B. C., are still preserved. Dr. Witthaus, the toxicologist, in repeating this observation, supplements it with an assumption which may or may not be warrantable. He says, “Women appear to have been most addicted to the crime of poisoning in the Grecian period, as they are at the present time.” A repetition may also be noted in Dr. Smith’s Dictionary of Antiquities, under the term Veneficium, the crime of poisoning. Referring to its frequent mention in Roman history, Smith says, “Women were most addicted to it.”
This crime has furnished a theme for novelists and dramatists all the way from the Poison Maid or Bisha-Kanya of India, in the Hindu story of the “Two Kings;” in the “Secretum Secretorum” of Aristotle (XXVII.); and in the “Gesta Romanorum” (XI.), to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story of “Rappacini’s Daughter.” Our modern fiction writers generally select their culprits from the male sex,—as for example, Charles Dickens in his “Hunted Down,” and Charles Reade in “Put Yourself in His Place.” Frequent references in Shakespeare’s dramatic works, such as the poisoning of Regan, daughter of King Lear, by her sister Goneril, or the removal of Leonine by Cleon’s wife in Pericles, show that this, as all else in human character and conduct, could not escape the grasp of the master spirit. He makes Richard II. say,—
“Let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:—
How some have been deposed, some slain in war;
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed;
All murdered.”
In Cymbeline, the king’s physician, in announcing the death of the queen, surprises and startles the monarch with the revelation of her fiendish purpose to destroy both him and his daughter by a former queen, in order to clear the way for her ambitious projects:
“Your daughter, whom she bore in hand to love