GREECE AND ROME

that the Thessalian women were, above all other people, skilled in sorcery and enchantments. They were equally adept at brewing a love potion or a poison, and by their litanies and charms they could draw the very moon from the skies. Pliny tells us (Historia Naturalis, XXX, ii, 2) that Menander, in his comedy Thessala (The Thessalian Woman), brought onto the stage a scene of a witches' gathering in which the enchantress compelled the moon to obey her magic: "I am amazed that the fame of [Achilles'] people has clung to them so much, to the point that Menander—a man born for the subtlety of literature without a rival—named his play The Thessalian Woman, covering the tricks of women who pull down the Moon. I would have thought that Orpheus was the first to introduce this superstition and the progress of medicine to the nearby areas, if Thrace, his seat, were not devoid of the wheel of magic." So essential a feature of witchcraft did this fascination of the moon become—a practice so typical of necromancers—that Nonnus actually attributes it to the Brahmin priests. Lucian, when he is to tell a story of enchantment, at once sends his hero to Thessaly, the most appropriate locale, and Apuleius, who turned the tale into finest gold, writes: "Extremely desirous of becoming acquainted with all that is strange and wonderful, I called to mind that I was in the very heart of Thessaly, celebrated by the unanimous consent of the whole wide world as the land where the spells and incantations of the art of magic are, so to speak, indigenous... accordingly, excited in the highest degree by my eagerness and my ardent temperament, I examined everything in detail with closest curiosity."

The second idyll of Theocritus, the Pharmaceutria (The Sorceress), gives a vividly realistic and impassioned picture of Greek sorcery. Simaetha, a proud Syracusan lady, has been forsaken by her lover Delphis, and driven to madness by the vehemence of her desire, she resorts to the terrible rites of magic to win him to her bed again. She stands at midnight upon the deserted shore; the wind has dropped and all is still; there is scarcely a ripple upon the moonlit sea; there is no sound save the gentle lap of the water that softly kisses the sand, and all nature is hushed in sleep. Yet her bosom throbs with agony; for her there is no rest, no quiet; love has sucked her blood like a leech; her very skin is jaundiced and sere, hot with fever, burning to the touch. A fierce fire blazes red upon the