Latin poet. Those who have read
Laevius[10] will recognize the lines.

[Footnote 10: MSS. _Laelius_.]

_Love-charms the warlocks seek through all the world:
The 'lover's knot' they try, the magic wheel,
Ribbons and, nails and roots and herbs and shoots,
The two-tailed lizard that draws on to love,[11]
And eke the charm that glads the whinnying mare._

[Footnote 11: _Saurae inlices bicodulae._ Helm, wrongly I think,
places a comma between _saurae_ and _inlices_.]

31. You would have made out a far more plausible case by pretending
that I made use of such things instead of fish, if only you had
possessed the slightest erudition. For the belief in the use of these
things is so widespread that you might have been believed. But of what
use are fish save to be cooked and eaten at meals? In magic they seem
to me to be absolutely useless. I will tell you why I think so. Many
hold Pythagoras to have been a pupil of Zoroaster, and, like him, to
have been skilled in magic. And yet it is recorded that once near
Metapontum, on the shores of Italy, his home, which his influence had
converted into a second Greece, he noticed certain fishermen draw up
their net. He offered to buy whatever it might contain, and after
depositing the price ordered all the fish caught in meshes of the net
to be released and thrown back into the sea. He would assuredly never
have allowed them to slip from his possession had he known them to
possess any valuable magical properties. For being a man of abnormal
learning, and a great admirer of the men of old, he remembered that
Homer, a poet of manifold or, rather I should say, absolute knowledge
of all that may be known, spoke of the power of all the drugs that
earth produces, but made no mention of the sea, when speaking of a
certain witch, he wrote the line:

_All drugs, that wide earth nourishes, she knew._

Similarly in another passage he says:

_Earth the grain-giver
Yields up to her its store of drugs, whereof
Many be healing, mingled in the cup,
And many baneful._

But never in the works of Homer did Proteus anoint his face nor
Ulysses his magic trench, nor Aeolus his windbags, nor Helen her
mixing bowl, nor Circe her cup, nor Venus her girdle, with any charm
drawn from the sea or its inhabitants. You alone within the memory of
man have been found to sweep as it were by some convulsion of nature
all the powers of herbs and roots a