quote of the week

“Among the Romans love potions were generally held to be dangerous things. Ovid, for instance, warns the suitor to avoid them. They will not make a girl mad with passion but simply mad. There seems to have been a certain reluctance to disclose what went into these brews but if what Theocritus details in his second Idyll can be trusted then one might conclude that the victim was more likely to throw up than freak out.”
(Arthur Keaveney, Lucullus: A Life (1992))