Sanskrit medical writings, which date back several hundred years before Christ, testify that the Hindus of that early period were familiar with poisons—animal, vegetable and mineral—together with their antidotes. Passages like the following show that criminal poisoning was guarded against:
“It is necessary for the practitioner to have knowledge of the symptoms of the different poisons and their antidotes, as the enemies of the Raja (sovereign)—bad women and ungrateful servants—sometimes mix poison with food.”
To various warnings which follow is added the precaution, “Food which is suspected should be first given to certain animals, and if they die, it is to be avoided.”
There is abundant evidence that the Persians and Egyptians, as well as the Hindus, were familiar with poisonous substances, such as the venom of serpents, the hydrocyanic acid of the peach kernel, mineral corrosives or irritants, and vegetable narcotics. In the Grecian mythology there is occasional reference to the removal of inconvenient husbands by goddesses who are familiar with the deadly properties of aconite. The manner in which Ulysses neutralized the enchantments of Circe, as related in the Odyssey, shows that attention was given at an early period to the application of antidotes. Homer also tells us of the voyage of Ulysses to Ephyra,
“to learn the direful art
To taint with deadly drugs the barbed dart;”
and Ovid relates that the arrows of Hercules were tipped with the venom of serpents, differing in that respect from the modern South American poison, curare, which is a vegetable extract. Poisoned arrows are referred to in the sixth chapter of Job, but there is no reference either in the Old or New Testament to the use of poison for taking away life.
Of the poisons used in Greece in the historical period, and mentioned by Nicander, the favorite appears to have been hemlock. Whether it was the Conium maculatum, or the Cicuta virosa or aquatica, is a matter of controversy. Haller contends that the water-hemlock was the conium of the Greeks. It may be noted, however, that Pliny says that the generic term Cicuta was not indicative of a particular family of plants, but of vegetable poison in general.
For the first circumstantial report of an instance of the class under consideration, we must go back to Antiphon, who, as already noted, lived more than twenty-three centuries ago. In one of his discourses he gives a short speech, entitled “Against a Stepmother, on a Charge of Poisoning.” It treats of a case which was brought before the famous court known as Areopagos. The speaker, a young man, is the son of the deceased. He charges his stepmother with having poisoned his father several years before through the instrumentality of a woman who was her dupe. The deceased and a friend, Philoneos, the woman’s lover, had been dining together, and she was persuaded to administer a philtre to both, in hope of recovering her lover’s affection. Both the men died, and the woman—a slave—was put to death forthwith. The accuser now asks that the real criminal—the true Clytemnestra of this tragedy—shall suffer punishment.
During the Renaissance in Italy, poisoning became a fine art; the victims were numbered by thousands, and the female fiend was everywhere in evidence. In the seventeenth century the use of poison as an instrument of secret murder became so common as to warrant a violation of the confessional. In 1659 the priests of Rome informed the Pope, Alexander VII., of the great number of poisonings revealed to them in the confessions of young widows. Investigation led to the discovery of a secret society of women which met at the house of Hieronyma Spara, a fortune-teller, who dispensed an elixir or “acquetta” for the dissolution of unhappy marriages. After a large number of victims had been sacrificed, La Spara’s practices were detected through cunning police artifice. She and thirteen of her companions were hanged; others were publicly whipped half-naked through the streets of Rome, and those of the highest rank were banished.